Robert Murase

[1][2] At the age of three, following the signing of Executive Order 9066, Murase and his family were detained along with several thousand San Francisco Bay Area Japanese-Americans at the Tanforan horse-racing track in San Bruno, California before the family were split, with George, Yoneko, and Robert sent to internment at Topaz[3] while his widowed grandmother (Kuni) and aunts Mieko and Grace were sent to Tule Lake.

[6] To gain experience in the landscape architecture field, Murase moved to Japan in 1967, where he maintained a practice for almost 10 years, conducting garden research at Kyoto University.

[7] He was survived by his mother, wife, and three children;[8] one of his sons, Scott, is a principal in the Murase Associates landscape architecture firm.

Robert was known as a true artist who had soul, where his works were poetical and often spiritual due to the emotional thought process he had with designing sites.

However, he was arguably more adept at infusing sites with a sense of the spiritual (e.g. mystery, stillness, serenity, power, primordiality, reverence) despite whatever commotion surrounded it.

"What attracts me to Japanese gardens lies in the essence of quietness which they express; their meditative emptiness, the illusion of nature, the effects of shadow and filtered light, and their stark simplicity.