By Khalida Sarwari
Japanese garden specialist and Hakone’s gardener Jacob Kellner just returned from a 17-day whirlwind trip to Japan. Along the way he visited six cities, giving lectures, learning from experts and even building a memorial garden for victims of the earthquake and tsunami that struck the region four years ago.
This was Kellner’s second trip to Japan, the first taking place a few years ago with then Hakone Foundation CEO and executive director Lon Saavedra. The two had gone over to Niigata to sign a sister garden agreement with the Northern Culture Museum and Garden. This time around, Kellner was there as part of the Sendai garden-building volunteer program he first learned about while attending the North American Japanese Garden Association conference in Chicago last fall.
The trip, which took place Oct. 9-27, was made possible in part by a $1,000 scholarship Kellner won from the Sister City Committee for his 400-word essay on the spirit of the “bushido,” a Japanese word for the way of the samurai life. The San Francisco resident, who has been the head of grounds maintenance at Hakone for the past seven years, was notified he had won the scholarship in May. He used the money to take the trip with a group of five others, including program organizer Koichi Kobayashi, a Seattle-based landscape architect. The trip started and ended in Tokyo, with stops in Sendai, Rikuzentakata, Hiraizumi, Kanazawa and Niigata.
Kellner spent three days in Sendai working at the site of a memorial garden at a Buddhist temple. There, he was placed on a stone-setting team where he worked with seven other people to set massive boulders and build stone bridges on the garden’s pathway edging. The project, which aims to honor victims as well as survivors, was started last year and is expected to be completed in three years.
Kellner said he found the lessons he learned there invaluable.
“I had an opportunity to see a garden being built practically from zero, which is something I had not done before,” he said. “There are a lot of opportunities to get Japanese garden-specific training in the U.S., but generally in workshops you’re building things that are temporary, so the opportunity to build something permanent in Japan and learn those techniques are rare.”
He and his group spent some time in badly damaged Rikuzentakata, which the tsunami left “absolutely devastated,” said Kellner, burdening especially the city’s fishermen and wildlife. He said he couldn’t help but reflect on the resilience of the people who remain there. Construction crews are in the process of doing massive earthwork.
“They’ve just recently started dismantling a massive conveyor system so they can cut down the mountain,” said Kellner. “They’re trying to raise everything up 30 feet and rebuild the entire commercial sector, which was just wiped out.”
More than halfway into the trip, Kellner split from the group and went to stay with Akao Donuma, a professor in Niigata who owns a garden company and serves as an adviser for Hakone. Kellner took a two-day trip to Kanazawa to transplant pine trees and learn about Japanese culture before returning to Niigata to give lectures to landscape and garden students at a vocational school and a garden club.
Highlights of this part of the trip included visits to the Saito Family Summer Villa and the Northern Culture Museum. Then it was back to Tokyo, where he toured public parks.
Overall, he said the trip was an enjoyable experience, although it left him with little spare time. He did have a chance, however, to sample “some of the best food in the world” and to ride Japan’s renowned public transportation system.
“Japan is probably one of the most hospitable countries in the world,” said Kellner. “The Japanese people usually put in a lot of planning and effort and thought into being hosts for their guests; it was well-demonstrated on this trip.”
Prior to Hakone, Kellner was a gardener at the Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon.
