Bonsai

A bonsai is judged as a whole: tree, pot and presentation. The ideal is not a perfect miniature but an impression of age and nature in a small space. Features such as a thick, tapering trunk, surface roots that grip the soil (nebari), and a clear front are prized. Deadwood effects created by stripping bark, called jin on branches and shari on trunks, suggest a tree that has survived storms and lightning.

The container is chosen to match the tree: unglazed brown or grey pots for conifers, glazed coloured pots for flowering and deciduous trees. At exhibitions and in the tokonoma alcove, a bonsai is often shown with a hanging scroll and a small companion plant (kusamono) that together evoke a season. The aesthetic shares much with the Japanese garden and ikebana: asymmetry, restraint and seasonal change.

Bonsai styles are named after the shape of the trunk and the way the tree grows in nature, from a solitary pine on a plain to a tree clinging to a cliff. The categories are a vocabulary for describing trees rather than strict rules.

A bonsai lives in a small volume of free-draining soil, often based on akadama, a granular volcanic clay. It needs regular watering, sometimes several times a day in summer, and repotting every few years with root pruning. Most bonsai are outdoor trees that need sunlight and the change of seasons; keeping temperate species indoors is a common cause of failure.

Shape is built up by pruning shoots and branches, pinching new growth, and wiring branches to set their position, with the wire removed before it cuts into the bark. Many trees start from nursery stock, cuttings or seedlings; collected trees from the wild (yamadori) are valued for their natural age.

Omiya Bonsai Village in the north of Saitama City was founded in 1925 by bonsai growers who left Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. Several nurseries still work there, and the Omiya Bonsai Art Museum, which opened in 2010 as a public museum dedicated to bonsai, shows trees, pots and scrolls. The village hosted the first World Bonsai Convention in 1989.

The most prestigious exhibition is the Kokufu-ten, held in Tokyo every winter since 1934. The Imperial Household keeps a collection of old bonsai at the Imperial Palace. Kinashi in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, is known as a centre of pine bonsai production and exports trees worldwide.

Bonsai reached Western audiences at world's fairs from the late nineteenth century and spread widely after the Second World War. The Japanese word is now used internationally, and clubs and nurseries exist across Europe and the Americas. A well-known symbol of this exchange is a Japanese white pine at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum in Washington, which survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 in the Yamaki family nursery and was donated to the United States in 1976.