July 6, 2020 • 33 mins
Bonsai’s origins go all the way back to ancient China, long before Japan became infatuated with the art form. Over time, the western world also became fascinated with bonsai, though there has been plenty of cultural confusion about it along the way. This episode is sponsored by Mazda.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, And UH,
little housekeeping up front. This is a sponsored episode. It's
sponsored by Mazda as they are promoting their new c
(00:24):
X thirty. They asked us if we would do an
episode for them, and we were delighted to We threw
around a lot of ideas for this episode, but one
that kept coming back to us and kept coming back
up was Bond's Eye. And it is an art form
that feels uniquely special, at least to me at this
point in time where we're all feeling very disconnected because
(00:44):
tending bonds Ie is used by some folks as a
way to meditate and reconnect to nature and feel a
little more centered. And for me, it's also really easy
to think about bonds eye and history together because there
are some very very old Bondsai in the world. We
will talk at a couple at the end, so today
that is indeed what we were talking about. Uh, And
(01:05):
to give you a rundown of how this episode will
play out, first, we're gonna just quickly cover what bondsai
is as kind of a level set because there are
some misconceptions, particularly in the Western world about it. Uh.
And then we're going to talk about its origins in
China and its development in Japan, which is the country
it's probably most associated with in popular culture anyway, and
then a little bit about how it became a subject
(01:27):
of fascination for the Western world, and then at the
end we're going to talk about a few notable bonds i.
In very broad terms, bondsay is the practice of cultivating
plants in containers with the goal, in the words of
the Oxford Companion to the Garden to quote, suggest a
natural scene or the abstract beauty of a tree in nature. Normally,
(01:49):
these plants are grown in coarse soil and very small
trays or pots, and there's a really wide range of
plants that can be grown in this way. Although woody
perenny ills are the favored option, they all need a
fair amount of attention and care with the regard to
their watering and their pruning, as well as occasional feeding.
Bondsai practice generally creates a simplified version of a larger plant,
(02:14):
and that's simplified to accommodate the smaller scale. A mature,
well maintained bonds i typically has horizontal branch growth to
create some width, and sometimes even branches that reach downward.
We'll talk about some of the styles in more detail
in a moment. And it also has a full but
compact foliage on top. So sometimes like the sort of
classic bondsai that people may think of when they hear
(02:37):
the word, is one that has foliage that looks sort
of like clouds at the top. And the small size
of the plants is not the result of genetic selection
or modification. It's careful design and cultivation from the time
their seedlings. And the size range for bonds I. I've
been mentioning how small they are, but it is not
as restricted to smallness as you might think. There is
(02:57):
actually a size classification system that allows for varying sizes
of bondsai uh and the large bonds eye that are
in that are as tall as eighty inches that's about
two meters, so that's a substantial tree. There are a
number of different styles of Bondsai and they're inspired by
different ways that trees grow in nature. The bonds eye
does not need to fall into one of these categories,
(03:19):
and there are just vast variations and interpretation of the categories,
but they offer a good way to guide the styling
for a horticulturist. Here are a few, but this is
not an exhaustive list at all. There are also subdivisions
within many of these styles, and also entirely different styles
that are not part of this list. You were yesterday
(03:40):
as you were working on this, you mentioned that you
were starting on this list and that it was turning
out to be extremely large. Yeah. It's one of those
things where you you think you'll have a few bullet
points and then you're like, oh, so. The first style,
which is a really common style, is broom style, and
that features a straight trunk with fulliage that branches out
(04:01):
at the top one third of the tree. Deciduous trees
with sort of fine branch structures are ideal for this
because they create that nice cloudy top. The formal upright
style is also characterized by a straight trunk, but this
time it tapers at the top with foliage that is
thickest at the bottom and also thins out as it rises.
Informal upright style features a tapered trunk, but one that's
(04:24):
grown not straight, but is an s shape with branching
at each curve. There's also a slanting style that stays
straight but typically grows at a sixty eight degree angle.
Cascading style mimics trees that grow downward because of external influences,
so the trunk grows upward, but then it bends over,
(04:44):
allowing the branches and the foliage to shower toward the ground.
There's also a semi cascade style, which can be grown
with a less dramatic downturn. Yeah. One of the I
watched a brief video about some of these, and one
of them suggested, like, oh, it would be like if
a tree grew under heavy snowfall and its branches couldn't
support it and so it cascades over. Yeah. I was
(05:06):
thinking when a tree grows like at the edge of
a cliff yep, and there's erosion over time and its
trunk compensates. Yeah. Rock falls are also sometimes noted as
the cause for those. Literati style is all about verticality,
growing upward but crooked, with no branching on most of
the tree trunk except at the very top, and this
(05:28):
style is intended to mimic trees in nature. That would
have to compete and struggle for sunlight and resources with
other plant life. Wind Swept style, as its name suggests,
means that the tree has grown to look like one
that develops in very windy conditions, with the foliage only
on one side, and an angled trunk. Double trunk style
has a bifurcated trunk, with each trunk growing its own foliage,
(05:52):
and the multi trunk style follows this same idea, but
in that case it forks into more than two trunks.
This is not to be confused with forest style, which
can feature many trunks, but in the forest style each
is its own individual tree, not a splitting of one
trunk into multiples. Growing on a rock style and growing
(06:13):
in a rock style are exactly as their names indicate,
with the roots visible and clinging to the exterior of
a base rock in the former and the roots can
field within the rock in the ladder. There are also
styles of bonsai based on damage that a tree might
encounter in nature. So raft style starts with a cracked
(06:34):
tree and then has branches growing upward out of the
old damage tree to develop foliage that forms kind of
one unit at the top, and Shari style mimics the
naturally occurring bark loss that trees may experience in nature
by carefully carving away the bark on the part of
the designer. Because bonsay is an art form, there are
a lot of different expressions of it and ongoing evolution
(06:57):
within the field, so it changed is over time. But
this has also led to what some would consider a
delution of the bonsai art form, particularly as popularity of
the concept has led to commercial enterprises that don't have
a lot of interest in the principles behind it. Like,
I know, I've seen advertisements and catalogs and stuff. They're like,
(07:17):
buy an instant bonsai, sort of defeating the point. Part
of the difficulty there is that the principles are often
listed very very differently depending on your source. When talking
about the esthetics of bonsai texts, at least in English,
very very greatly. In some cases you'll find a specific
(07:38):
list of principles of design, which include things like balance, proportion, movement, simplicity, unity,
and an absence of the designers involvement That means you
can't see the way that the tree may have been manipulated.
But other texts are much more general, suggesting that as
an art form. These rules are not really rules, but
they're just sort of guides to in full warm decisions
(08:00):
on how you design and maintain a tree. So, particularly
in Western cultures who are really translating this Asian art
form through a Western lands, things have gotten kind of muddled.
