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Take home a piece of Pacific Bonsai Museum with this unique enamel pin.
Designed by Seattle small business owner Zack Bolotin, this pin is meticulously modeled after our famous Domoto maple. The pin measures 1" x 1".
Originally one of a pair of twin bonsai, this maple was imported from Japan in 1913 for exhibition at the seminal 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, California. At the conclusion of the Expo, the paired trees were separated; this one was purchased by Kanetaro Domoto, who, with his brothers, owned 48 acres in Oakland at Domoto Brothers Nursery.
By 1936, during the height of the Great Depression, the Nursery fell into foreclosure. However, a bank representative handling the foreclosure fortuitously noted the importance of the tree to the family and allowed Kanetaro to keep it. Kanetaro then gave the tree on to his oldest son, Toichi to care for at his own nursery nearby.
Toichi cared for the bonsai until 1942 when the family had to leave it behind following President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 which forced them to leave their home and endure incarceration. During that time, the bonsai survived with some help from a nursery employee and under its own initiative, sending roots through its rotted wooden container into the soil below for it’s primary source of water and nutrients. After the Domotos were allowed to return home, Toichi found the tree alive but in need of major pruning which he continued to carry out over the next several decades. Toichi also rebuilt the family nursery business, specializing in the hybridization of azaleas, camellias, and other flowering plants and was elected President of the California Horticultural Society in 1957.
The bonsai was placed under the care of the Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection on long term loan in 1990 and generously donated to Pacific Bonsai Museum by the Domoto family in 2015, 100 years after it’s debut in San Francisco
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