2025-26 Winter Lecture Series – LECTURE FOUR

Zoom lecture by Michael Shapiro.
“Kyoto Gardens in Plain English: Communicating Japanese Gardening Aesthetics and Techniques to the World.. “

Michael Shapiro is responsible for using the medium of English to communicate his company’s work and the value of its gardeners’ skills to the world beyond Japan.
This means finding new ways to illustrate how historical gardens in Kyoto are managed and how this legacy of garden management informs contemporary Japanese garden creation. This talk is from a personal perspective and will focus on Kyoto gardeners and the challenges of translating their work into accessible language to people approaching it from a different language and cultural background. He will explain how this translation process works by providing an inside look into some of the educational programs he has been involved in creating. (“Translating” here means more broadly — facilitating communication across cultural contexts.)

Michael is a garden researcher and translator at Ueyakato Landscape, a Kyoto landscaping firm with a history dating back to the nineteenth century.

Registration details are being sent to members in the December e-Newsletter. For further details email: chair@jgs.org.uk