The word bonsai has become synonymous with horticultural tininess and
very small plants kept in containers, more than relating directly
to the aesthetic principles of bonsai or it's Chinese precursor pinging.
(08:25):
Some of this expansion beyond the classical sense of bonsai
is reflected in the consideration of a pre World War
two bonds ie as the classical model and post World
War two is modern, although that doesn't really encompass the
sort of fast and loose use of the term to
apply to pretty much any small plant. I um, I
don't want to throw any retailer under the bus, but
(08:49):
I was once in a store that sold plants, and
they had a row of tiny cactus cold as bonsai,
and I was like, I don't quite think so well.
When when I was a child, there was a catalog
that I particularly love to look through, and it sold
(09:12):
something that it described as a grow your own bonsai kit,
and what it was was a potato with a partially
sprouted eye. And that potato I, you know, root that
comes out like that was supposed to be the bonds eye.
(09:33):
That is a fascinating interpretation. Yeah, yeah, bonds I, even
in its less rigid definitions, but presuming you're not talking
about a potato, is by its nature meticulous. Caring for
a bonsai tree is an ongoing process. Because their pants
are trays are very small, and because it's usually with
(09:54):
a coarse soil, they often need to be watered frequently.
This does vary, though, of course by plant type. Both
indoor and outdoor plants need to have their environment carefully managed,
and for even hobbyists, pruning is required to keep the
shape of the foliage. That effort becomes much more intensive
for expert designers. Everyone I think has probably seen footage
(10:15):
of like that person that is carefully clipping bonds I,
sometimes in ways that are not even perceptible to the
human eye, uh, but are of course part of shaping
it into that beautiful, beautiful final product. Uh. Route pruning
is also part of maintaining the small size of the
plants and all of this work, which is done quite carefully,
(10:37):
adds a meditative element to the cultivation of bonds i
and that is part of its appeal. So just a
moment ago, we mentioned pinging. We can't really talk about
bonsies history without talking about that first, So coming up
we will get into some discussion of the miniature horticultural
art of China. First we'll take a quick sponsor break.
(11:04):
Pingjing also called Pensay, which was its earliest name, is
where the bondsaie story really starts. China, due to its
vast size, has an incredibly diverse range of plant life,
and there was already a well established gardening tradition in
China that had begun hundreds of years before the creation
of these mini scenes developed as an art form, and
(11:25):
the name pinging translates to tray scenery or pot scenery,
and the idea of pinging is that a person can
see the large in the tiny. The miniature nature allows
for the experience of seeing larger things from a different perspective,
both literally and figuratively, and it's an expression of emotion
as much as it is a miniature recreation of larger
(11:48):
natural scenes. Reverence for large scale natural forms like mountains
and forests informed the development of pinging as a way
to connect to nature. But pens ing is not only
about plants. There are actually three types of pinging, tree pinging,
landscape pinging, and water and land pinging, and all of
(12:10):
this is meant to form a blended balance of nature
and art. The natural elements can almost be considered as
artists media to be combined with other media such as
small sculpture or arrangements of stones. One source that I
read likened it to a landscape painting, but one that
is alive and with greater dimension. And because of this,
(12:31):
pinging works are often revisited after they're completed, not just
to maintain the living floral elements, but also to be
reworked to accommodate the growth of the living plants within them.
So you might need to change around where the sculpture
sits depending on how your your tree in the scene
has grown. While there were miniature gardenscapes created as far
(12:52):
back as the Shang dynasty, which lasted from about sixteen
hundred to ten forty six b C, the first evidence
of pinging is from the Han dynasty that's around two
d C. So what we have from that two is
a picture, a painting of pinging, not the plant itself,
and that representation is a fresco in an Eastern Han
(13:15):
tomb that features six red flowering plants. They're arranged in
a small round container, and then that's it's in a
square frame. This art form would have initially been something
that was reserved for the wealthy and the privilege, so
it makes sense that its first evidence is on a
prince's tomb. From the third to the fifth centuries, Buddhism
and Taoism became highly influential, leading people to issue the
(13:38):
trappings of money and engage instead with nature, and as
a consequence, pinging developed greatly during this time as people
sought ways to have nature, even in its smallest form,
in their everyday lives. Pinging became entwined with the idea
of cultivating one's character and one's appreciation for beauty. Another
(13:59):
huge period of growth for this art form came in
the seventh through the ninth centuries during the Tongue Dynasty,
when arts flourished. This was a relatively stable period in
Chinese history. One of the most famous historical depictions from
pinging is from this period. It's a mural on a
mausoleum for Prince Junghui from the year seven oh six,
(14:22):
and it features a servant woman carrying a tray with
a miniature scene on it with rocks and fruit trees.
Evidence of pinging appears from throughout the Tongue Dynasty in
the eighth century. It's written about in poems, and it's
documented as something that people would cultivate for their own homes,
often incorporated into their outdoor landscape, so you would have
(14:43):
it in your yard, for example. In the tenth centuries
Northern Song Dynasty, it was similarly represented in art, and
this is when the water and land pinging also developed.
During this time, it appeared in a lot of poetry
and paintings as well, sometimes as a decorative element in
a larger scene, but often as the subject of the
(15:05):
work itself. This appreciation and representation of pinging continued over
the next two centuries. Then, sometime during the period when
the Song Dynasty and the Japanese Hand Period overlap, pingjing
made its way to Japan. We will be coming back
to Japan in just a moment. During the Ming Dynasty,
which spanned the years thirteen sixty eight, to sixteen forty four,
(15:27):
pinching not only flourished, but more and more ideas of
it beyond an object of beauty were recorded. Right or
too long declared that smaller pingjing that could quote be
set on a stool or table were the best ones,
followed by pinging intended to sit in courtyards, and he
also wrote advice on what he believed were the best
esthetic principles of the art form, preferring the look of
(15:49):
aged trees, such as those in images by a number
of famous painters. He stresses as well that though plants
in pinging could be trained with stiff fibers or string,
there should be no appearance of such manipulation in the
final product. That is something that continues in these art
forms today. During the Chang dynasty, which followed the Ming
and lasted until nineteen eleven, the possibilities of pinging expanded
(16:14):
really significantly. The limits of this art form were tested,
they were expanded, More and more creative concepts emerged. During
this time. Regional styles also developed, and there were books
about the art that rapidly grew in number, including writings
that talked about the virtue of creating pinging for pleasure.
