Here is an interlude post about my trip to Okinawa. Next week, back to bonsai, where I hope to share some wonderful old bonsai on Honshu.

The city of Naha, at the southern end of Okinawa.

At the top of the main island is a large laurel forest. I went up there for a few days.

At the guest house I misunderstood the food situation. Thought there would be dinner, as we were miles from town. The owner was busy and said he’d take me in the next day so I could shop. So I didn’t eat for 24 hours. I survived off a drink vending machine on property. An inadvertent juice fast.

These vending machines are everywhere. They’re even nowhere. A little delivery truck trundles up the barren road once every couple weeks to supply the mistaken. 

Site of my starvation

Laurels and tree fern. Okinawa is subtropical, around 60 F this time of year. This is the dry season.

Azalea

Fire-bellied Newt. I shouldn’t have picked this up, as a friend later told me. The newt’s skin has toxins.

A protector deity on a roof. Behind the lion grows a sapling pine, I think a Ryukyu Pine. “Ryukyu” is the name of the sea-trading Okinawan culture that dates back thousands of years.

Photo courtesy Merlin app

I did some birding, including trying to find this bird, the Okinawa Rail. It’s a sneaky shorebird that lives in the lush laurel woods and it eluded me for several days. I heard many of them in the deep ravines but had no intention of slithering to my demise over a bird so intent on not being seen. That they were only described to science in 1981 is no mystery to me.

It’s rural and quiet in the north. Or so I thought on the first day.

Right at 6 pm a loudspeaker blared out over the sparsely inhabited forest: It’s time to go home to your children, the day is done, good night.

This was LOUD. And it made me jump—

What?! A fire, an earthquake, a liquid beverage delivery?!

Then, my feathers smoothed out again, a huge shape swooped in to hang on a branch. Another few flew by. Bats, flying foxes with 3-foot wingspans.

Another evening shock. Would they quietly munch on fruit as advertised, or skip that amuse-bouche and go for the main course?

Back in the south in a rice paddy. Many crops grew there, including taro.

Impressive root flares help stabilize these tree mangroves in the mud.

A quiet street in a small coastal town.

The current trend in Okinawan homes is concrete, with a brutalist flare.

A more typical older home.

Back in Naha for the flight to Tokyo, I found this sidewalk with embedded broken pottery shards.

Naha is proud of its past potters. Here the masonry wall of a building holds a platter.

Next week, the Kokufu show-

A few of the ridiculous trees in Part I of the Kokufu-ten. Wednesday was the take-down and switch-out to new trees. And now it’s open again for Part II. 

The entrance to the show looks down on the large displays. This is in the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno. This view gives a sense of the scale and impact these huge trees might have only a few feet away.

Needle Juniper. A well-known juniper making an appearance in the 100th Kokufu. 

Chinese Quince. Every last twig had once been wired on this massive specimen.

Japanese Black Pine; Kokufu Prize. Huge tree.

Korean Hornbeam; Kokufu Prize.

Ume. Excellent Ume in this year’s show.

Satsuki Azalea.

Shinpaku Juniper; Kokufu Prize.

Magnolia. Resets the tone with an airy whimsicality.

Shinpaku Juniper; Kokufu Prize.

Selaginella, or club moss (light green plant).

Japanese White Pine. A quiet multiple-trunk bunjin. The Kokufu highlights thicker-trunked trees.

Trident Maple. Grown in a small pot it’s whole life, maybe 75 years.

Ume.

Red Pine from the Imperial Family. Notice the lack of conformity to modern bonsai expectations, particularly the lack of compaction.

Japanese White Pine worked on by Mr. Shinji Suzuki. He was excited about this entry as it has a grand history…

The White Pine was shown in the first Kokufu-ten in 1934. It’s a great addition to this 100th show (not year, they took two years off and some of the early years had double shows). The entry is a nod to the durability of the show and the trees in it.

Zelkova.

Dwarf Flowering Quince ‘Chojubai’.

Honeysuckle.

Chinese Quince. The intense ramification at this small scale is not easy.

This medium sized display won a Kokufu Prize.

And the shohin displays notched a prize winner.

An unusual raised-root Japanese White Pine—the lowest branch falls away to the back.

Ume.

Ezo Spruce. Only a few spruce in this year’s show.

A gathering of global bonsai friends—left to right—myself, Juan Andrade, Mario Komsta, Peter Gregg, John Eads, Carmen Leskoviansky, Evan Cordes, and Masaki Shimada. 

