We first visited Kubota Garden only hours after Prince went away. Restoration was desperately needed.

Few South Sounders, it seems, have ever heard of Kubota Garden. The park doesn't go out of its way to announce its presence, but it still seems unfair. The suburban hideaway is an easy drive from Tacoma, and it offers a beautiful respite from the stresses and trials of modern life. It's also free.

Kubota Garden originated in 1927, when Japanese immigrant Fujitaro Kubota (no relation to Kubota Corporation of Osaka, which makes tractors and other farm equipment) bought five acres of logged-out swampland. Three years later, he bought the 25 acres next door. Born in 1879 on Shikoku Island, he had come to America in 1907 to find work on the railroad. Over the next two decades, he had saved enough money to start his own gardening business. He designed and constructed a Japanese-style garden (nihon teien) on the land, and it soon became a gathering and cultural center for Japanese immigrants in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, northwest of Renton.

Flyers dispensed near the entrance to the garden don't include this, but in the early 1940s, Mr. Kubota and his family were interned - let's be honest, imprisoned - along with over 9,000 other innocent American citizens at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. Some historians believe these Japanese internment camps should be called concentration camps, though that opinion is still controversial. At any rate, you can see why Mr. Kubota might have taken particular joy in a park that emphasizes the peace and harmonic beauty of the natural world. His body rejoined that world in 1973, one year after he was awarded the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure.

Inspired by the Chinese, Japanese emperors had gardens built for hunting and meditation as early as seven centuries after Christ. Instead of viewing them from inside a structure, however, Japanese designers built gardens that rewarded contemplative journeys outside. In a Zen Buddhist garden, the visitor sits on a bench and regards the entire garden. In a promenade garden, one walks in a circuit, admiring the garden from numerous perspectives. Kubota Garden is large enough to apply both of these aesthetic principles.

It's a shining example of the Japanese focus on water. When some Americans envision a Japanese garden, they imagine a field of pebbles around rock and temple structures. This is of course one type of Japanese garden design, but the pebbles in such a "dry garden" represent the flow of water. Kubota Garden benefits from natural springs, which feed a series of ponds and waterfalls. As with bonsai trees, the principle at work here is miniaturization. Each pond symbolizes an ocean. Each rock in the pond is a mountain. Unlike more formal Persian walled or paradise gardens, symmetry is ignored here, so the randomness of nature may be captured in a smaller, representative form. A Japanese garden is a living, three-dimensional landscape painting.

It's exactly what was needed. As we strolled through the garden, over eight times larger (and $6 cheaper) than Seattle Japanese Garden in Madison Park, we could feel our life energy returning. Kubota Garden is a delight for the eyes and balm for the soul. The sky-rending bellow of air traffic gives way to birdsong and murmuring streams. Step into the Fera Fera Forest, a grove of threadleaf cypress that matured into a graceful cathedral. We have gathered here to get through this thing called life.

KUBOTA GARDEN, 9817 55th Ave. S., Seattle, free, open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, 206.725.5060