It started to take on an identity not just of
(16:36):
something that could bring a person closer to nature, but
also is something done simply for the pleasure of creating it. Yeah,
it kind of switches and becomes not just this meditative thing,
but also not leaving that idea behind, but also like
kind of being pitched almost as a hobby, like you
could do this too. Um. As part of this developmental period,
(16:57):
more decorative containers came into fashion, and pinging, which had
long been the subject of visual art and poetry, then
started to mimic the concepts of those arts in its execution,
so to to represent the same ideas and concepts of
a painting in the pinging, or the ideas of a
poem in the execution of the scene. When the King
(17:17):
dynasty collapsed in nineteen eleven, that marked a downfall of
the popularity of pinging as well, at least for a while,
But in the last fifty years there's been a renewed
interest and appreciation for the art form in China. In
nineteen eight one, the Chinese Association of Flower and Pinging
was formed. That group later folded into the Chinese Society
(17:38):
of Landscape Architecture, under the header of Flower, Pinging and
stone branch, and that's been tasked with mounting an exhibition
every four years. Starting in nineteen eighty five, the Chinese
Pinging Artists Association was formed in Night with a mission
to continue to share the art form throughout the country.
Pinging has spread around the world old and has gained
(18:00):
popularity in many cases alongside Japanese bonzai. The two art
forms are often shown at the same expositions, with penjing
often offering gardeners and viewers a less austere alternative to
the usually more formal forms of bonsai. So, as we
mentioned a few moments ago, the art of pingjing made
its way into Japan during the hay On period. That's
(18:22):
a period we've talked about on the show a couple
of times before. In the fiction book The Tale of
the Hollow Tree, which was written in Japan in nine seventy,
the merits of cultivating trees is mentioned in a passage
that's often quoted in bonsai histories. Quote. A tree that
has left growing in its natural state is a crude thing.
Is only when it is kept close to human beings
(18:44):
who fashion it with loving care. That it's shape and
style acquire the ability to move one. When Zen Buddhism
became popular in Japan starting in the twelfth century, the
Japanese adaptation of pinging became intertwined with it, as Zen
monk sought to represent the universe in the cultivation of
single plants. And this is actually the source of many
(19:06):
of the aesthetic ideals that shaped bondsai and continue today,
and it's why Japanese bonzai tends to be a little
bit more stark in contrast to its Chinese origins. But
while this is an important aspect of the development of bonzai,
it's worth noting that the exact start of the bonsai
tradition is not something that's universally agreed upon. Um. We
(19:27):
have been talking about all of these these pieces of
the puzzle in its history, and some people will point
to like China as the origin versus others who want
to put it more in Japan. Is when it really
becomes bonsai, and it's a matter of debate. Um. The
word bonsai, which was a linguistic adaptation of the Chinese
penza i, was not in use yet at this point.
(19:49):
Centuries later, though, the association was in Buddhism of bonzai
and its origins in the twelfth century remains. The idea
of growing trees in dishes in Japan hand reached beyond
monks as well, but often the dishes were a lot deeper.
They were bowls instead of hands. This style, called hatching noki,
(20:09):
was immortalized in a folk tale in the late thirteen hundreds,
and it also became a no play. That story is
about an impoverished samurai who gives up his last treasured
potted trees to use his firewood for a traveling monk
in the winter, and the second act it's revealed that
the monk was actually the showgun Tokyori Hojo, who helps
(20:30):
the samurai regained his fortune in the end. This is
a really popular story, and woodblock prints depicting it were
popular for hundreds of years. Over time, small cultivated container
trees became so culturally significant in Japan that most people
would have had one in some form, but these were
still not bonzai in the sense we would think about
(20:52):
them today. That name again did not even exist until
the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that was when
that Chinese name was adapted and adopt did during a
summit of scholars In doing so, they wanted to set
apart the common hatchinoki from the more artistic efforts at
growing trees in shallower vessels with greater design and intent,
(21:12):
and there had already been shows for dwarf potted trees
in Kyoto. So this separation and definition helped codify standards
for shows and competitions to include bonsai as a distinct,
separate thing going forward, leading eventually to formal showings of
bonsai that started in the nineteen thirties. As the nineteenth
century played out, bonsai was recognized as its own art
(21:35):
form in Japan, to the degree that formal writing, horticultural theory,
and shows started to become really common. The different styles
of bonsaye started to develop, and methods of training trees
changed to include the use of wire instead of stiff
natural fibers. Will talk next about a natural disaster and
its impact on bonzai in Japan in the twentieth century,
(21:58):
but before we do, we're going to have a quick
sponsor break. We have talked on the show before about
the Great Conto earthquake, which obliterated Yokohoma and much of
Tokyo and killed more than a hundred and forty people,
(22:19):
and that also impacted bonsai. A robust nursery industry of
growers who specialized in training bonsai had developed in Tokyo
in the decades prior to the earthquake. With all of
their hard work destroyed, thirty of the families who owned
such nurseries started over as a collective in nearby Omia,
which has since then become omi A Bonsai Village and
(22:42):
has become a hub for bonsai culture. In two thousand ten,
it became home to the omi A Bonsai Art Museum.
Japan went through massive changes after its surrender at the
end of World War Two. The Empire was gone, the
country was reformed as a democracy, and it's a cod
of me was just completely overhauled while the damage from
(23:02):
the war was rebuilt. Bonsa I persisted despite all of
these changes, and it became more revered as art. On
the second half of the twentieth century, there was a
dip in bond sized popularity in Japan, but in recent
years there's been a resurgence, and one that's been accompanied
by experimental designs that really stray from the more formal
(23:23):
predecessors that we've been talking about. Yeah, I am not
an expert by any means, but one of the things
I was reading mentioned how did some of the newer
forms of bonsai are a little more wild, and I
I wonder if they're getting a little bit more back
to their roots and pingjing. Bonsai related items were in
(23:43):
the US as far back as the Colonies. Trading agreements
with China led to the import of goods that were
new and novel to North America, and the same seeds
of the cultural fetishism and ethnocentric views of Victorian England
with regards to Asia. We're definitely in place in the
unit in States colonial days, so items like miniature plants
from Asia became prized elements of personal collections. Several World expositions,
(24:09):
starting in the eighteen seventies featured displays of dwarf trees
from Japan. European and North American attendees wanted to see
these plants, and that desire had been stoked by centuries
of written descriptions by travelers to Asia who had described
the practice of horticulture and miniature has eventually led to
the first book in the Western world about bonsai, which
(24:32):
was published in France in nineteen o two. A tourist
industry grew in Japan which sold inferior quality bonsai to
European and American tourists, who then brought them home. This
led to some of the misinformation about this art form
yeah Unfortunately, trading on the fact that that Western tourists
didn't really know what they were buying also caused a
(24:54):
lot of confusion in the West about bonsai. Immigrants from
Japan to the US brought the by tradition with them,
although horticulture knowledge was by no means ubiquitous among the
people who traveled across the Pacific to work as laborers.