I’m back home already, but with spies abroad I hope to offer a photo reel of Part II—

 

Many thanks to Evan Cordes, Carmen Leskoviansky, and Masaki Shimada for these photos of Kokufu-ten Part 2.

The Kokufu is well-known to showcase impressive, thick-trunked, dizzyingly developed old bonsai. I’ve included some of those meat and potato trees, but whimsy also shows up here and there. In this Part 2 I’ve included some of that.

Shinpaku. Crazy live vein.

Japanese White Pine. A formal-ish upright bunjin in a simple bridge pot.

Hitting the same note twice, here’s a formal upright Ume. Never seen that before. Appears to be in a hexagonal rectangle.

Japanese White Pine. Big famous tree. This was in Mr. Suzuki’s garden when I first arrived in 2003.

Hornbeam.

A Harland Boxwood. Unusual in the Kokufu. Excellent nebari. You’d struggle to get a fine and detailed nebari like this in the ground, likely pot-grown from a cutting or air-layer.

Root over rock Trident Maple.

This shohin display got a Kokufu Prize.

A swirling Shinpaku. Likely grafted foliage, it usually is when fine and tight. But not always.

A smaller Trident Maple.

Lovely accent.

Hinoki forest. That tenjin deadwood rising off the right side strikes me as odd and out of place. Especially coming from one of the younger trees.

Needle Juniper. Kokufu Prize.

Japanese Maple.

A dancing pair of Shinpaku and Chojubai.

Japanese Red Pine.

A stone exhibited by former apprentice Andrew Robson.

And another stone shown by Andrew’s father, Jeffrey Robson.

A floating Spirea.

A basket of Winterberry.

Here’s the gallery of the 2026 Kokufu show, Part I.

 

 

 

 

A few final stories from my Japan trip.

The first hour in Obuse was bittersweet.

You might recognize this tree from a photo in Post-dated: The Schooling of an Irreverent Bonsai Monk. Walking home after a long day I’d pat its trunk or raise my fist passing under it, and say some version of, you and me pal, we’ll make it.

When we arrived in Obuse I split off to visit a small temple at the edge of town. I often went there as an apprentice, finding these quiet temples (some were Shinto shrines) restful. They drew me in.

On my way to the temple I didn’t realize I’d crossed the road I’d taken daily to and from work. I glanced left and stopped. Here was my tree.

But it was dead.

I stood there breathing. My tree was dead, my brother tree. We’d kept each other going, or at least, it had kept me going. 

My memory of Obuse is no longer true. Not true for today. In my absence the place is changing. And next time I go, my tree may be gone entirely.

The next stop cheered me up.

Reunited with my group, we went to Mr. Suzuki’s garden. He met us in the teahouse, and brought out two pots, setting them on this wooden stand.

I knew these pots!

The blue one is a bonsai pot I’d given Mr. Suzuki in the states in 2003, a few months before I started my apprenticeship. The bottom one was a gift on a return trip to Japan after my apprenticeship ended. It was from a kiln I fired around 2012, my last kiln. A winter tea bowl.

And he had them there in the teahouse.

On a wall of the teahouse was a Japanese White Pine shown in the first Kokufu show, in 1934. The photo to the left is from that year, and on the right how it looked in this year’s Kokufu.

The next day our group split up for various adventures. My friend Evan Cordes and I stayed in Nagano to tour around a bit. This temple wasn’t on our itinerary, but it sums up the architectural chiaroscuro you can encounter in any urban Japan setting: an old temple, with a modern high-rise framing it.

Any walk along the cold, snowy city streets of Nagano may pass by yakisuki—charred cryptomeria—on the older buildings. I fell in love with yakisugi while living in Japan 20 years ago, and had to have it for my tiny house siding. (Making it involved a lot of smoke and flames, loss of eyebrows, and even a run to the ER…a story in my forthcoming tiny house memoir.)

A Jizo statue with pine shoots. The red cloth is protective for children and travelers. The pine shoots are for longevity and good fortune.

To the side of a house in Nagano we saw a common sight anywhere in Japan: bonsai. Dangling Disney characters optional.

Metalwork on the Zenkoji temple. This is one of the oldest wooden buildings in Japan. Most of the older ones have burned down and been rebuilt, but this one dates to 1707.

