The package arrived wrapped twice over. Two furoshiki cloths (風呂敷)1 — one purple, the other a deep saffron yellow — each sealed in red ink with the hanko (判子)2 of the Shunkaen Museum (春花園 BONSAI 美術館) in Tokyo, protected a rigid case bearing a simple bonsai label. Several weeks had passed since it left Japan, held up for days in customs before finally reaching Spain. When it was at last in my hands, I knew I didn’t want to open it in a hurry.
I removed the first furoshiki. Then the second. Underneath, the case appeared. Inside, a sheet of translucent washi paper (和紙)3 carefully wrapped the diploma. I unfolded it slowly, letting each fold fall open, until four kanji appeared, brush-written by master Kunio Kobayashi (小林國雄) himself.
They read: 勝讓武古, Masaru Buko, “one who yields victory and perfects the martial art into seasoned mastery.”
It was the first document of my life to formally bind me to a Japanese lineage of transmission.
And I had not yet set foot in Japan to receive it.
With time I have come to understand that the package contained far more than a diploma. It contained an invitation to walk a path whose scale I could then barely intuit: entry, first at a distance and later in Japan, into one of the oldest and most guarded systems of artistic transmission in Japanese culture. That is the path I wish to share with the readers of Bonsai Clubs International.
An Art Built in the Space Between Things
Since 2022 I have studied under the direction of Kunio Kobayashi, the third house master (iemoto, 家元)4 of Keidō Katayama Ryū (景道片山流)5, a school devoted to one of the most refined disciplines of traditional Japanese display: the composition of bonsai, suiseki, and companion plants within the tokonoma (床の間)6, the alcove in Japanese architecture meant to express landscape and the passing of the seasons.
The school was founded in 1986 by Katayama Teiichi (1908–1996), known by his artistic name Katayama Ichiu (片山一雨). After a decade of training alongside Yoshimura Toshiji at Kofu-en, one of Japan’s most prestigious satsuki (皐月)7 nurseries, he developed his own way of understanding display, drawing on the aesthetics of Sen no Rikyū’s (千利休) tea ceremony. He called this vision Keidō, “the way of the landscape”: a method for using the space of the tokonoma so that it would evoke the four seasons without describing them explicitly.
He was succeeded as second iemoto by Sudō Uhaku (雨伯), who, on November 6, 2022, formally invested Kunio Kobayashi as the school’s third master. During that ceremony he received the name Kobayashi Ichiu (一雨), though the master himself continues to go by his working name, Ippū, convinced that an inherited name is not an award but a responsibility that must go on being earned every day.
Keidō is not simply about learning to place a tree beside a kakejiku (掛け軸)8, a stone, or a companion plant. It is a visual grammar built on the principles of wabi-sabi (侘び寂び)9, where emptiness carries as much weight as visible elements. A bonsai is not considered complete until the whole tokonoma breathes as a single composition.
And yet it is not a matter of applying a set of rules either. Within this lineage — and especially under Kobayashi’s direction in recent years — the tree stops answering to the symmetrical, triangular ideal that for so long dominated much of contemporary bonsai. Attention shifts toward asymmetry, tension, movement, and open space; toward trees that seem to have been found in the mountains rather than built on a workbench.
Before deciding on a single branch, one must first discover who that particular tree is: how it has grown, where its tension lives, what history the trunk still holds, and what forces have given it its shape. Technique then stops being a set of answers and becomes a conversation with a unique living being. It is not the rule that determines the design, but the character of the tree itself.
The Man Behind the School
Kunio Kobayashi’s path toward bonsai carries, in a way, the same quality of discovery that he passes on to his disciples today. Born in Tokyo in 1948 into a family devoted to floriculture, he came across a Japanese white pine (Pinus parviflora var. pentaphylla) at an exhibition in 1976. Years later he would still recall that moment as the instant he understood he would devote his life to this art. That tree, Oku no Kyomatsu (奥の巨松), remains one of the great symbols of the Shunkaen Museum, which he founded in Tokyo in 2002.
Over these years of study I have come to see that his teaching goes beyond horticulture or technique. He often repeats that bonsai stops being an exercise in cultivation once it becomes a form of visual poetry. A tree does not aim to reproduce a photograph of nature; it aspires to express a relationship between landscape, time, and the gaze of whoever contemplates it.
In recent years this way of understanding bonsai seems to have deepened further. Kobayashi has shown a growing interest in trees whose strength comes not from conforming to a known model but from conveying authenticity. Technique remains, but it stops being the goal and becomes a means instead. The result is compositions that are harder to classify and, precisely for that reason, closer to the nature they try to evoke.