As bonsai continued to fascinate US gardeners and hobbyists, this
led to some opportunities for Japanese experts in bonsai to
(25:16):
share their knowledge through demonstrations and teaching sessions, which were
often organized by garden clubs. Eventually, clubs that focused specifically
on bonsai began to form in the U S, starting
on the West coast. Panjing had more difficulty in gaining
appreciation in the United States, thanks in part to the
Chinese Exclusion Act. In nineteen fifteen, the Japanese government shipped
(25:38):
bonsai to the San Francisco, Panama Pacific International Expo for exhibit.
Several of these bonsai were hundreds of years old. The
exhibit was seen by nineteen million visitors, and that sparked
an all new level of interest in bonsai in the US.
That interest was impeded by a plant quarantine law in
the nineteen teens because that vented new bonsai from entering
(26:01):
the country. That was part of an effort to protect
North American agriculture from invasive species of pests. Another previous
show topic had a significant impact on bonsai in the
United States. Executive Order ninety sixty six, which we've talked
about and which displaced many Japanese immigrants and their citizen children,
(26:22):
forced the growers that had established nurseries on the West
Coast to abandon their work, leaving countless plants and their
livelihoods to die. In some cases, bonsai masters that were
in camps tended to trees during internment as kind of
part of their coping mechanisms, and we will talk about
an example of one of those in just a moment.
Bonds I had a surgeon popularity in the U S
(26:44):
starting in the mid twentie century. One of the drivers
with servicemen who were returning from duty in Asia and
brought bonsai plants home with them as mementos or as gifts.
These plants got the nickname ruck Sack bonsai. But once
these plants have been brought back to the US, the
soldiers started to realize they didn't actually know what to
do with them or how to take care of them.
(27:06):
And while the West Coast had a degree of established
bonsai culture by this time, on the East Coast bonsai
were less familiar, at least to the middle class. The
wealthy had been purchasing imported bonzai since the turn of
the century, but for the average person, they still didn't
really know what the whole thing was about, and so
to fill that gap in knowledge, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
(27:26):
published a booklet on Bonsai care that was one of
the first guides to the art published in the United
States for novice practitioners, and it also helped spread interest
in this art form. Soon there was enough interest for
the Botanic Garden to have expert Kanya Sharroda teach classes
on bonsai, and Yashiroda also wrote several books on this
art in his lifetime, and his book Bonsai Japanese miniature trees.
(27:49):
Their style, cultivation and training is still very popular on
the secondary market. If you find a good quality first edition,
you're going to pay hundreds of dollars for it. Throughout
the second half for the twentieth century, bonsai is both
an art form and as a hobby has continued to
be popular outside of its countries of origin. While some
people appreciate bonsai and penjing solely as examples of art,
(28:13):
caring for these plants continues to be a source of
calm and contemplation for both practitioners of Zen Buddhism and
for secular enthusiasts. You can even find courses in bonsai
as meditation. And while there are innumerable bonsai around the world,
there are famous bonsai, and so I wanted to make
sure that we touched on a few of those. The
bonds I, believed to be the oldest in the world,
(28:36):
is more than a thousand years old. It's part of
the collection of the Crespy Bonsai Museum in Milan, Italy.
The museum calls the large size ficus the princes of
the museum collection. It's been with the museum since it
was acquired from a private collector in It's been tended
by generations of both Chinese and Japanese masters, and it
(28:57):
requires daily care and attention. Perhaps the most notable long
lived bonsai is a Japanese white pine that's part of
the National Arboretum in the collection of the National Bonsai
and Penjing Museum in Washington, d C. This tree is
three d ninety years old, interesting enough on its own,
but it survived the bombing of Hiroshima when the atomic
bomb Little Boy was dropped in World War Two, and
(29:19):
it was given to the US as a bicentennial gift,
along with fifty two other examples of bonzai by Massaru Yomaki,
a Japanese master of bonsai. But even the museum did
not know this tree's history until the master's grandsons visited
to check on the tree that they had heard about
in their family stories. That happened in two thousand one,
and suddenly everyone knew about this Hoiroshima surviving bonsai. In
(29:42):
February seven bonds i were stolen from the public collection
of z Amura, the bonsai seller in Tokyo. One of
them was a valuable four hundred year old Shimpaca juniper
with an estimated value of more than fifty thou dollar.
Cj Amura and his wife Umi appeared on television and
(30:04):
pled with the thieves to please water the tree, which
would not survive a week without proper care. Earlier this year,
and we're recording in two Bonsai trees were stolen from
the Pacific Bonsai Museum in Federal Way, Washington. And one
of them was a Japanese black pine, and it was
of particular historical significance. It had begun its life in
(30:25):
a tin can in a Japanese internment camp. It was
cultivated by one of the detainees there. The other tree
was also important. It was a silver berry created by
artist Kyoko Hatanaka in Nix. The museum put out a
call on social media for their returning, promising that they
would just not ask any questions. They were just afraid
that these irreplaceable trees would die without proper care. Three
(30:48):
days after the theft, the trees reappeared in the museum's driveway.
There are some great photographs because it was a rainy
day when they came back, of just these trees in
this driveway that are worth untold amounts of money in
the rain, and they had the forethought to take a
picture of them before moving them back to the museum.
An article about the Horoshionist survivor Bonds and I featured
(31:11):
a quote from the curator of the National Bonds I
Impinging Museum, Jack says Dick and I felt like it
captured part of why this art form is so captivating,
as he contemplated the constant daily care that older examples
of bonds I require, He said, quote, I always like
to say, bonds I is like a verb. It's not
a noun. It's doing. I love that quote. It is
(31:34):
amazing to me when you think about I had this
moment last night where I was trying to explain this
to one of my friends, and I was like, if
these trees could talk, because if that was in year
old tree has seen some stuff. Um, and I just
am like bowled over by by their long histories and
the things we will never ever know about them, um,
(31:57):
which is very very cool. I do have listener mail.
It is from our listener Haley, who writes, Hi, my
name is Haley. I'm a big fan of your podcast.
I have a few suggestions and ideas for future podcast ideas.
I really love learning about historical hoaxes me too, and
I recently wrote an essay for school about the mechanical turk.
