Garden Traditions
By JOYCE TSE
RAFU STAFF WRITER
Saturday, June 23, 2007

New exhibition explores the historic connection between horticulture and Japanese Americans.


Teresa Tamura
The Kogita family was incarcerated at the Minidoka, Idaho concentration camp during World War II, but still managed to build their own rock garden. That garden was transported back to their home in Seattle, and son Paul maintains it to this day.

Explore any one of a multitude of Southern Califonria neighborhoods, and you’re bound to be greeted by some finely manicured lawns, rock gardens and perfectly proportioned shrubs that are pruned to resemble harmonious floating orbs.

Beginning Sunday, the Japanese American National Museum pays homage to the century-old tradition of Japanese gardens and the people who create them in their latest exhibition, “Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden.”

“Gardeners have clearly been the foundation of many of our com­munities because there are so many of them—for good and ill. Many people like my father, a college graduate, ended up running nurseries. It probably wasn’t his first choice, but there were a limited amount of opportunities—which is probably true for so many gardeners,” said JANM spokesman Chris Komai, who emphasized that the exhibition is a collaboration among many groups, including the Southern California Gar­deners’ Federation; Pacific Coast Chap­ter, California Landscape Contractors Association; and the California Garden and Landscape History Society, among others.

“Landscaping America” presents the history and influence that Japanese-style gardens and their Japanese American gardeners had on the American land­scape. Even while anti-Asian sentiments grew during the turn of the century, Japanese American artistic sensibilities and their ability to take nature on a grand scale and present it in miniature led to the widespread appeal and demand for these gardens by other citizens, making it an economically viable profession.

“We’re trying to do something be­yond telling you what a Japanese garden
is,” said curator Sojin Kim. “We want to show you things you can’t see in the garden—things beneath the surface. … Who are the people who take care of the garden? … What are their personal stories? … Who are the people that use them? What do these gardens mean to them?”

The exhibition, which runs through Saturday, Oct. 21, in the museum’s Weingart Foundation Foyer and Gallery, incorporates a timeline of Japanese American involvement in the gardening trade with photographs, landscape paintings and sketches, gardening tools and video installa­tions showing various gardens from around the country. A guide-by-cell feature also allows visitors to use their cell phones to listen to more information about the exhibition or hear stories from gardeners and their families. And all the while, to view the exhibit, visitors must follow a prescribed curving path, set out by Japanese-style fencing that unmasks just as much as it conceals.

“One of the guiding principles for the design of this exhibit has been that of mie gakure, or the hidden and unseen. In a Japanese garden, where paths curve, things are located so you have to move to discover the different items there,” said Kim.

Hirokazu Kosaka of the JACCC, who designed the exhibit with JANM’s Clement Hanami, explained the importance of the entryway to the gallery housing the exhibition. “This is the pinnacle of the garden,” he said, gesturing to the fences flanking both sides of his body. “At the garden at my house in Japan, from the gate to where we step into the veranda to view the garden, takes 10 axial orientations. This comes from the Buddhist thought that evil spirits cannot bend. They can only go straight.”

During a Friday preview of “Landscaping America,” former landscape architect Yosh Kuromiya, 84, was joined by Haruo Yamashiro, 76, owner of Yamashiro Landscaping in Gardena. The two men looked on, reminiscing about their own careers.

“I think this is finally recognizing the very important role that gardening and different horticultural and agricultural elements had to do with the development of the Japanese community, from the time immigrants first came over,” said Kuromiya, who initially resisted the gardening trade after his release from Heart Mountain Relocation Center.

“I had to first make peace with it and decide that this was honorable work,” Kuromiya said, explaining that gardening was looked down on because it was “dirty work.” But gardening—that vital aspect of Japanese American life—contributed to financial stability and psychological wellbeing. Even during internment, internees transformed harsh, arid land into beautiful landscapes of trees, rocks and even ponds.

“I came to love it,” said Kuromiya. “I could do as much work as I wanted to or was able to, and made enough to make it pay off.”
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“Landscaping in America: Beyond the Japanese Garden” at the Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. First St., Los Angeles, opens Sunday, June 17, and ends Saturday, Oct. 21. The opening features a “BBQ Party on the Plaza.” The event is free to museum members and Southern California Gardeners’Federation members. For more
information, call (213) 625-0414 or visit www.janm.org