Emptiness, Not Excess
This way of understanding bonsai did not begin with Kobayashi. It is rooted in the teaching of Sudō Uhaku, the school’s second iemoto, whose writings on display insist on an idea I have come, with time, to recognize in everyday practice too: a practitioner’s true level rarely shows in what they themselves say about their own work. It is others who, in silence, perceive the honesty of work well done.
Across two generations, both masters have pointed toward the same place. The beauty of the tokonoma depends less on what it contains than on what it chooses to leave out. This is yohaku no bi (余白の美)10, the beauty of empty space, where silence matters as much as form, and where the landscape is only completed once the viewer takes part in it with their own imagination.
Seen from that perspective, the line of a trunk stops being a flaw to correct and becomes the visible result of a life. Decades of wind, snow, drought, or light have already written part of its story. Before intervening on a tree, the artist’s first duty is to learn to read it.
Sudō Uhaku warned against a bonsai judged solely by the perfection of its wiring or the immediate impact of a flawless silhouette. Kobayashi tends to put it even more simply: whoever works a tree never becomes its creator; at most, they are its temporary keeper.
I want to be careful in saying this. It is not a matter of ranking different ways of practicing bonsai. There are many legitimate ways to approach this art, and all of them have helped keep it alive both inside and outside Japan. Keidō’s vision is simply another way of looking: one that invites listening before intervening, understanding a tree’s character before trying to transform it, and accepting that, at times, the most important part of a composition is precisely what remains unsaid.
Learning Without a Classroom
I arrived in this world after more than two decades devoted to bonsai and suiseki, with a background in physical geography and ecology, and more than ten years teaching at the Escuela Sagunt-En. All of that had shaped the way I understood landscape.
What began was a kind of learning very different from anything I had known. And it began, moreover, more than ten thousand kilometers away.
For close to a year and a half there were no classes in the sense we usually understand them in the West. There was no syllabus, no exercises, no periodic corrections. All communication passed through Jin Yasufumi, my senpai (先輩)11, Kobayashi’s closest collaborator and director of the Shunkaen Museum.
It should be made clear that this period of distance study was an exceptional circumstance, authorized and supervised throughout by my senpai within the school’s own formative process. It does not represent how the Keidō system normally works, which unfolds in person.
He relayed my questions to the master.
He answered when it was necessary.
And, at other times, he answered precisely with silence.
In time I came to understand that this absence, too, was part of the teaching.
In the traditional system, an aspiring disciple is usually observed long before being instructed. Error is tolerated so long as it remains within the scope of personal practice; what is truly being assessed is the attitude with which each step is taken.
At the time I did not know that.
I simply studied.
Without asking myself whether I was progressing, whether I was being evaluated, or whether I would one day become part of the school.
When, in the summer of 2024, I received the diploma calligraphed with the four kanji of my name — accompanied by the museum’s official happi (法被)12, a garment that is never bought, only granted — I understood that all that time had been part of one single process.
Until that moment I had thought I was learning a discipline.
Only later did I understand that I was also learning a different way of relating to it.
That package ended up becoming, too, the final push to travel to Japan. For years I had imagined that trip without ever deciding to take the step. It was that name, written by my master’s own hand, that took the project out of the future and turned it, at last, into reality.
In the autumn of 2025 I arrived at Shunkaen for the first time.
Only then did I understand that distance study had not been the path itself.
It had been the way of preparing me to begin it.
Learning to Read the Hierarchy
My first stay at Shunkaen, in the autumn of 2025, replaced distance with presence. The days passed alongside the master and his circle of disciples, and I quickly understood that evaluation rarely had to do with technique.
During that stay I was also given the school’s official kimono, with my four kanji — 勝讓武古 — embroidered in gold thread. It was not a keepsake or a courtesy gift: it was, once again, a way of inscribing the received name onto something worn on the body, not just onto a document.
It had to do with conduct.
With the way one observes before speaking.
With knowing when to ask a question and when to accept that it was not the moment to ask it.
I had traveled to Japan thinking I was going to learn bonsai. I discovered that, before anything else, I was learning to take my place within a community.
There is one scene that remains especially vivid in my memory.
It was mealtime. No one indicated where each person should sit. There were no instructions, no explanations. Everyone simply took their place with complete naturalness. The younger apprentices gathered on their own. The disciples with longer standing sat near the master. No one seemed to be making decisions; the order arose by itself.
I hesitated for a few seconds.
Not out of insecurity, but because I understood that this arrangement followed a logic I could not yet grasp. I asked where I should sit, and I was shown the place immediately to the master’s left.