I haven't listened to all your podcasts, so if you've
made a podcast on this topic, then another of my
(32:18):
favorite historical hoaxes is a donation of Constantine. We did
the donation of Constantine. Uh. We also have done uh
some episodes on automata in We did one on five
historical robots. Uh. She also mentions our James Baldwin podcast
that she thought was amazing uh. And then she gives
us some other suggestions of of potential interesting black figures
(32:41):
in history, which is very cool. Some of those we
have covered. But Haley, I just want to say thank
you for listening. Uh. We clearly share some of the
same interests and if you would like her I do
as you could do so at History podcast at i
heeart radio dot com. You can also find us pretty
much everywhere on social media as Missed in History. It
is also easiest pie to subscribe to the podcast. You
can do that on the I heart radio app, at
(33:02):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart
Radio for more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the
i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, And UH,
little housekeeping up front. This is a sponsored episode. It's
sponsored by Mazda as they are promoting their new c
(00:24):
X thirty. They asked us if we would do an
episode for them, and we were delighted to We threw
around a lot of ideas for this episode, but one
that kept coming back to us and kept coming back
up was Bond's Eye. And it is an art form
that feels uniquely special, at least to me at this
point in time where we're all feeling very disconnected because
(00:44):
tending bonds Ie is used by some folks as a
way to meditate and reconnect to nature and feel a
little more centered. And for me, it's also really easy
to think about bonds eye and history together because there
are some very very old Bondsai in the world. We
will talk at a couple at the end, so today
that is indeed what we were talking about. Uh, And
(01:05):
to give you a rundown of how this episode will
play out, first, we're gonna just quickly cover what bondsai
is as kind of a level set because there are
some misconceptions, particularly in the Western world about it. Uh.
And then we're going to talk about its origins in
China and its development in Japan, which is the country
it's probably most associated with in popular culture anyway, and
then a little bit about how it became a subject
(01:27):
of fascination for the Western world, and then at the
end we're going to talk about a few notable bonds i.
In very broad terms, bondsay is the practice of cultivating
plants in containers with the goal, in the words of
the Oxford Companion to the Garden to quote, suggest a
natural scene or the abstract beauty of a tree in nature. Normally,
(01:49):
these plants are grown in coarse soil and very small
trays or pots, and there's a really wide range of
plants that can be grown in this way. Although woody
perenny ills are the favored option, they all need a
fair amount of attention and care with the regard to
their watering and their pruning, as well as occasional feeding.
Bondsai practice generally creates a simplified version of a larger plant,
(02:14):
and that's simplified to accommodate the smaller scale. A mature,
well maintained bonds i typically has horizontal branch growth to
create some width, and sometimes even branches that reach downward.
We'll talk about some of the styles in more detail
in a moment. And it also has a full but
compact foliage on top. So sometimes like the sort of
classic bondsai that people may think of when they hear
(02:37):
the word, is one that has foliage that looks sort
of like clouds at the top. And the small size
of the plants is not the result of genetic selection
or modification. It's careful design and cultivation from the time
their seedlings. And the size range for bonds I. I've
been mentioning how small they are, but it is not
as restricted to smallness as you might think. There is
(02:57):
actually a size classification system that allows for varying sizes
of bondsai uh and the large bonds eye that are
in that are as tall as eighty inches that's about
two meters, so that's a substantial tree. There are a
number of different styles of Bondsai and they're inspired by
different ways that trees grow in nature. The bonds eye
does not need to fall into one of these categories,
(03:19):
and there are just vast variations and interpretation of the categories,
but they offer a good way to guide the styling
for a horticulturist. Here are a few, but this is
not an exhaustive list at all. There are also subdivisions
within many of these styles, and also entirely different styles
that are not part of this list. You were yesterday
(03:40):
as you were working on this, you mentioned that you
were starting on this list and that it was turning
out to be extremely large. Yeah. It's one of those
things where you you think you'll have a few bullet
points and then you're like, oh, so. The first style,
which is a really common style, is broom style, and
that features a straight trunk with fulliage that branches out
(04:01):
at the top one third of the tree. Deciduous trees
with sort of fine branch structures are ideal for this
because they create that nice cloudy top. The formal upright
style is also characterized by a straight trunk, but this
time it tapers at the top with foliage that is
thickest at the bottom and also thins out as it rises.
Informal upright style features a tapered trunk, but one that's
(04:24):
grown not straight, but is an s shape with branching
at each curve. There's also a slanting style that stays
straight but typically grows at a sixty eight degree angle.
Cascading style mimics trees that grow downward because of external influences,
so the trunk grows upward, but then it bends over,
(04:44):
allowing the branches and the foliage to shower toward the ground.
There's also a semi cascade style, which can be grown
with a less dramatic downturn. Yeah. One of the I
watched a brief video about some of these, and one
of them suggested, like, oh, it would be like if
a tree grew under heavy snowfall and its branches couldn't
support it and so it cascades over. Yeah. I was
(05:06):
thinking when a tree grows like at the edge of
a cliff yep, and there's erosion over time and its
trunk compensates. Yeah. Rock falls are also sometimes noted as
the cause for those. Literati style is all about verticality,
growing upward but crooked, with no branching on most of
the tree trunk except at the very top, and this
(05:28):
style is intended to mimic trees in nature. That would
have to compete and struggle for sunlight and resources with
other plant life. Wind Swept style, as its name suggests,
means that the tree has grown to look like one
that develops in very windy conditions, with the foliage only
on one side, and an angled trunk. Double trunk style
has a bifurcated trunk, with each trunk growing its own foliage,
(05:52):
and the multi trunk style follows this same idea, but
in that case it forks into more than two trunks.
This is not to be confused with forest style, which
can feature many trunks, but in the forest style each
is its own individual tree, not a splitting of one
trunk into multiples. Growing on a rock style and growing
(06:13):
in a rock style are exactly as their names indicate,
with the roots visible and clinging to the exterior of
a base rock in the former and the roots can
field within the rock in the ladder. There are also
styles of bonsai based on damage that a tree might
encounter in nature. So raft style starts with a cracked
(06:34):
tree and then has branches growing upward out of the
old damage tree to develop foliage that forms kind of
one unit at the top, and Shari style mimics the
naturally occurring bark loss that trees may experience in nature
by carefully carving away the bark on the part of
the designer. Because bonsay is an art form, there are
a lot of different expressions of it and ongoing evolution
(06:57):
within the field, so it changed is over time. But
this has also led to what some would consider a
delution of the bonsai art form, particularly as popularity of
the concept has led to commercial enterprises that don't have
a lot of interest in the principles behind it. Like,
I know, I've seen advertisements and catalogs and stuff. They're like,
(07:17):
buy an instant bonsai, sort of defeating the point. Part
of the difficulty there is that the principles are often
listed very very differently depending on your source. When talking
about the esthetics of bonsai texts, at least in English,
very very greatly. In some cases you'll find a specific
(07:38):
list of principles of design, which include things like balance, proportion, movement, simplicity, unity,
and an absence of the designers involvement That means you
can't see the way that the tree may have been manipulated.
But other texts are much more general, suggesting that as
an art form. These rules are not really rules, but
they're just sort of guides to in full warm decisions
(08:00):
on how you design and maintain a tree. So, particularly
in Western cultures who are really translating this Asian art
form through a Western lands, things have gotten kind of muddled.