The roof of Zenkoji is itself worth a visit. The layers of wood that hold up that slope and overhang are part of a traditional system of carpentry called kigumi. It uses interlocking joints that shift and absorb stresses, like earthquake. Which can make you think of aikido, the Japanese martial art that redirects an opponents energy.

Evan with a ridiculous Zelkova. A concrete filling or something similar supports the hollowed trunk. The white paper zigzag in front of the trunk is called a shide. These protect from evil and purify a place, and its presence suggests the building beyond is a Shinto shrine.

A few other posts about my 2026 Japan trip:

Okinawa

Kokufu Part 1

Kokufu Part 2

The Kokufu show is a goldmine. You can walk through it or flip through a show book and realize you’re just looking at the stands. Or the branch setting. Or the pots.

In this year’s Kokufu I took some closeups of the nebari. Here’s a handful of them.

Japanese Maple with a wide, fused nebari. Hard to create without root grafting. Grafting is usually done by inserting a rooted cutting into a hole in the nebari, which will fuse and grow roots. Do that a LOT of times and you might make something like this. The extent of this root flare is a construct, a stylistic exaggeration that exists in almost any art.

Not to knock root grafting, a useful skill for sure.

Camellia with a solid, broad nebari. It’s a lot, but not overdone. The tree feels stable.

Another Japanese Maple. To my sensibility, this is near ideal. It has a few holes in it, with minimal or no grafting. It looks natural.

An Azalea with a nice root flare. Like Maples, Azaleas will often create a respectable nebari without much fiddling. Just growing in a pot (rather than the ground) and either trimming the bottom roots hard under the trunk base and / or planting in a shallow pot can make a nebari like this. Although Azaleas prefer deeper pots, so the root trim technique would get the nod here.

You do see non-impressive—or absent—nebari in the Kokufu. This is a Trident Maple.

Another root-over-rock Trident but with a more mature root structure.

A Pine with a respectable nebari. Also a root over rock. Nebari tends to be minimal on root over rock plantings.

A Hornbeam with an average nebari. Or, rather, a good one for a Hornbeam. Elm is another plant often reluctant to fuse roots into a broader nebari. I think rather than forcing it’s nice to accept this reality. Root grafts would not disappear as well on a Hornbeam as on a Maple, the wound would last a long time. So you don’t see many attempts at it.

Another Japanese Maple with a grafted nebari. It looks like the foot of a snail to me. About ready to slither off to the next stand. Would be wonderful to have in the backyard. But the mollusk vibe might be hard to shake.

Hope the creator isn’t reading this.

A Chinese Quince. Possibly grown in the ground or a growing bed for a time. Root fingers like this are often the result of that sort of strong growth. Chinese Quince, Hornbeam, and Azalea are examples of plants which have much better nebari if grown in a pot. There’s more fine definition in the nebari structure, more in scale with the tree. Not unlike fine twigging versus coarse.

 

 

 

I collected this Limber Pine with Steve Varland and Dan Wiederrecht about a decade ago. It looked younger than the delicious, half-deadwood trees on the slopes nearby. Then a couple years ago bark started to peel in the front and—delight of delights—the whole front had died, leaving a swath of shari. 

Last week we potted this tree for the first time. In the Seasonal class we failed to find a suitable pot, so it went on a slab.  

For years I’ve made slab plantings with juicy, organic root masses. I’ve wanted to try a root mass that suggested the shape and volume of a typical pot, so here’s our effort at that. A block of roots and soil that hints at a harder material.

Here’s the Limber Pine being prepared for its slab adventure. 

Our Corian slab ready for the rootball, cut to a soft rectangle. The bottom has grooves cut between the wiring holes so it sits flat. No need for drainage holes as the water will just go sideways.

The root ball prepared with stout bamboo stakes in four corners to be used as tie-downs.

Gelatinous cooked corn starch helps firm up our muck. We use 1/3 corn starch, 1/3 long-fibered (unshredded) orchid moss, and 1/3 akadama dust. Sometimes more corn starch is needed for a sticky mass that doesn’t crack when you squish it.

Mixing the muck.

Ted and Chad work the ball. Chad’s hat is clever: bonsai overwork. 

The bottom has a muck wall about 1” thick. Above that is the root mass where we spread on a watered-down muck like a slurry over the cut ends of the fine roots.

The finished slab planting. A few lichens adorn it to jumpstart the colonization of the new surface. Holes were punched in the bottom edge so when it’s watered, we don’t get a blowout of the muck wall from a gallon of water seeking escape. Had that once. Moss and lichen will cover the holes in a year or two, but once roots grow into the muck the protective job of those holes is finished.

