Knowledge, Introspection and Remembrance: Cultivating my Relationship to the Seattle Japanese Garden
By Corinne Kennedy
The Garden’s weeping willow and zigzag bridge.(photo: Mary Ann Cahill)
Experiencing the Seattle Japanese Garden has become for me a process of cultivating knowledge, introspection, and remembrance.
The Seattle Japanese Garden has reopened this month after its annual winter closure, and I’m grateful that volunteers and visitors alike can once again experience its beauty and peacefulness. Accordingly, what follows are my personal reflections about experiencing the Garden—unlike the mostly factual and objective articles that I usually submit.
As a SJG docent and regular blog contributor, I’ve benefitted not only from docent training but also from many continuing education classes and events. This ongoing education has given me an in-depth knowledge and appreciation of both nature and culture—not simply information about the Garden’s plants, but also about the history, culture, and art of Japan’s traditional gardens, and Japanese-style gardens in general, including our own.
I’ve learned that the Garden was made possible, in part, by the mid-twentieth century “sister city” program—in which Japanese-style gardens were built in the U.S. as civic “friendship gardens.” According to Asian art historian Kendall H. Brown, the Seattle Japanese Garden is “arguably one of the finest in North America”:
“It was the first major public Japanese garden built on the West Coast after World War II, and its creation inspired a flowering of public gardens from Vancouver to San Diego.” (Quiet Beauty: The Japanese Gardens of North America, 2013).
The Garden’s beginnings:
In a gift of peace and goodwill, the Tokyo Metropolitan Park and Green Space Bureau financed the design for our Garden and sent internationally known landscape designer Jūki Iida to supervise its construction. Of necessity, Iida hired Japanese American landscape contractors to build it—including Richard Yamasaki, who had been incarcerated at Minidoka in Idaho during World War II.
Construction of the Garden, March 4, 1960. (photo: Arboretum Foundation)
Yamasaki learned from and forged a relationship with Iida, whom he viewed as a mentor. Dedicated to Iida’s teachings and to the care and preservation of the garden, he served as a consultant to the garden and a mentor to its gardeners long after the 1960 opening.
As Yamasaki recounted in 2006, Iida taught that he was creating:
“… a Japanese garden in a foreign setting, but with strict application of certain Japanese principles, such as shizen sa (naturalness) and sono mama no susuma sugata, or the way natural elements age and spread.” (Spoken at the dedication ceremony of the Jūki Iida scroll, held at the Elisabeth C. Miller Library on August 8, 2006.)
Rooted in nature and a sense of place:
This concept of naturalness, as well as the requirement that a garden be rooted in a sense of place—the country and region where it is built—are fundamental to the creation of a truly Japanese-style garden. For me personally, our Garden is a blending of nature, history, and culture—and experiencing it is a process of blending knowledge with introspection and remembrance. This is especially true because we’re living now in such uncertain times, in a country torn by conflicting attitudes about immigration and towards people many in our country regard as “other.”
Knowledge, introspection, and remembrance: honoring the land our Garden is built upon, and the history and culture of its peoples:
In documents and at events, the Arboretum Foundation now makes regular references to honoring the indigenous peoples on whose land the Washington Park Arboretum and Japanese Garden were built, and I’ve done that too in some of my articles. Yet my words have felt incomplete.
Eventually I read Megan Asaka’s 2022 book, Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City. Reading it has deepened my understanding of the history and lives of indigenous and immigrant workers in the Pacific Northwest.
Megan Asaka’s 2022 book, Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City
Asaka’s well-researched and powerful history of the highly mobile workers who were essential to building the city we live in today—both indigenous peoples and the successive waves of immigrant workers brought here as laborers—was a revelation. I didn't know how critically important indigenous people were to that era’s economy—even as their lives and history were being destroyed.
Similarly, I didn't know the interconnected work histories of indigenous peoples and Japanese and other Asian immigrants. The erasure of their histories haunts me.
