A new 5-foot-tall wooden Shinto shrine has been installed in Point Defiance Park’s Japanese Garden in Tacoma. Carved in Japan, the artwork replaces an original shrine gifted to the city in 1961 by Tacoma’s sister city, Kitakyushu, said Parks Tacoma.
They say decades of Pacific Northwest weather caused irreversible damage to the original shrine after it was relocated to the park in 1982.
In 2022, Parks Tacoma partnered with the Tacoma Sister City Commission and the Tacoma Parks Foundation to arrange for a hand-carved replacement from a master shrine builder in Japan…