Portland Japanese Garden: The Most Authentic Japanese Garden Outside of Japan [Interview]

Portland Japanese Garden: The Most Authentic Japanese Garden Outside of Japan [Interview] Nestled within Portland’s Washington Park sits a majestic garden and one of the city’s highly treasured spaces. The Portland Japanese Garden is a true gem and lauded as the most beautiful and authentic Japanese garden outside of Japan. Encompassing 12.5 acres, the site is more than “just” a garden; it’s a place where visitors can […] READ: Portland Japanese Garden: The Most Authentic Japanese Garden Outside of Japan [Interview]

Art Sep 3, 2025 0 0 Add to Reading List

Portland Japanese Garden: The Most Authentic Japanese Garden Outside of Japan [Interview]

Photo: David M. Cobb

Nestled within Portland’s Washington Park sits a majestic garden and one of the city’s highly treasured spaces. The Portland Japanese Garden is a true gem and lauded as the most beautiful and authentic Japanese garden outside of Japan. Encompassing 12.5 acres, the site is more than “just” a garden; it’s a place where visitors can immerse themselves in Japanese culture while enjoying and appreciating nature in all its glory.

The Garden is unique because it features more than one style—there are five distinct approaches within its bounds. In having this, each space highlights the varied methods of Japanese landscape design practiced throughout history. Walk down carefully laid paths, look out on the manicured stone gardens, and enjoy how the foliage changes throughout the year. You can also explore the art of bonsai and learn how artisans have cultivated these small trees and shaped them into living sculptures.

The Cultural Center, designed by renowned architect Kengo Kuma, opened in 2017 and was an important expansion. It represents the future of Portland Japanese Garden, and it’s a place where visitors can experience traditional Japanese arts through seasonal activities, performances, and demonstrations.

My Modern Met spoke with Will Lerner at the Portland Japanese Garden, and he shares its history, how the gorgeous spaces are maintained, a primer on the Cultural Village, and much more. Scroll down for our exclusive interview.

Photo: Portland Japanese Garden

For those unfamiliar with Portland Japanese Garden, how would you describe it?

Portland Japanese Garden is a nonprofit and public garden and cultural institution located in the city’s Washington Park. It encompasses 12.5 acres on a site that was once home of the Portland Zoo, including five historic garden spaces, a Pavilion that hosts art exhibition and summer marketplaces, and a Cultural Village that hosts the majority of the organization’s programming and is the site of our Umami Café and Gift Shop.

Portland Japanese Garden is unique compared to other Japanese gardens, even those within Japan, because it presents different styles presented throughout the history of Japanese landscape architecture; whereas, many other gardens will typically feature just one. Also unique to the Garden in North America is that its maintenance and design has been overseen by a lineage of Japanese-born gardening experts, including its current garden curator, Hugo Torii. It hosts a variety of programming including the aforementioned art exhibitions and summer marketplaces as well as festival celebrations, demonstrations, and performances of Japanese cultural pursuits, workshops, seminars, and lectures.

We’re humbled by the fact that several visiting Japanese dignitaries have described us as the most beautiful and authentic Japanese garden located outside of Japan and we are proud to be one of Portland’s crown jewels.

There really is no wrong day to visit us, it’s beautiful year-round as each season brings its own special qualities. That said, we tend to see large crowds during our fall colors (late Sep/Oct/early Nov), which light the grounds in crimsons and golds and it’s really stunning. Another popular time is during cherry blossom season (late March into early April) when the intentional placement of the trees gives the landscape a delicate and ephemeral quality. Within the Garden, it’s best to see all of it as the harmony of the spaces makes every individual part feel like part of a bigger whole.

Photo: Roman Johnston

How did the Portland Japanese Garden come to be? Is there an extraordinary part of its history you’d like to share?

The Garden was founded in 1963 in the aftermath of World War II to create cross-cultural understanding. Even prior to the bigoted and unwarranted incarceration of those of Japanese ancestry during the war, our area had been hostile to these community members and neighbors. That racism pervaded long after the end of the war. Leaders in local cultural organizations, businesses, and government came together to work on taking the left-behind remains of the old Portland Zoo and transform it into the lush urban oasis we enjoy today. The hope was to rebuild ties with Japan and that, through nature, better understanding of a foreign culture would take place.

The work to build the Garden wasn’t simple. Aside from the topography of the Garden, which is elevated and on a hillside surrounded by Douglas firs and western cedars, what the original workers found was essentially a brownfield: polluted soil and concrete. Furthermore, there were still fierce pockets of racist resistance. Our first garden director, Kinya Hira, and the original designer of the landscape, Professor Takuma Tono from the Tokyo University of Agriculture, encountered attacks such as stones being thrown at them. Hira would later be stabbed on the grounds of the Garden in a premediated assault.

