To fully get it, you have to understand where Kojima came from. Growing up, his formative influences weren’t zen gardens and meticulous raked gravel, they were music, skateboarding and tattoos. “At the root of everything was street culture,” he says, thinking back. Deeply influenced by American culture, he was the kind of kid who understood the language of Vans sneakers and punk rock. That sensibility didn’t go away when he discovered bonsai. It actually became the lens through which he would reimagine it.
And it all started, fittingly, with a pair of secondhand jeans. When Kojima was young, he was separated from his parents and spent time in a children’s home. It was there where he noticed the man in charge, usually a strict principal type guy, kept bonsai trees, tending them with quiet focus. It was his first real encounter with the art—not as a cultural artifact, but as a living practice of attention and care.
Kojima was eventually reunited with his family and horticulture took a backseat, at least temporarily. But during this time, his father, who loved vintage clothes, gave him a pair of old Levi’s. The jeans were the 1966 501 cut, straight leg and worn-in beautifully. “That denim shaped my sense of value and authenticity,” he says. The 501 became a kind of personal shorthand for purity, for the feeling of encountering something real for the first time. Years later, when Kojima started pursuing bonsai, he saw a particular tree—a Japanese white pine, known as Goyōmatsu—he knew immediately. “I purchased it, and to this day, whenever I look at it, it brings me back to that same feeling. The purity of my beginning.”
The Goyōmatsu is, in traditional bonsai culture, about as classic as it gets. In Japanese, the word carries connotations of awaiting an important calling, of being entrusted with a duty, which is why the tree has long been associated with dignity, longevity, and good fortune. For Kojima, it’s all of that and also something more personal: his origin story, compressed into a living thing. To me, it’s a perfect metaphor: denim adapts and gets a patina, personalized by the wearer. So do bonsai. They both get more meaningful and beautiful the longer you live with it.