A few shy goldfish that hid among the water lilies’ leaves remained. The koi he raised grew large and fat enough to tempt marauding great blue herons, who flew off with the fish held tight in their long beaks. In the back yards of the houses we lived in he created Japanese gardens with gates he built with bamboo stalks and stone lanterns he carved from pumice. My father’s fascination with Japanese gardens stemmed from this visit. I much preferred watching the slow graceful koi as they swam in the large pond adjacent to the teahouse. The choreographed ritual movements of the black clad tea master seemed strange to me. My parents took me to visit the garden and the teahouse when it opened in 1959. Gardeners planted bamboo, pines, maples, and gingkoes alongside cedars, firs, and rhododendrons that are native to the northwest. The garden incorporated rough granite boulders brought down from the Snoqualmie mountain pass and hand-crafted stone lanterns brought from Japan. I learned more about Japan after Seattle and Osaka became “sister-cities” in 1957 and a team of Japanese garden designers created a garden and teahouse in the Seattle Arboretum. I admired Pam’s red brocade kimono and her elegant porcelain doll with its pale skin and straight black hair. The twins looked tiny standing in front of the tall bronze Buddha. One of them was of the Great Buddha of Kamakura. But Japan didn’t come into sharp focus until I saw the many photographs Pam and Greg had brought to share. I knew Japan was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean and sometimes, when beachcombing, I found green glass floats from Japanese fishing nets washed up on the shore of Puget Sound. Two of my classmates, Pam and Greg, had lived in Japan. I first encountered the Buddha in Miss Gibbs’s third grade classroom.
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