Only yesterday …

Japan has a lot more to offer to a scholarly minded student of bonsai. To be fair, they had bonsai introduced to them a thousand years ago, while we got it from Japan “only yesterday” (get the pun?). Consequently, their bonsai has a long history and a weighty cultural context. The image above shows this month’s issues of ‘Bonsai Seki’ and ‘Kinbon’ magazines on the shelf of a regular book store in Osaka. In Sydney, such store would be considered small, however even the largest book store in Australia wouldn’t have a single bonsai magazine.