Shiojiri Niwa

1964 — PRESENT

The sister-city garden by the river began as children's letters: In 1964, pen-pal exchanges opened between Nishi Primary School in Shiojiri, Japan, and Battell Elementary School in Mishawaka, arranged under Hiroo Takasuna on the Japanese side and Helen Amos on the Mishawaka side. The friendship outgrew the classroom: in 1972 Mishawaka and Shiojiri City, in Nagano Prefecture, formally became sister cities, a relationship whose fiftieth anniversary the two cities celebrated in 2022. The garden that embodies it stands at 1000 East Mishawaka Avenue, in the Merrifield Park ground's immediate company — sources divide between placing it in the park and across from it, and the address and the adjacency are what is printed here. Shiojiri Niwa, a strolling garden of the Chisen-Kaiyushiki form, 1.3 acres, was dedicated in August 1987, designed by Shoji Kanaoka, the Japanese landscape architect of Epcot's Japan pavilion, and built around a teahouse pavilion and its placed boulders — two hundred large boulders on one account, a figure another telling multiplies, and the count is printed as unsettled because the garden's meaning does not ride on it. In 1992 a bronze sculpture of two American and two Japanese children, by Hidekazu Yokozawa, was dedicated in the garden. The garden remains on the city's rental and venue lists today — the pen pals' exchange of 1964 kept, sixty years on, as a piece of public ground.

Sources:

1. Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library, Shiojiri Room history — the sister-city relationship of 1972 and its setting.
2. Japanese Garden directory (japanese-city.com) — the 1964 pen-pal beginning under Takasuna and Amos; the garden's form and size.
3. City of Mishawaka and the garden's record — the dedication in August 1987; Shoji Kanaoka's design; the Yokozawa children's sculpture of 1992; the fiftieth anniversary in 2022; the garden on the city's present rental lists.