At the time I read it as a courtesy toward a foreign visitor.
Only later did I understand it was not.
In an iemoto system, hierarchy rarely needs to be explained.
It exists because everyone recognizes it. No one imposes it, and precisely because of that, it becomes even more evident.
For those of us who grew up in a culture where almost everything is spoken and justified, learning to read that silent language is a different kind of education in itself. In time I understood that this, too, was part of the learning. Perhaps it was even one of its deepest lessons.
That first in-person stay culminated, in November 2025, with the practical evaluation and the diploma marking the completion of studies.
A Master Interrupts His Own Demonstration
The most unexpected moment of recognition came during the Taikanten (大観展)13 in Kyoto, one of Japan’s most important bonsai exhibitions.
That year, Kobayashi had been invited to give the main demonstration. In front of an international audience, he worked on a Japanese black pine (Pinus thunbergii) while explaining each decision with his characteristic composure.
At one point in the demonstration I asked him what pot he considered suitable for the tree’s next repotting. The question came from a personal concern: I wanted to know whether my way of reading that specimen was beginning to come close to his own.
He answered briefly.
He went on working.
A few seconds passed.
Then he set down his tools, turned to the audience, pointed at me, and said:
“This is Marcial. He has come from Spain. He is my student.”
“He has been studying Keidō with me for two years.”
And he turned back to the tree.
The demonstration went on as if nothing had happened.
Anyone familiar with the restraint Japanese masters usually show in public will understand the meaning of that gesture. It was not a courtesy toward a foreign visitor, nor an improvised compliment. It was a way of acknowledging, before professionals and enthusiasts from different countries, that the bond between master and disciple had stopped being private and had become part of the lineage’s own history.
I do not remember feeling pride.
I remember, above all, a profound sense of responsibility.
Because within a tradition like this one, recognition never marks the end of the path.
The October Ceremony
In October 2026 I returned to Shunkaen to take part in the name-transmission ceremony. It was time to receive the ichiji-hairyō (一字拝領)14, the granting of a character taken from the master’s own name, together with the makimono (巻物)15 certifying the disciple’s place within the school’s genealogy.
In Japanese tradition, these gestures carry a meaning that goes beyond the material document that accompanies them. They do not represent a goal reached. They mark, rather, the beginning of a responsibility.
There are aspects of that ceremony I prefer to keep for another occasion. The master’s words, the character I received, and the intimacy of that moment belong, in some measure, to the lineage itself. They deserve to be told with the calm and the space they require.
What I can share is the feeling I had holding that makimono in my hands.
I inevitably recalled the day I opened the package that had arrived from Japan.
The two furoshiki.
The washi paper.
The four kanji written in brush.
Then I understood that first diploma had never been a point of arrival.
With the perspective only time grants, I understand now that each stage prepared the next without announcing it. Distance study prepared the journey. The journey prepared living alongside the master. Living alongside him prepared trust. And it was that trust that made possible a transmission which, in truth, belongs not only to the one who receives it, but also to those who preserved it before him.
As far as my own knowledge extends, and that of those who currently belong to this lineage, no other Westerner is known to have completed this entire process within Keidō Katayama Ryū: from distance study to formal incorporation into its genealogy.
I share this experience not to claim any merit.
If the iemoto system teaches anything, it is that recognitions stop mattering the very instant they are received. What remains is only the obligation to live up to the trust placed in us by those who came before.
Outside Japan we tend to approach bonsai looking for technical answers: how to wire a branch, how to repot a tree, how to improve a silhouette. All of that is part of learning, but the iemoto system asks a different question.
The answer never appears in writing.
It is learned by observing.
By waiting.
By listening.
By accepting that some teachings only arrive when the master judges the moment has come.
We often think patience means enduring the wait.
Over these years I have learned that, for Japanese tradition, patience consists instead in ceasing to measure time.
Not that of shaping a tree.
But that of understanding that we only pass through it for an instant. The trees will remain. So will the lineage. Our task is simply to care for both for as long as we are granted the chance to do so.
That is what I hope to pass on to my students at the Escuela Sagunt-En and to share with the Bonsai Clubs International community: not just a way of making bonsai, but a way of standing before it.
Because, in the end, bonsai does not belong to us.
In time I came to understand that true learning did not consist only of acquiring technical knowledge. The path within the lineage shaped my character: it tempered my ego, taught me patience, cultivated humility, and, above all, made me a far more respectful person toward those who came before me, toward my fellow travelers on this path, and toward the tradition itself.
Here these words come to an end.
My path through the landscape continues, under the rain and the wind.