BUILDING THE GARDEN Excerpts from
a New Collection of Articles by the Creators
of the Japanese Garden B y N i a l l D u n n e
This year, as part of the 60th anniversary
celebration of the Seattle Japanese
Garden, a group of Garden volunteers
is putting the finishing touches on a collection of
articles about the creation of the Garden by two
of its designers, Kiyoshi Inoshita and Jūki Iida,
garden engineer Nobumasa Kitamura—Iida’s
assistant during the construction phase—and
others. Most of the articles are from Japanese
publications and have been translated into
English for the first time for this collection,
which also includes archival correspondence,
biographical notes, and the original plant list.
Entitled “Japanese Writers on the Japanese
Garden in Washington Park Arboretum, Seattle,
1959–2009,” the collection was curated by
two long-time Unit 86 Garden guides, Shizue
Prochaska and Julie Coryell, both of whom
also did most of the translation work. Shoko
Majima, a friend of Shizue who works in the
Tokyo library system, tracked down and sent
her copies of most of the featured articles.
The impetus for the collection came a decade
ago, when Shizue and Julie helped create video
presentations for the Japanese Garden’s 50th
anniversary. “We discussed the need for an
archive group,” says Shizue, “that would study
the history of the Garden for the sake of future
generations. A key step to knowing the past
was to translate all the records written by the
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