Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden
Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden
Book Highlight
By Camille Daw, Graduate Fellow
The dry, high desert of Idaho made for a hostile environment. The landscape proved isolated, remote, and vast. Many Nikkei remarked about the emptiness of the space upon their arrival at the confinement site. In 1943, the WRA began a “beautification program” at Minidoka to plant shrubs and other plants outside of the barracks and hired Fujitarō Kubota to make the spaces outside of barracks more hospitable for those incarcerated and living at Minidoka.
Spirited Stone includes essays from scholars and authors, fully encapsulating the life, work, and legacy of Fujitarō Kubota and his beautiful rock gardens that combined Japanese aesthetics with the plants, structures, and boulders of the Pacific Northwest. Anna Tamura researched and wrote extensively about Kubota’s work at Minidoka and his contributions that still remain. Similarly, Jamie Ford beautifully personifies Kubota’s Seattle garden, describing the sorrow and loss while the Kubato family remained behind barbed wire at Minidoka and the joy when the family returned. Glenn Nelson also contributed to the book, discussing the preservation of the garden and the legacy of the garden in relation to Minidoka. Nelson, born in Tokyo, used the garden and Kubato’s legacy to reflect on his own identity at a Minidoka Pilgrimage in 2017. He wrote,”Sobbing quietly with the rest of them, I realized that it was the horror and heartbreak of war, and the love and heroism required to overcome it, that aligned us all.”
Kubota immigrated to the United States and purchased a marsh landscape in South Seattle that eventually became his garden. Spirited Stone provides an excellent narrative of Kubota’s journey through establishing his garden, along with the strength and resilience needed for success as an immigrant in the United States amidst racism and discrimination. The book provides lessons, applicable to all readers, about experiencing hardship.
More technically, the book also breaks down the symbolism present in Kubato’s gardens and designs. For an audience not familiar with landscape architecture, and the study of gardens, Spirited Stone provides an excellent introduction and study of behind the choices Kubato made, especially with the size, shape, and placement of the stones near specific plants, trees, and water features.
For someone who enjoys books with lots of photos, heartfelt text, and a strong message, Spirited Stone emotionally encapsulates the experience of Japanese Americans, the legacy of Fujitarō Kubota and the Issei generation, and the history behind Kubato’s gardens.
For more information or to order a copy of Spirited Stone: https://kubotagarden.org/spiritedstone.html