The slope to the right has no muck on top, just soil with sphagnum over it for better water penetration.

Here’s the finished piece. It’s not like a pot. But it has some clean lines and a pot-like mass. The slopes might suggest movement and direction with a flow to the right. 

Inspiration? I didn’t notice the similarity of this DeWalt battery pack until several days later. Hard to claim inspiration if you don’t remember seeing it, though the mind is a funny thing.

For the backstory on this tree, here is the Limber Pine’s First Styling.

Then Maciek Adwent helped rework the design in this video in 2024: 

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For those who can’t get enough words about trees, here are a selection of books you might enjoy.

These books cover a wide arc of tree storytelling, from their lives in nature to how we interact with them. They are not about bonsai, but rather might illuminate why bonsai captivate us.

Tree: A Life Story— A penetrating view through the lens and experience of an ecologist, David Suzuki, this tree biography takes a Douglas Fir from seedling to toppling over at great age. Suzuki leads us on a macro and micro journey through the Fir’s lifespan and how it changes and is changed by the biotic life around it. You learn as much about the nitrogen cycle, carpenter ants, and the haunting similarity of chlorophyll and blood as about the tree. A small treasure.

The Overstory: A Novel— No fewer than five people have gifted or suggested this book to me, and I’ve done about the same for others. A reviewer wrote, “…trees…are both the stealth protagonists and the beating, fine-grained heart of this strange, marvelous book.” It’s a Pulitzer Prize winner, a generational effort, and, if you have the emotional bandwidth for a deep dive of several generations of people and their lives with trees, worth it. A delicious set of stories.

In Trees: An Exploration— Due to be released on April 7, 2026 (pre-ordering has begun), Robert Moor’s book has already received strong reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and dignitaries from natural history circles. From the top of a sequoia filming a documentary with David Attenborough to a tree full of chimpanzees, this investigative romp wonders what a tree is from the vantage of science, history, and philosophy. Moor interviewed me for an article in The New Yorker about bonsai, and I’m personally looking forward to this one.

I’ll offer another short book list again soon. Feel free to suggest your favorite “bonsai-adjacent” books in the comments.

This week, an assortment of puzzlers from this spring’s repots, with comments. 

A Japanese Beech with an unfortunate root system. Chunks of roots have died, identified by being black, unlike the living ones, which are light brown. Spraying with water helps see which is which. Then cut away the black areas until you see healthy tissue. 

Here is a Japanese White Pine with a similar issue. One possible reason for a pocket of root death is that the tree dried out completely, causing root death in areas, then was watered as usual, and then rot sets in. Correction is the same as with the Beech. It is easy to get air pockets when removing big chunks of the root mass like this, so have large mounds of new soil wherever there is a hole under the root mass before settling the tree in, and take more time chopsticking in soil. Having a “porthole” through the nebari helps drop soil in.

This one is an aesthetic decision—removing a high, ugly root on a Japanese Black Pine.

Cutting off the root.

Root removed, leaving one with some shari on it just below, which slopes into the soil better.

Approach grafting roots on a Rocky Mountain Juniper. This technique is not used much to get better juniper nebari, but rather to shorten an uninteresting trunk to the area it starts to get jazzy. U-pins with protective rubber hold 1/4” roots into grooves cut in the live vein.

A sharp, stainless steel spatula used in a stab-it-kill-it repetitive chopping motion is handy for removing the bottom snarl of roots on trees like this Japanese Maple. 

An over-large and over-long surface root on a Japanese Maple is shortened. Red circle indicates a side root of some size that will take over.

After whittling back with a ball cutter, the wound is smoothed with a chisel. Good idea to sterilize and seal wounds on Japanese Maple due to some of the diseases that can enter wounds on this species.

A Red Maple that came out of a narrow, rectangular pot. The nebari of this tree has been squoozed on the front and back and needed more room. White cloth is to keep the trunk clean while grabbing. 

On the left, the pot the Maple came out of. On the right, the one it might go into.  

In this pot there is more room for the front and back roots. Another reason to choose a pot is for better root spread. 

 

This 20-year old Japanese Maple has never been pinched. Freely grown, a maple will have a coarse shoot structure, but this early period of no pinching develops the trunk and branches and roots.

Pinching a maple when young stunts development.

