Seattle Japanese Garden

This guide to the Seattle Japanese Garden follows a ceremonial teahouse that Tokyo's city government sent across the Pacific in pieces in nineteen fifty-nine, assembled here before the rest of the garden was finished. It lingers on the Fourth of July that year, when Urasenke grand master Sen Soshitsu the fifteenth knelt inside to perform a tea ceremony refined over generations, and on garden designer Juki Iida's careful hunt through the Cascades for the pond's granite boulders. Then, in nineteen seventy-three, vandals tore the teahouse apart, leaving a gap in Iida's landscape for years. Stand at the pond's edge, where Iida placed each boulder like a sculptor choosing marble.