Still, there was too much goodwill to be overcome, and the Garden was built and opened to the public in 1967. As Hira would notice later in subsequent visits, a place that had been a site of protest had become an indelible part of Portland. We’re grateful to know that today we work for an organization that has been credited as a reason why this area has improved as a place for those of Japanese ancestry and are determined to continue this work so that one day all bigotry can cease.

Photo: Mike Centioli

Are there any hidden gems you wish more people would take advantage of?

I wouldn’t really say there are any “hidden” gems. I do think that sometimes folks come here with the mindset of seeing it as part of a checklist of the many amazing places to visit in Portland. While it’s certainly possible to come up and leave within an hour, I think the person who will get the most out of their visit is the one that takes their time and settles in. Find a bench and look out and within. The Garden, like other Japanese gardens, is designed to a place that meets your emotional needs and create inner peace that then transfers naturally in how you interact with others. If you put the phone away for a bit and just enjoy the view, you’ll be surprised how quickly it calms you down.

Photo: Tony Small

Photo: Portland Japanese Garden

The Garden is impeccably maintained. What kind of work goes into keeping it so pristine?

Thank you! We’ve got an incredible team here that takes care of the landscape every day. This begins with our gardeners led by Hugo Torii, garden curator. They’re joined by our amazing Facilities Department in fostering and maintaining the land and the structures on it. We are also grateful for our group of horticultural support volunteers, who do very precise and time-consuming work (such as brushing pine needles and small natural debris off moss). The pride all of these folks take in their work is inspiring and motivates someone like me to work harder and better.

How does this align with Japanese gardening practices?

There are many different practices that are employed by Torii, but I think the one that stands out to me is intentionality: Everything you see in Portland Japanese Garden is intentional. I think that even for someone who is largely unfamiliar with landscape design they can still feel it, especially when they think about other natural spaces they’ve visited. They want it to evoke the feeling of being in the wild and because so much care and thought goes into it, it’s successful.

The Cultural Village at Portland Japanese Garden. (Photo: James Florio)

Renowned architect Kengo Kuma created a Cultural Village for the Garden that opened in 2017. Can you talk more about that?

We’re very proud to be the first public project that Kengo Kuma & Associates created in the U.S. As you noted, it opened in 2017 and was a significant change for the Garden. In just a few months, we went from being a smaller, 5.5-acre space with a small staff to 12.5 and double, triple the staff.

It was designed in the spirit of the monzenmachi, or gate-front towns, that were established outside of temples and shrines in Japan. Aside from it greatly expanding the amount of programming we could do, it also helped diffuse our crowds a bit. We’ve been very fortunate to see an increase in attendance but as we started to get closer to 400,000 and 500,000 visitors a year, the leaders saw that the foot traffic was causing stress on the historic garden spaces and was disrupting the serenity of the landscape. Now with the Cultural Village, we have a larger area for people to hang out in, whether it’s just enjoying time on our Ellie M. Hill Bonsai Terrace, a cup of tea from the Umami Café, watching demonstrations in the Cathy Rudd Cultural Corner, checking out art in the Cal and Mayho Tanabe Gallery, or shopping through the curated goods at our Gift Shop.

Photo: Portland Japanese Garden

Photo: Jonathan Ley

What's your favorite part of the Garden?

This is the most difficult question! The longer I’ve been here, the increasingly harder it gets for me to choose any single season or part of the landscape because I do love it in the whole and am starting to truly see it as one. That said, my answer is the people. I love that when I walk around, I can hear languages and accents from all around the world. I love that this place has so much meaning to our community and that they find comfort from being here. For all of the gains that have come with the technological advancement of our age there is still nothing that comes close to the pleasure of feeling you’re part of a community, of something larger than yourself.

In my first few weeks after being hired, I ran into a guest who had bought a membership. She was just visiting but had made us part of her morning routine as she was in Portland to tend to a loved one that was terminally ill and was in their final days. To know that we could be a place that offered some kind of comfort to her and that I get to be a small part of it is something I’ll think about for the rest of my life. A more cheerful story is that I once encountered a photographer from Banff in Canada, who had been coming three years in a row, hoping to time it just right to get us in peak fall colors. We attract people seeking peace and beauty—I can only hope we’re judged by the company we keep.

We really do need each other. When we talk about nature in the Garden, we like to stress that humanity is not separate or above nature, we are nature. You feel it here and, alongside knowing we are a place that has helped foster reconciliation between peoples, makes me hopeful we can get past the acrimony of our times.