PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Shofuso Japanese House and Garden, a Fairmount Park landmark, was vandalized earlier this week. Thankfully, the damage isn’t nearly as extensive as initially thought.
Kazumi Teune, interim executive director of the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia, says when vandals breached the Shofuso Japanese House and Garden on Wednesday night, their security cameras were not working.
“I'm talking to the Japanese government,” said Teune. The Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia manages the historical landmark, which was gifted to the city in 1958. Teune says she informed the Japanese government of the vandalism discovered Thursday morning.
“They called me from the Consul General of New York — they call me, are we okay? So I said it's not that bad like we first thought.”
She said technicians were working to make sure the cameras will function going forward.
Shofuso program coordinator Mike Lewis says they closed for one day, and they were able to fix some of the damage well enough to reopen on Friday. A couple of doors were broken from their tracks, and some items taken from the tea school were found outside.
“The doors are sliding doors, so they're just wooden doors. If you put enough pressure and rip them down, like it seemingly happened, you can access in the house even if they're locked like they usually are," Lewis said.
“We just found a lot of vandalism, a lot of damage. Also just, like, trash sunflower seeds in the house,” he said.
He said they are still taking stock of what was disturbed.
“But thankfully, a lot of the stuff was temporarily fixed, like the rain chains and the doors that we have here,” he said.
He says the most significant and upsetting damage was done to the priceless mural inside the house.
Lewis said the work of art was created by world renowned Japanese artist Hirishi Senju and gifted to the site in 2007.
“So the damage is going to be hard to repair. It's going to be the longest term effect of all this,” he said.
“That's what you see,” Teune said. “It's few scratches, but can be repaired. So that's good news.”
And, as luck would have it, Teune said, the artist lives not too far away, in upstate New York.
“So he has to assess what can be done. Is it this entire piece, the big piece have to be replaced? Or just the scratched portion?”
However, the paper used to make the mural will have to be imported from Japan.