As the new academic year began at Waipahu High School on Aug. 6, several students in the Japanese language program went to check on the traditional Zen rock garden they designed and built on their campus last year in honor of their sister school, Iyo High School in Fukuyama, Japan.

They discovered that, rather like learning a language, a garden is never done.

“There are a lot of weeds peeping through the stones,” said Jett Palacpac, 15, a junior, on the third day of school. “We’re battling, but the weeds keep growing back.”

Weeding is one of many ways the garden project has been teaching the students responsibility and perseverance, said their teacher, Tanya Harris, who is in her 18th year of teaching Japanese at the high school.

“It took some grit. We hit a few walls,” said Harris, who has always loved gardens but is “not a gardener at all.”

Harris said the core garden group of 50-odd students faced challenges ranging from power struggles in the planning stages to heavy rains and flooding during a drawn-out execution phase in which they nearly despaired before hitting upon a drainage strategy.

Today the well-laid-out garden, a simple open square about 20 feet by 20 feet, paved and bordered in gray and white stone, with clean lines and a tranquil air, reveals no hint of the sometimes fraught undertaking that produced it.

The idea of a Zen rock garden originated a couple of years ago with the students in Harris’ Japanese 3 class. Based on their research, they were excited to create the first, student-made high school Japanese garden in Hawaii, Harris said.

“We decided on a rock garden initially because it would be simplest to maintain as students and teachers alike,” Harris said, noting there would be no one around to weed and water during school vacations.

In addition, “We thought about grass and plants, but the type of dirt Waipahu has, red dirt, it’s more coarse and breaks apart easily, would go all over the garden and kind of mess it up,” said Elliah Herradura, 17, a senior.

There was an unused grassy yard at the back of the school campus they could use. It was a small space, which they didn’t want to look cluttered — another advantage of rocks over landscaping. Besides, rocks would be cheaper, they thought. (Turned out, they were pricey. “One big rock cost $50,” Harris said.)

After they decided on the type of garden and what they’d need, Harris wrote and submitted a grant proposal to the Public Schools of Hawaii Foundation, receiving $2,000 for the project with the stipulation it had to be completed in one school year.

Although the first group graduated before construction got underway, some of them, like Elliah’s older brother Eleazar Herradura, 19, a sophomore at Leeward Community College, returned to lend a hand.

Asked about the different stages of the garden, Herradura and a group of students said the highest hurdle was learning to work together as a collective.

Initial confusion and delays arose from trying to design the garden by consensus and failing to set clear deadlines, Herradura said. “We were trying to keep in mind what everybody thought the garden should look like.”

One student in particular turned out to be very controlling, Harris said. “He wouldn’t listen to their ideas; it became his garden. I didn’t dethrone him,” she said, but she did step in and redesignate roles so there couldn’t be just one leader.

“There were so many people who wanted to make the design, leave an impact or an image for themselves,” said Elliah Herradura. They had to be reminded that the garden was “for our school’s image and relationship with our sister school, not for people’s personal gain.”

“After we fixed the communication problem and set clear deadlines things went more smoothly,” Eleazar Herradura said.

Except, that is, for the rain.

After the students cleared the garden space to dirt, Waipahu was inundated with rains that turned it to mud crossed by channels of water. They researched a piping system to divert the water downhill toward a grassy area and forest above Pearl Harbor.

“We had to study which way the water wanted to go naturally, and we tested it out, and to our delight it worked,” Harris said.

They dug channels beneath where the garden would lie and laid pipes before purchasing rocks from a local garden store and getting started.

Harris, whom her students address as “sensei,” has taught Japanese at Waipahu High School for 18 years; she majored in Japanese at Georgetown University, taught English in Fukuoka, Japan, for seven years, and got her teaching degree at Chaminade University.

She recalls that, at about age 7, having recently moved to Kaneohe with her family when her father, Ernest Harris, joined the entomology research team at University of Hawaii at Manoa, she told her mother, Bettye Jo Harris, that she wanted to go to Japanese school after school the way some of her classmates did.

“She was surprised,” Harris said. “She said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to take ballet classes?’”

Harris was sure, and became the only African American child in her Japanese school class.

Now, in addition to spraying weeds with a solution of vinegar, water and dish soap and pulling them, maintenance also includes vigilance and communicating to other students to be respectful when they visit the garden, said Skye Yasuda, 16, a junior.

“We had trouble with other students knocking things down, and a lot of rubbish in the garden,” Yasuda said, “but it has also brought together all the Japanese (language) students and I believe that through the garden we can gather more interest from other students (who aren’t studying Japanese).”

Kailee Trias, had just returned from a visit to their sister school in a yearly Waipahu High exchange program. “They have a garden, a lot of flowers and grass on top of the second floor,” said Trias, 16, a junior. “In Japan I learned to open up my shell more and be more casual — I learned a lot of new Japanese slang,” she said.

“I feel this is a really good reminder to our sister school that we’re trying to bridge a gap of thousands of miles with something they can recognize when they visit here,” Palacpac said. “Something they can remember and smile at.”

In sum, “I was surprised at their persistence. They really wanted to do this,” Harris said.

Although she minimizes her role as mere coordinator of the garden, giving all the credit to her students, their inspiration could be seen as a flowering offshoot of her own desire and determination to learn Japanese as a girl.

The next step for the garden is to construct a new fence made of synthetic material that looks like but is stronger than bamboo, and to install some large, decorative rocks and a bench. Having exhausted their grant money, the students are fundraising, and anyone interested in donating can contact Harris at dakinesensei@gmail.com.