The word bonsai has become synonymous with horticultural tininess and
very small plants kept in containers, more than relating directly
to the aesthetic principles of bonsai or it's Chinese precursor pinging.
(08:25):
Some of this expansion beyond the classical sense of bonsai
is reflected in the consideration of a pre World War
two bonds ie as the classical model and post World
War two is modern, although that doesn't really encompass the
sort of fast and loose use of the term to
apply to pretty much any small plant. I um, I
don't want to throw any retailer under the bus, but
(08:49):
I was once in a store that sold plants, and
they had a row of tiny cactus cold as bonsai,
and I was like, I don't quite think so well.
When when I was a child, there was a catalog
that I particularly love to look through, and it sold
(09:12):
something that it described as a grow your own bonsai kit,
and what it was was a potato with a partially
sprouted eye. And that potato I, you know, root that
comes out like that was supposed to be the bonds eye.
(09:33):
That is a fascinating interpretation. Yeah, yeah, bonds I, even
in its less rigid definitions, but presuming you're not talking
about a potato, is by its nature meticulous. Caring for
a bonsai tree is an ongoing process. Because their pants
are trays are very small, and because it's usually with
(09:54):
a coarse soil, they often need to be watered frequently.
This does vary, though, of course by plant type. Both
indoor and outdoor plants need to have their environment carefully managed,
and for even hobbyists, pruning is required to keep the
shape of the foliage. That effort becomes much more intensive
for expert designers. Everyone I think has probably seen footage
(10:15):
of like that person that is carefully clipping bonds I,
sometimes in ways that are not even perceptible to the
human eye, uh, but are of course part of shaping
it into that beautiful, beautiful final product. Uh. Route pruning
is also part of maintaining the small size of the
plants and all of this work, which is done quite carefully,
(10:37):
adds a meditative element to the cultivation of bonds i
and that is part of its appeal. So just a
moment ago, we mentioned pinging. We can't really talk about
bonsies history without talking about that first, So coming up
we will get into some discussion of the miniature horticultural
art of China. First we'll take a quick sponsor break.
(11:04):
Pingjing also called Pensay, which was its earliest name, is
where the bondsaie story really starts. China, due to its
vast size, has an incredibly diverse range of plant life,
and there was already a well established gardening tradition in
China that had begun hundreds of years before the creation
of these mini scenes developed as an art form, and
(11:25):
the name pinging translates to tray scenery or pot scenery,
and the idea of pinging is that a person can
see the large in the tiny. The miniature nature allows
for the experience of seeing larger things from a different perspective,
both literally and figuratively, and it's an expression of emotion
as much as it is a miniature recreation of larger
(11:48):
natural scenes. Reverence for large scale natural forms like mountains
and forests informed the development of pinging as a way
to connect to nature. But pens ing is not only
about plants. There are actually three types of pinging, tree pinging,
landscape pinging, and water and land pinging, and all of
(12:10):
this is meant to form a blended balance of nature
and art. The natural elements can almost be considered as
artists media to be combined with other media such as
small sculpture or arrangements of stones. One source that I
read likened it to a landscape painting, but one that
is alive and with greater dimension. And because of this,
(12:31):
pinging works are often revisited after they're completed, not just
to maintain the living floral elements, but also to be
reworked to accommodate the growth of the living plants within them.
So you might need to change around where the sculpture
sits depending on how your your tree in the scene
has grown. While there were miniature gardenscapes created as far
(12:52):
back as the Shang dynasty, which lasted from about sixteen
hundred to ten forty six b C, the first evidence
of pinging is from the Han dynasty that's around two
d C. So what we have from that two is
a picture, a painting of pinging, not the plant itself,
and that representation is a fresco in an Eastern Han
(13:15):
tomb that features six red flowering plants. They're arranged in
a small round container, and then that's it's in a
square frame. This art form would have initially been something
that was reserved for the wealthy and the privilege, so
it makes sense that its first evidence is on a
prince's tomb. From the third to the fifth centuries, Buddhism
and Taoism became highly influential, leading people to issue the
(13:38):
trappings of money and engage instead with nature, and as
a consequence, pinging developed greatly during this time as people
sought ways to have nature, even in its smallest form,
in their everyday lives. Pinging became entwined with the idea
of cultivating one's character and one's appreciation for beauty. Another
(13:59):
huge period of growth for this art form came in
the seventh through the ninth centuries during the Tongue Dynasty,
when arts flourished. This was a relatively stable period in
Chinese history. One of the most famous historical depictions from
pinging is from this period. It's a mural on a
mausoleum for Prince Junghui from the year seven oh six,
(14:22):
and it features a servant woman carrying a tray with
a miniature scene on it with rocks and fruit trees.
Evidence of pinging appears from throughout the Tongue Dynasty in
the eighth century. It's written about in poems, and it's
documented as something that people would cultivate for their own homes,
often incorporated into their outdoor landscape, so you would have
(14:43):
it in your yard, for example. In the tenth centuries
Northern Song Dynasty, it was similarly represented in art, and
this is when the water and land pinging also developed.
During this time, it appeared in a lot of poetry
and paintings as well, sometimes as a decorative element in
a larger scene, but often as the subject of the
(15:05):
work itself. This appreciation and representation of pinging continued over
the next two centuries. Then, sometime during the period when
the Song Dynasty and the Japanese Hand Period overlap, pingjing
made its way to Japan. We will be coming back
to Japan in just a moment. During the Ming Dynasty,
which spanned the years thirteen sixty eight, to sixteen forty four,
(15:27):
pinching not only flourished, but more and more ideas of
it beyond an object of beauty were recorded. Right or
too long declared that smaller pingjing that could quote be
set on a stool or table were the best ones,
followed by pinging intended to sit in courtyards, and he
also wrote advice on what he believed were the best
esthetic principles of the art form, preferring the look of
(15:49):
aged trees, such as those in images by a number
of famous painters. He stresses as well that though plants
in pinging could be trained with stiff fibers or string,
there should be no appearance of such manipulation in the
final product. That is something that continues in these art
forms today. During the Chang dynasty, which followed the Ming
and lasted until nineteen eleven, the possibilities of pinging expanded
(16:14):
really significantly. The limits of this art form were tested,
they were expanded, More and more creative concepts emerged. During
this time. Regional styles also developed, and there were books
about the art that rapidly grew in number, including writings
that talked about the virtue of creating pinging for pleasure.