I believe that knowledge of those lives and histories is fundamentally important if our relationship to the spaces that are the Seattle Japanese Garden—and the larger metropolitan area that we inhabit—is not to be superficial, its past erased and forgotten. I believe that even as we walk through the Garden and experience its beauty, we have an obligation to acknowledge those lives in our hearts and minds.
Interconnections: lessons from my recent visit to Limahuli National Botanical Tropical Garden on Kaua’i:
Limahuli National Tropical Botanical Garden, January 2024. (photo: Corinne Kennedy)
In closure, I’d like to share a seemingly unrelated experience, visiting another, very different type of garden. Limahuli Garden and Preserve is one of five gardens that comprise the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG), chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1964 (three on Kaua’i, one on Maui, and one in Florida). As stated in Limahuli Garden’s self-guided tour booklet (2022):
“The mission of the organization is: to enrich life through discovery, scientific research, conservation, and education by perpetuating the survival of plants, ecosystems, and cultural knowledge of tropical regions.”
What does this have to do with experiencing the Seattle Japanese Garden?
Limahuli Garden is not a Japanese-style garden, nor is it a showy garden. A good friend of mine, an avid gardener, told me that it hadn’t impressed her. Nonetheless, Limahuli was the recipient of the American Horticulture Society’s 1997 Award as the best natural botanical garden in the United States, and it has much to teach us.
Unlike most botanical gardens, Limahuli includes not only the 17-acre Garden open to visitors (the portion of Limahuli Valley closest to the ocean) but also the 985-acre Preserve (extending upwards into the mountains). Both are rooted in history, place, and preservation.
From the self-guided tour booklet:
“Limahuli Garden and Preserve is situated in a 1,000 acre valley that houses countless biological and cultural treasures. There are nearly 250 taxa of native plants and birds in the valley, about 50 of them are on the verge of extinction—some of them found only in Limahuli. We also have innumerable archeological complexes and cultural sites; remains of the footprint of the Hawaiian civilization that thrived here and continues to be alive and practicing to this day. We utilize these resources of ancestral wisdom and modern science as the foundation of our management of the valley and our method in finding solutions to global threats. It is this unique blend of valuing the plants, the people and the place, all seen as equal contributors to the well being of the whole system. This way of Hawaiian life continues to be shared with aloha. We look to the ancient ahupua’a 1 system of resource management with the aim of demonstrating how this tool can inform us in addressing modern issues regarding resilience and sustainability.”
1 Ahupua’a is a social-ecological system “that divided land into comparable units that generally extended from the highest point in the mountains down to the ocean. Each of these thriving self-sustaining communities… had all the resources needed to feed, clothe, and shelter the people living within it. This system was commonly based around a water source flowing from the mountains to the ocean. The ahupua’a system recognized the interconnection between the people, the mountains, the ocean and the role that fresh water plays in linking the two. By operating within this system, the Hawaiians were able to sustain a large and healthy population while maintaining the integrity of their islands’ natural resources.” (from the tour booklet)
Visitors are only allowed to tour the relatively small Limahuli Garden, not its much larger Preserve. Fortunately, the Garden is structured to educate visitors about history, nature, and culture, including the Preserve’s work of preservation. Distinct sections of the garden feature plants reflecting the island’s history—including plants that developed from seed brought by wind, water and birds, canoe-era plants brought by two waves of Polynesian settlement, plants brought there during the colonial “plantation era,” an invasive “monoculture” forest area, and a native forest in which invasive plants have been removed and native plants re-established. Walking through the garden, I felt a newly awakened sense of immersion in a place and its history.
Having read Asaka’s book and visited Limahuli Garden, I’m moved by the interconnections they reveal. And I feel strongly that knowledge, introspection, and remembrance are the lights that will guide me each time I walk through our beloved Seattle Japanese Garden.
Corinne Kennedy is a Garden Guide, regular contributor to the Seattle Japanese Garden blog, and retired garden designer.