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- Having a Japanese garden in Portland
brings part of another culture
that many people in this country wouldn't otherwise experience.
The garden has a reputation of being the finest
Japanese garden in the world outside of Japan.
Probably one of Portland's most important cultural attractions.
When I look at the garden, I see work.
JULE GILFILLAN: Head gardener and Oregon native Michael Kondo
has worked at the Portland Japanese Garden
for more than 40 years.
Oregon, especially the Portland metropolitan area,
it is amazing for plants --
the right amount of sun, rain.
We don't get really severe cold up here.
Everything grows.
So this is just perfect.
A Japanese garden's characteristics
mainly are forms and shapes.
But at the same time,
it's how those shapes interact with each other,
how the plants interact with stones,
stones interact with the trees.
But what's not there is also important.
The emptiness of a space
is just as important as what you fill it with.
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- Many of these gardens in Japan were done in miniature scale.
It was in someone's backyard, in a courtyard, down an alley,
alongside of a temple or a shrine.
And so what that required was this downscaling of nature
so that it was a more intimate and human interaction with it.
Stephen Bloom is the garden's CEO
and self-described ambassador.
In 1959, when Sapporo and Portland became sister cities,
remember, it was less than 20 years after the end of the war.
The community was looking for a way to heal wounds of the war,
but also, they were looking for ways to increase economic ties
between Oregon and Japan as well.
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Portland leaders suggested locating the garden
on the site of the old city zoo
and commissioned Professor Takuma Tono to design it.
The Portland Japanese garden truly ended up being
the grand masterpiece of his life.
While Professor Tono did the design,
a young gardener named Kinya Hira
did much of the actual planting.
Kinya Hira came in 1963 and was here for almost four years.
And in the early years, when they were building the garden,
they didn't want all of the plant material
to be brand new.
So they would get in their car
and they would drive around the neighborhoods of Portland,
and when they found a tree or a shrub
that they wanted for the garden, they would stop,
and they would say, "Hey, we're building
this Japanese garden, would you donate that tree?"
And so many of our signature trees in the garden,
they were actually donated out of people's yards.
But not all Portlanders were generous.
Kinya Hira, while he did his job,
had a tough time of it.
There was still a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment.
He would come home, and there might be a gang of people
spray painting across his trailer, "Go home, Jap."
And as a matter of fact, one night, he was stabbed.
He felt very unwelcome.
When Hira-san left Portland three years later,
he vowed he'd never return.
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KONO: What the designer, Professor Tono,
wanted to represent was the difference
in different kinds of Japanese gardens.
Right now, we're in the Strolling Garden.
You're hearing the water.
It's supposed to kind of calm you
as you're walking through.
And then as you go down below, you'll see the Tea Garden.
It's like you're looking at a picture.
And you're looking through the windows that are open,
and it frames the garden.
Then from there, we go to the Heavenly Waterfall.
That's part of the Strolling Garden.
You're just feeling the water, the falls, the sound.
Actually, when I first started here,
you still had the road for the Portland Zoo.
And the Heavenly Waterfall used to be a bear pit.
It's where they kept their bears.
I guess my favorite garden is the Natural Garden.
It sounds funny, but it is difficult
to make something look natural. [ chuckles ]
Down there, you don't use clipper; you use scissors.
And it's also the one place where you really have
to walk slowly through to get everything.
A pavilion stands in the garden's most formal area.
It's known as the Flat Garden and features views
of the shapes, forms, and empty space
characteristic of Japanese design.
The Sand and Stone Garden,
another mainstay of Japanese garden design,
is probably the most abstract.
This is a karesansui,
which means "dry mountain water" in Japanese.
And the rake patterns represent the ripples in the water.
In a Japanese garden setting, you have to have water,
even if it's in a symbolic sense.
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When I begin the raking, I take a moment and breathe
and try to just empty myself
of, like, personal things that might be bothering me.
And that's just what we encourage
for the visitors as well.
It's also a nice place to meditate
and sort of draw your own conclusions.
The Sand and Stone Garden
is an oasis of stillness year-round.
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The rest of the garden is in a constant state of change.
KONO: Spring is definitely a favorite for a lot of people,
just because you have flowers,
and you have the leaves that are just coming out.
Summer is when you really start seeing the shapes of plants.
Fall is my favorite time, just because when it comes,
you just start seeing the fall colors,
and that's just amazing up here.
This Japanese maple has become a Portland icon.
Come here on the right fall day,
and you'll have to wait your turn to get a shot.
It's also not unusual to find folks
who have come a long way to get theirs.
Walter Santos drove all the way from San Diego.
Yeah, 16 hours straight.
I saw on the website the colors were going.
And so I'm a photographer,
so whenever that happens, I'm there.
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30,000 people visited the new garden
when it opened in 1967.
Today, that number is closer to half a million visitors
each year.
To handle it all, the garden added
a new Cultural Crossing Village.
The Village has places to shop and eat,
as well as space for performance and education.
The multi-year project was designed by Kengo Kuma
and presented garden curator Sadafumi Uchiyama
with as many challenges as opportunities.
One of the most important features
is how we sort of direct the water.
The water runs during the rain seasons,
so six months a year.
Then the other six months is dry.
I never built anything that has that extremes.
Sada's designs had to manage all that rain,
falling onto broad roofs and paved plazas
and down steep slopes,
all without marring the delicate aesthetic
of a living garden.
[ rain pattering ]
At the top, living roof tiles soak up and slow down the rain.
And where pavement runoff follows gravity,
there's a strategically placed creek.
So this is not just a dry creek.
This is really the conveyance to collect water.
And then this one continues all the way to another creek,
and then eventually into the big tank
underneath the parking.
So that was a real challenge,
and it seems, so far, it's working.
[ laughs ] Thanks.
At the top of the village, a traditional castle wall
holds back the mountainside above.
It's made of granite,
brought in from right outside Baker City.
And it's the first full-scale castle wall
built outside Japan.
This is a dry stack, meaning no cement.
So it stays in place by the gravity,
pretty much the weight of each stone.
And then when land moves,
and these are following the center of gravity, and settle.
So when the earth shakes, so it moves and settles.
GILFILLAN: So it's earthquake proof?
Well, this is from Japan, so...
[ laughs ] Earthquake country, right?
Even everything else gone, this will stay.
The Cultural Crossing Village was dedicated in April 2017.
Among the visiting dignitaries was Kinya Hira,
the young gardener who had left 50 years earlier.
BLOOM: What was truly remarkable was that Hira-san came
and saw how this community had embraced a garden
that they didn't want to begin with.
So really, he saw what this garden did
in healing the hearts of the community.
And in that, his own heart was healed as well.
It's this unique combination of Japanese garden design
that's wrapped in the Pacific Northwest,
in our Douglas firs, in our cedar trees.
That's what makes it truly unique.
I think Oregonians can be truly proud of what they have here.
When you think about the phrase "world-class,"
this garden stands up to the best in the world.
And not just of Japanese gardens,
but of gardens across the globe.