1.Background Currently, Japanese gardens are getting more and more popular worldwide. In March 2016, the Japanese Government has set the policy "to make 40 million foreign tourists visit Japan by 2020 and up to 60 million by 2030" (JNTO). Tourism in Japan has grown rapidly in the last few years and is today on a all time high (South China Morning Post, 2016). A large group of tourists that visit Japan is from Europe. If this fact is taken into account, it becomes necessary to get a deeper knowledge about the perception of European people towards Japanese gardens to use this data for further design activity. 2.Research method The research consists of survey, analysis and interpretation (Pratiwi, 2014). In the survey, questionnaires are used to investigate the respondents' perception of Japanese garden. The respondents were 30 people from Europe (16 male, 14 female) that have been selected through purposive sampling. The participants were asked to write individual keywords related to Japanese garden, to describe in a short paragraph, what Japanese garden means to them, and finally to sketch their imagination of Japanese garden. In the following step, both LIST and KH Coder method have been used to analyze the respondents' view towards spatial environment and linguistic value orientation. The results have been used to interpret European people's landscape image concerning social meaning, spatial view, linguistic knowledge and self-orientation. 3. Research results 138 different keywords were collected within the questionnaires. Most of the keywords are related to noun words, such as bridge, river, or stone, and atmosphere words such as silence, harmony, and calm. The most frequently repeated keywords are stone (6.67%), water (5.23%), bridge (3.81%) and calm (3.33%). The short paragraph questionnaires were analysed by using KH Coder method (by Koichi Higuchi). It shows that the frequently occurring words are interrelated and form seven groups, three of them bigger and more relevant: one group is organized by words such as water, green, nature, calm and quite... The second group is stone, bonsai, shrine and maple trees... The third one is bridge, red, temple, wooden and colour... In the sketch questionnaires LIST method (Landscape Image Sketching Technique) has been used. The elements in all sketches are very similar to the collected keywords and in most cases show the balance between architecture and nature plus hard and soft elements as key features for Japanese gardens. 4. Conclusion The prominent components in the perception of European people about Japanese garden are as follows: There is more focus on the visible elements than on other elements that require other senses, and respondents pay more attention to visible elements then to other elements that require other senses. The purpose of this research is to provide guidance for designing the landscape of Japanese gardens in general. Key words: Japanese garden, Europe, LIST, KH Coder, Perception, Sketch, Social meaning