It started to take on an identity not just of
(16:36):
something that could bring a person closer to nature, but
also is something done simply for the pleasure of creating it. Yeah,
it kind of switches and becomes not just this meditative thing,
but also not leaving that idea behind, but also like
kind of being pitched almost as a hobby, like you
could do this too. Um. As part of this developmental period,
(16:57):
more decorative containers came into fashion, and pinging, which had
long been the subject of visual art and poetry, then
started to mimic the concepts of those arts in its execution,
so to to represent the same ideas and concepts of
a painting in the pinging, or the ideas of a
poem in the execution of the scene. When the King
(17:17):
dynasty collapsed in nineteen eleven, that marked a downfall of
the popularity of pinging as well, at least for a while,
But in the last fifty years there's been a renewed
interest and appreciation for the art form in China. In
nineteen eight one, the Chinese Association of Flower and Pinging
was formed. That group later folded into the Chinese Society
(17:38):
of Landscape Architecture, under the header of Flower, Pinging and
stone branch, and that's been tasked with mounting an exhibition
every four years. Starting in nineteen eighty five, the Chinese
Pinging Artists Association was formed in Night with a mission
to continue to share the art form throughout the country.
Pinging has spread around the world old and has gained
(18:00):
popularity in many cases alongside Japanese bonzai. The two art
forms are often shown at the same expositions, with penjing
often offering gardeners and viewers a less austere alternative to
the usually more formal forms of bonsai. So, as we
mentioned a few moments ago, the art of pingjing made
its way into Japan during the hay On period. That's
(18:22):
a period we've talked about on the show a couple
of times before. In the fiction book The Tale of
the Hollow Tree, which was written in Japan in nine seventy,
the merits of cultivating trees is mentioned in a passage
that's often quoted in bonsai histories. Quote. A tree that
has left growing in its natural state is a crude thing.
Is only when it is kept close to human beings
(18:44):
who fashion it with loving care. That it's shape and
style acquire the ability to move one. When Zen Buddhism
became popular in Japan starting in the twelfth century, the
Japanese adaptation of pinging became intertwined with it, as Zen
monk sought to represent the universe in the cultivation of
single plants. And this is actually the source of many
(19:06):
of the aesthetic ideals that shaped bondsai and continue today,
and it's why Japanese bonzai tends to be a little
bit more stark in contrast to its Chinese origins. But
while this is an important aspect of the development of bonzai,
it's worth noting that the exact start of the bonsai
tradition is not something that's universally agreed upon. Um. We
(19:27):
have been talking about all of these these pieces of
the puzzle in its history, and some people will point
to like China as the origin versus others who want
to put it more in Japan. Is when it really
becomes bonsai, and it's a matter of debate. Um. The
word bonsai, which was a linguistic adaptation of the Chinese
penza i, was not in use yet at this point.
(19:49):
Centuries later, though, the association was in Buddhism of bonzai
and its origins in the twelfth century remains. The idea
of growing trees in dishes in Japan hand reached beyond
monks as well, but often the dishes were a lot deeper.
They were bowls instead of hands. This style, called hatching noki,
(20:09):
was immortalized in a folk tale in the late thirteen hundreds,
and it also became a no play. That story is
about an impoverished samurai who gives up his last treasured
potted trees to use his firewood for a traveling monk
in the winter, and the second act it's revealed that
the monk was actually the showgun Tokyori Hojo, who helps
(20:30):
the samurai regained his fortune in the end. This is
a really popular story, and woodblock prints depicting it were
popular for hundreds of years. Over time, small cultivated container
trees became so culturally significant in Japan that most people
would have had one in some form, but these were
still not bonzai in the sense we would think about
(20:52):
them today. That name again did not even exist until
the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that was when
that Chinese name was adapted and adopt did during a
summit of scholars In doing so, they wanted to set
apart the common hatchinoki from the more artistic efforts at
growing trees in shallower vessels with greater design and intent,
(21:12):
and there had already been shows for dwarf potted trees
in Kyoto. So this separation and definition helped codify standards
for shows and competitions to include bonsai as a distinct,
separate thing going forward, leading eventually to formal showings of
bonsai that started in the nineteen thirties. As the nineteenth
century played out, bonsai was recognized as its own art
(21:35):
form in Japan, to the degree that formal writing, horticultural theory,
and shows started to become really common. The different styles
of bonsaye started to develop, and methods of training trees
changed to include the use of wire instead of stiff
natural fibers. Will talk next about a natural disaster and
its impact on bonzai in Japan in the twentieth century,
(21:58):
but before we do, we're going to have a quick
sponsor break. We have talked on the show before about
the Great Conto earthquake, which obliterated Yokohoma and much of
Tokyo and killed more than a hundred and forty people,
(22:19):
and that also impacted bonsai. A robust nursery industry of
growers who specialized in training bonsai had developed in Tokyo
in the decades prior to the earthquake. With all of
their hard work destroyed, thirty of the families who owned
such nurseries started over as a collective in nearby Omia,
which has since then become omi A Bonsai Village and
(22:42):
has become a hub for bonsai culture. In two thousand ten,
it became home to the omi A Bonsai Art Museum.
Japan went through massive changes after its surrender at the
end of World War Two. The Empire was gone, the
country was reformed as a democracy, and it's a cod
of me was just completely overhauled while the damage from
(23:02):
the war was rebuilt. Bonsa I persisted despite all of
these changes, and it became more revered as art. On
the second half of the twentieth century, there was a
dip in bond sized popularity in Japan, but in recent
years there's been a resurgence, and one that's been accompanied
by experimental designs that really stray from the more formal
(23:23):
predecessors that we've been talking about. Yeah, I am not
an expert by any means, but one of the things
I was reading mentioned how did some of the newer
forms of bonsai are a little more wild, and I
I wonder if they're getting a little bit more back
to their roots and pingjing. Bonsai related items were in
(23:43):
the US as far back as the Colonies. Trading agreements
with China led to the import of goods that were
new and novel to North America, and the same seeds
of the cultural fetishism and ethnocentric views of Victorian England
with regards to Asia. We're definitely in place in the
unit in States colonial days, so items like miniature plants
from Asia became prized elements of personal collections. Several World expositions,
(24:09):
starting in the eighteen seventies featured displays of dwarf trees
from Japan. European and North American attendees wanted to see
these plants, and that desire had been stoked by centuries
of written descriptions by travelers to Asia who had described
the practice of horticulture and miniature has eventually led to
the first book in the Western world about bonsai, which
(24:32):
was published in France in nineteen o two. A tourist
industry grew in Japan which sold inferior quality bonsai to
European and American tourists, who then brought them home. This
led to some of the misinformation about this art form
yeah Unfortunately, trading on the fact that that Western tourists
didn't really know what they were buying also caused a
(24:54):
lot of confusion in the West about bonsai. Immigrants from
Japan to the US brought the by tradition with them,
although horticulture knowledge was by no means ubiquitous among the
people who traveled across the Pacific to work as laborers.