This Japanese Maple might be pinched this year. The branching is past tertiary and has good structure. 

A Japanese Maple shoot about a day away from opening its first leaves. 

Push the first pair of leaves apart with a tweezer, grab the interior shoot, and pull off. If you catch it right here, the internode will be shorter.

This is some of the first bonsai work we do after spring repotting.

This shoot has elongated several days past ideal, though it should still be pinched to the first set of leaves. As this is a single flush plant when mature, we get one chance a year to shorten the internode. 

A note of patience:

When first pinching a specimen, it will likely have a thicker twig. This translates to a couple years where even if you pinch, it will have a longer internode. Keep at it and you can get a thin twig, with a short internode. This offers the delicacy Japanese Maples are known for. 

A maple following years of pinching. Notice the thin twigs and short internodes.

There is a point at which pinching goes the other way. The first pair of leaves open to no shoot inside. If that goes on, those branches may die back. No shoots elongating is our clue to fertilize more. 

When should we start pinching?

Some will pot-grow their Japanese Maples 10-30 years before pinching. There are also those who prefer a stronger tree and never pinch—a possible direction for those in stressful climates for Japanese Maple: hot and dry with little winter cold. This is likely to stress them and leaving longer shoots may be best.

In some situations pinching is useful to rein in this coltish species, especially for small specimens like shohin.

Many find Japanese Maple a tough, forgiving plant. Pinching is maybe best thought of as optional, and applied dependent on goals.

This collected Yellow Cedar, Callitropsis nootkatensis, came from Vancouver Island, BC. We designed it six years ago, and in the following photo essay we transfer it from a box to a pot, and adjust the branches.

Patch and Masaki removed the Yellow Cedar from the box and began exploring the root mass. We hoped it might fit in a pot we had, but didn’t know if its large base of deadwood and living tissue would allow that. We went slow and with a backup plan.

A root hook assisted bringing in the sides.

One of the challenges with this specimen was the inclination forward to present the front. At about a 75 degree tip, a large portion of the rear root ball would become a high root sail. Patch works away at that back area to lower it.

The rough set to check fit. A block of 2×2 to the right temporarily braces against the deadwood for this strong forward tip.

For a while I considered a slab for this one, but worried the hanging deadwood in front would make that presentation problematic—at least, without a tall mound. Luckily the pot we had slipped around the low, long deadwood like a shoe around a foot, and over which the frontal jin had enough height to hang.

Masaki works a very long chopstick, which helps protect the foliage as he does his sewing action. Note that he’s flipped it point side up—not a textbook move—but in areas where you are sure there are no fine roots, the blunt end can help push soil underneath areas and into holes. With tighter root masses, with more fine root, or with moist soil, it is better to use the sharp end.

Like any tool, having the right one defines the game—it helps to have long chopsticks, short ones, thick ones, and skinny ones on hand. Timber bamboo with its many dimensions of length and thickness is used to make these. A great way to play with an hour.

Already the foliage has a cupped finger-like presentation, not unlike old needle juniper or hinoki bonsai, though we’ve only pinched this tree for six years. Unlike junipers, Yellow Cedar can be pinched without weakening the plant.

As it looks in early April 2026, after touching up branch placement. Interesting species for its quick foliage density achieved through 2x a year pinching.

For a brief look at what we started with…

Here is the raw tree in a box in 2020. Anton Nijhuis collected the specimen in British Columbia and said it had been sitting in his garden a few years and no one wanted it. Yellow Cedar is a newish species for bonsai—certainly new to me at the time—so I took it.

This is after the styling session in 2020. The wild snags of deadwood on this side (there’s none on the other) made for a simple front choice. We left the tree at this rakish inclination for six years while pinching it, and, distracted by other projects, finally got to potting it this spring.

For the full styling article: Snow Falling on a Yellow Cedar

A note on the species name. Yellow Cedar is a curiosity, including, apparently, to taxonomists. Since 1824 the genus has bobbled back and forth between Cupressus and Chamaecyparis. At the time this tree was styled, in 2020, Cupressus nootkatensis was its name, considered a cypress. Now it goes by Callitropsis nootkatensis.

April 2026 Bulletin Board: 

• Some big news! Mr. Shinji Suzuki is coming to the Portland Art Museum on Sunday, July 19. He’ll also be presenting that week at our local bonsai group, the Bonsai Society Of Portland, and I’ll share more as plans firm up. Here’s some deets for the museum event: The Way of Bonsai