Morikami Museum and Gardens is a hidden gem in Delray Beach

Morikami Museum and Gardens is a hidden gem in Delray Beac...
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Travel
Morikami Museum and Gardens
is a hidden gem
By Maria Karagianis | G LOB E C ORRESP ONDENT
FEB RUARY 03, 2013
MORIKAMI MUSEUM & JAPANESE GARDENS
The Yamato-kan is the original Morikami Museum building and sits on Yamato Island.
Yamato was the early 1900s utopian community’s name.
DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — Eerie creaking and odd groaning. I had never been to
Asia and had never sat on a bench in a bamboo grove, as I was doing, watching
leaves flutter and long green bamboo trunks clink and grind against each other,
making weird noises in the wind. The sounds were haunting and alluring, oddly
loud and surprising, especially since I was not in a sacred Japanese bamboo
forest.
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Rather, I was sitting on a sunny day this past January in a bamboo grove in
south Florida — 7 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean between Delray and Boca
Raton and 20 miles southwest of the Gilded Age mansions and designer
boutiques of Palm Beach.
The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens is a quiet hidden gem set on 16
acres of a 200-acre property in what was once Florida pineapple country. Known
to locals, the property is less well known to tourists who, if they decide to venture
west from the beach for a day, are in for a most pleasant surprise.
Besides its beautifully manicured, historic, and serene Japanese gardens, with
wooden bridges, benches, water features such as koi ponds and waterfalls,
sculpture, rocks, tropical plants and trees, a bamboo grove, bonsai collection,
and tea house, the Morikami has a good restaurant with Japanese foods
including teriyaki, wakame salad, and sushi. The museum and grounds also
include an extensive art gallery, tremendous programs ranging from tea
ceremonies to origami workshops and lectures, a library with historical volumes
on Japanese art and gardening, and a small but excellent gift shop with items
imported from Asia ranging from silk jackets and bamboo purses to porcelain
vases, wind chimes, and jewelry.
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The connection between Japan and Palm
Beach County goes back over 100 years to
1904, when the scion of a samarai family
Related
If you go to Delray Beach,
Fla....
named Jo Sakai, a recent graduate of New
York University, returned home from his
studies in this country to his birthplace of
Miyazu, Japan, a castle town on the Sea of
Japan. He was there to recruit a group of
pioneers who agreed to help him realize his
utopian vision of revolutionizing US
agriculture.
MORIKAMI MUSEUM & JAPANESE
GARDENS
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With the help of the Model Land Co., a
subsidiary of Henry Flagler’s Florida East
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Bamboo forms a triad of auspicious
emblems with pine and plum, a
common motif in Japanese art.
Coast Railway, the idea became a reality and
they named their community Yamato, the
ancient name for Japan. Initially only men, Yamato eventually included wives
brought from Japan and children. So in the early 20th century, inland Florida
became an odd melting pot of Japanese settlers in traditional costume with
utopian ideas about farming who maintained their language, religion, and
cultural traditions living peacefully among a bunch of pineapple farmers.
Like most utopian communities, however,
Yamato eventually failed to live up to its
founders’ expectations. By the 1920s, the
community, which had never grown beyond
about 35 individuals, succumbed to the
reality of easy cash for land as speculators
and developers threw around piles of cash
before the Great Crash of 1929. Most
members sold their farmland, gave up their
dreams, and returned to Japan.
MORIKAMI MUSEUM & JAPANESE
GARDENS
James and Hazel Gates Woodruff
Memorial Bridge marks the entrance
to the Japanese gardens.
Only one settler remained, a brave soul
named George Sukeiji Morikami, who arrived at Yamato when he was 19 and
who continued to cultivate crops after everyone else had left. During World War
II, he endured anti-Japanese prejudice; at the same time the US government was
isolating and segregating Japanese-Americans, Morikami tolerated indignities
like having to carry a letter addressed “To Whom It May Concern” and signed by
a local government official, proclaiming that Morikami, “who resides on a farm
four miles south of Delray Beach on the Federal Highway has permission to
travel on Saturday, July 18, 1942 from Miami to his home.”
Besides farming, Morikami also worked as a
fruit and vegetable wholesaler. He eventually
became rich. In the mid-1970s, when he was
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in his 80s and shortly after finally receiving
US citizenship, Morikami donated much of
his land to Palm Beach County to be used as a
park to preserve the legacy of the original
Yamato settlers. Now the museum and
MORIKAMI MUSEUM & JAPANESE
GARDENS
The Karesansui Late Rock Garden
(Edo Period, 17th-18th centuries).
gardens are a nonprofit public-private
Karesamsui means “dry landscape.”
partnership in cooperation with the county
In this style of garden, rocks are
park system.
arranged in a bed of raked gravel,
while plants take a secondary role.
Over 20 years after Morikami donated his
land, and following construction of the
Yamato-kan teahouse, viewing gallery, and gardens, the Morikami Museum in
1993 opened a second large museum building. It now houses the restaurant,
library, a 225-seat theater, classrooms, a permanent collection of more than
7,000 Japanese art objects and artifacts, exhibition galleries, the museum store,
and an outdoor cafe with a scenic view of the lake and gardens.
There are many interesting artifacts and photographs about the history of the
Yamato settlement and Morikami himself on display in the Yamato-kan, the
Morikami’s original building, a teahouse inspired by traditional Japanese
architectural design. Outside this picturesque building is a huge collection of
bonsai trees.
When I visited the museum, I had the impression I had stepped into ancient
Japan. In the main museum there was an exhibit on Japanese dolls and Kabuki
theater as well as rooms full of paintings and photographs.
The Zen-like gardens, though, are what
originally attracted me to the Morikami.
Space, light and darkness, texture and color,
sounds — of rushing water and rustling
leaves — Japanese gardens are designed to be
holistically sensual rather than merely visual.
Designer Hoichi Kurisu created the complex
MORIKAMI MUSEUM & JAPANESE
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GARDENS
around a lake as six distinct gardens — each
from a different period of Japanese history.
Shinden Garden is from the Heian Period,
between the 9th and 12th centuries, when the
Japanese nobility adapted Chinese garden
James and Hazel Gates Woodruff
Memorial Bridge marks the entrance
to the Japanese gardens, was erected
in memory of Mrs. Woodruff, a lover
of Japanese gardens, by her husband,
a US Naval commander and veteran
of Pearl Harbor.
design ideals that featured lakes and islands
that emphasized informality and appreciation
of nature. Paradise Garden comes from the 13th and 14th centuries when
strolling gardens were introduced as an earthly representation of the Pure Land
or Buddhist heaven. Early Rock Garden is inspired by the 14th century when
Japanese gardens were inspired by Chinese landscape paintings in ink that
depicted water cascading from distant peaks into a sea or lake.
The other three gardens are: the Karesansui Late Rock Garden, based on 15thand 16th-century rock gardens; the Hiraniwa Flat Garden from the Edo Period of
the 17th and 18th centuries, which evolved out of late rock gardens; and the
Modern Romantic Garden from the Meiji Period of the late-19th and early-20th
centuries, reflecting Western influences that had begun to permeate Japan.
Walking through the gardens shortly after the New Year, I left the bamboo grove,
walked over a Japanese wooden bridge, and wished I could stay for a meditation
retreat. Walking slowly, staring at swaying leaves, breathing deeply — it was a
great way to start 2013.
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Maria Karagianis can be reached at [email protected].
© 2013 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
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