Fujitaro Kubota and His Garden (film)

Documentary on the life of Fujitaro Kubota and Kubota Garden. An Issei who cycled through various businesses before discovering landscape gardening, Kubota built a large garden in Seattle to showcase his nursery stock that became an attraction. He and his sons later designed Japanese-style gardens for large clients such as the Rainier Club, Bloedel Reserve, and the University of Washington. The Kubota Garden was eventually sold to the City of Seattle in the 1980s and continues to be operated by the city. The film also covers the Kubota family's wartime incarceration at Puyallup and Minidoka and the difficult postwar period. The film is based on interviews with Kubota family members, those who worked him, and historians tied to the Kubota Garden Foundation.

The film came out of a project by the Kubota Garden Foundation—an organization formed to support the operation of the garden by the city—to organize its archive and document its history. After conducting around two dozen oral histories, the foundation decided to produce the film and a book. Work on the film took some four years and was led by archivist and historian Ernie Dornfeld. Kubota Garden Foundation board chair Joy Okazaki told Sharon H. Chang they wanted the film "to be accessible to people, factual, interesting, inspirational." They also wanted to make sure the World War II incarceration story was included.

Fujitaro Kubota and His Garden premiered at the Ark Lodge Cinemas in Seattle in December 2019. The book Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota's Garden was published in 2020.

Might also like Designing the Path: Japanese American Architect, Gyo Obata (2014); Lost LA: Descanso Gardens (2017); Fugetsu-Do (2020)