As bonsai continued to fascinate US gardeners and hobbyists, this
led to some opportunities for Japanese experts in bonsai to
(25:16):
share their knowledge through demonstrations and teaching sessions, which were
often organized by garden clubs. Eventually, clubs that focused specifically
on bonsai began to form in the U S, starting
on the West coast. Panjing had more difficulty in gaining
appreciation in the United States, thanks in part to the
Chinese Exclusion Act. In nineteen fifteen, the Japanese government shipped
(25:38):
bonsai to the San Francisco, Panama Pacific International Expo for exhibit.
Several of these bonsai were hundreds of years old. The
exhibit was seen by nineteen million visitors, and that sparked
an all new level of interest in bonsai in the US.
That interest was impeded by a plant quarantine law in
the nineteen teens because that vented new bonsai from entering
(26:01):
the country. That was part of an effort to protect
North American agriculture from invasive species of pests. Another previous
show topic had a significant impact on bonsai in the
United States. Executive Order ninety sixty six, which we've talked
about and which displaced many Japanese immigrants and their citizen children,
(26:22):
forced the growers that had established nurseries on the West
Coast to abandon their work, leaving countless plants and their
livelihoods to die. In some cases, bonsai masters that were
in camps tended to trees during internment as kind of
part of their coping mechanisms, and we will talk about
an example of one of those in just a moment.
Bonds I had a surgeon popularity in the U S
(26:44):
starting in the mid twentie century. One of the drivers
with servicemen who were returning from duty in Asia and
brought bonsai plants home with them as mementos or as gifts.
These plants got the nickname ruck Sack bonsai. But once
these plants have been brought back to the US, the
soldiers started to realize they didn't actually know what to
do with them or how to take care of them.
(27:06):
And while the West Coast had a degree of established
bonsai culture by this time, on the East Coast bonsai
were less familiar, at least to the middle class. The
wealthy had been purchasing imported bonzai since the turn of
the century, but for the average person, they still didn't
really know what the whole thing was about, and so
to fill that gap in knowledge, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden
(27:26):
published a booklet on Bonsai care that was one of
the first guides to the art published in the United
States for novice practitioners, and it also helped spread interest
in this art form. Soon there was enough interest for
the Botanic Garden to have expert Kanya Sharroda teach classes
on bonsai, and Yashiroda also wrote several books on this
art in his lifetime, and his book Bonsai Japanese miniature trees.
(27:49):
Their style, cultivation and training is still very popular on
the secondary market. If you find a good quality first edition,
you're going to pay hundreds of dollars for it. Throughout
the second half for the twentieth century, bonsai is both
an art form and as a hobby has continued to
be popular outside of its countries of origin. While some
people appreciate bonsai and penjing solely as examples of art,
(28:13):
caring for these plants continues to be a source of
calm and contemplation for both practitioners of Zen Buddhism and
for secular enthusiasts. You can even find courses in bonsai
as meditation. And while there are innumerable bonsai around the world,
there are famous bonsai, and so I wanted to make
sure that we touched on a few of those. The
bonds I, believed to be the oldest in the world,
(28:36):
is more than a thousand years old. It's part of
the collection of the Crespy Bonsai Museum in Milan, Italy.
The museum calls the large size ficus the princes of
the museum collection. It's been with the museum since it
was acquired from a private collector in It's been tended
by generations of both Chinese and Japanese masters, and it
(28:57):
requires daily care and attention. Perhaps the most notable long
lived bonsai is a Japanese white pine that's part of
the National Arboretum in the collection of the National Bonsai
and Penjing Museum in Washington, d C. This tree is
three d ninety years old, interesting enough on its own,
but it survived the bombing of Hiroshima when the atomic
bomb Little Boy was dropped in World War Two, and
(29:19):
it was given to the US as a bicentennial gift,
along with fifty two other examples of bonzai by Massaru Yomaki,
a Japanese master of bonsai. But even the museum did
not know this tree's history until the master's grandsons visited
to check on the tree that they had heard about
in their family stories. That happened in two thousand one,
and suddenly everyone knew about this Hoiroshima surviving bonsai. In
(29:42):
February seven bonds i were stolen from the public collection
of z Amura, the bonsai seller in Tokyo. One of
them was a valuable four hundred year old Shimpaca juniper
with an estimated value of more than fifty thou dollar.
Cj Amura and his wife Umi appeared on television and
(30:04):
pled with the thieves to please water the tree, which
would not survive a week without proper care. Earlier this year,
and we're recording in two Bonsai trees were stolen from
the Pacific Bonsai Museum in Federal Way, Washington. And one
of them was a Japanese black pine, and it was
of particular historical significance. It had begun its life in
(30:25):
a tin can in a Japanese internment camp. It was
cultivated by one of the detainees there. The other tree
was also important. It was a silver berry created by
artist Kyoko Hatanaka in Nix. The museum put out a
call on social media for their returning, promising that they
would just not ask any questions. They were just afraid
that these irreplaceable trees would die without proper care. Three
(30:48):
days after the theft, the trees reappeared in the museum's driveway.
There are some great photographs because it was a rainy
day when they came back, of just these trees in
this driveway that are worth untold amounts of money in
the rain, and they had the forethought to take a
picture of them before moving them back to the museum.
An article about the Horoshionist survivor Bonds and I featured
(31:11):
a quote from the curator of the National Bonds I
Impinging Museum, Jack says Dick and I felt like it
captured part of why this art form is so captivating,
as he contemplated the constant daily care that older examples
of bonds I require, He said, quote, I always like
to say, bonds I is like a verb. It's not
a noun. It's doing. I love that quote. It is
(31:34):
amazing to me when you think about I had this
moment last night where I was trying to explain this
to one of my friends, and I was like, if
these trees could talk, because if that was in year
old tree has seen some stuff. Um, and I just
am like bowled over by by their long histories and
the things we will never ever know about them, um,
(31:57):
which is very very cool. I do have listener mail.
It is from our listener Haley, who writes, Hi, my
name is Haley. I'm a big fan of your podcast.
I have a few suggestions and ideas for future podcast ideas.
I really love learning about historical hoaxes me too, and
I recently wrote an essay for school about the mechanical turk.
I haven't listened to all your podcasts, so if you've
made a podcast on this topic, then another of my
(32:18):
favorite historical hoaxes is a donation of Constantine. We did
the donation of Constantine. Uh. We also have done uh
some episodes on automata in We did one on five
historical robots. Uh. She also mentions our James Baldwin podcast
that she thought was amazing uh. And then she gives
us some other suggestions of of potential interesting black figures
(32:41):
in history, which is very cool. Some of those we
have covered. But Haley, I just want to say thank
you for listening. Uh. We clearly share some of the
same interests and if you would like her I do
as you could do so at History podcast at i
heeart radio dot com. You can also find us pretty
much everywhere on social media as Missed in History. It
is also easiest pie to subscribe to the podcast. You
can do that on the I heart radio app, at
(33:02):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart
Radio for more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the
i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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