Backyard Zen
IT’S a little after 8 a.m. on a slumbering block of tract homes in Panorama City, but Roy Imazu is already deep into a routine any choreographer would admire. There’s not a wasted movement as he cuts up the floor with his partner, a trusty Honda power mower. He promenades briskly around the perimeter of the lawn, then closes in with an ever-tightening box maneuver. With a final pivot and push, he polishes off the last clump, leaving a tidy emerald carpet.
“When you get through and the lawn has that clean-cut appearance, that’s what it’s all about,” says Imazu, 75, a constant gardener whose handiwork has kept homes and churches around the valley groomed for almost 50 years. At an age when thoughts turn to lawn furniture, not maintenance, Imazu continues to carry on a tradition that’s played a key, yet overlooked, role in the greening of Southern California -- Japanese American landscaping.
For much of the last century, Japanese Americans were the region’s unofficial groundskeepers. Tending and landscaping yards from Hollywood to Long Beach, they left a living legacy that can be seen around the Southland. There’s the poodle-clipped foliage gracing the Sawtelle and Crenshaw districts, Zen gardens in Venice, and a Beverly Hills mansion with a garden straight out of a Kyoto highlight reel.
Japanese American gardeners pretty much invented the yard care business as we know it, an industry now the domain of Latino emigres as Imazu’s generation hangs up the shears. They helped shape the space of suburbia, which emerged on their watch, setting standards without which we might have descended into weed-choked dereliction.
The contributions of these vanishing pioneers are coming to light in an exhibition opening Sunday at the Japanese American National Museum called “Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden.”
“The history of Japanese American gardeners is a core part of the history of Japanese Americans and definitely Japanese Americans in Southern California and the whole West Coast,” says Sojin Kim, curator of the show, which documents the personal stories and artistry behind these low-profile stewards of the public face on our private worlds.
Some gardeners were painters, some poets, some only interested in making a living, but all brought a tenacity to will a piece of the American Dream out of turf and planter boxes.
BEFORE sushi, before Godzilla and the Smog Monster, one of the earliest windows on Japanese culture for Americans was gardening. The classic Japanese garden debuted at the U.S. Centennial in Philadelphia in 1876, introducing the signature elements of manicured trees, flowing water and layered foliage. By the early 1900s Japanese immigrants had carved out a niche -- and a living -- in yard maintenance and landscaping. Gardening seemed an earthy Esperanto across the two cultures.
It was also a means of cultural expression. “In working with nature and caring for the yard, people had an opportunity to express their aesthetics and creativity,” Kim says.
Even if the maintenance gardeners weren’t doing anything particularly Japanese in the early days, they came from a tradition in which arranging flora is an art form; nature a sacred space and guidepost that keeps folks on the path of harmony and balance.
In time, that relationship with the natural world would alter how many viewed the stuff growing outside the picture window. Perceptions of gardens would shift from mere decorative props to inspirational agents, able to restore lost bearings to the urban zombie through sylvan simplicity.
That notion drives the contemporary interest in Japanese garden design, says Maryanne Yamaguchi, manager of the Yamaguchi Bonsai Nursery on Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Angeles, a place with a storied chapter in this tale. Her father started the nursery in 1949 and was instrumental in the spread of bonsai, the art of miniaturized plants and trees.
“A lot of people live a pretty hectic life in L.A., and they have this sense that they want a Zen garden,” she says. “I think people find them very relaxing and calming.”
But the garden as inner experience was a long way off when the first wave of Japanese hit the turf in the early 1900s. Prevented from owning farms by alien land laws, the immigrants gravitated to gardening as the next best option for survival.
By 1918, 1 out of 10 men from Japan in Southern California was a gardener, according to Ron Tsukashima, a professor in sociology at Cal State L.A. In the pre-mini-truck era, they made their way to gigs at wealthy homes in the Hollywood Hills by bike and wheelbarrow, doing more tending than designing.
In the late ‘30s, boardinghouses in the Sawtelle area were jammed with Japanese men plying the yard-maintenance trade. The area boasted 13 nurseries and four flower shops. Gardening associations sprouted around Los Angeles. But then it all came crashing down when World War II broke out. Livelihoods and businesses were vaporized as Japanese Americans were rounded up and herded into internment camps.
Yamaguchi’s father had to close his landscaping business and was sent off to the camp at Manzanar. Imazu and his family were interned at a camp in Poston, Ariz. He was about 10 at the time. “At that age, you’re too young to know the situation,” he says. But his family, like all other Japanese Americans, was left to replay the immigrant saga of starting again from scratch.
The museum exhibition tells the story of the Jingu family, who had scrabbled together a garden and teahouse attraction out of an abandoned rock quarry in San Antonio. It was billed as “The Sunken Japanese Gardens,” but after the war erupted it was renamed “The Chinese Sunken Gardens” and the Jingus evicted.
Searing L.A. summers weren’t much of a hardship after the crucible of the war years. By the ‘60s tenacious Japanese American gardeners and entrepreneurs had rebuilt a reputation for dogged work habits and an exacting aesthetic.
“If there was an eighth day in the week, they would work it,” says Brian Yamasaki, a vice president of the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, a group formed by Japanese Americans in 1955 to offer members a place to connect, get discounts on tools and find a political voice. “They were always striving for customer satisfaction because of pride and their work ethic.
“Simplicity is what Japanese try to create, and harmony,” Yamasaki adds. “If you could incorporate simplicity and harmony into a 2-acre estate, you would really have something.”
The work was physically hard and took its toll. Yamasaki recalls his gardener father working six days a week and coming home exhausted. “He wasn’t happy, he wouldn’t be making enough money.”
Eventually his dad took a job with the city of Santa Monica. Yamasaki, who got a degree in landscape architecture, was repeatedly advised not to follow in his father’s and grandfather’s yard-tending footsteps. But as someone who was helping his grandfather garden at the age of 4, soil was in his blood. He started his own landscape contracting business but now works as a senior gardener for the city of Los Angeles, where his latest project is the restoration of the Los Angeles River.
In the old days, Imazu sometimes worked seven days a week to make ends meet. It was dicey with four kids. “I wasn’t making that much money,” he says. The bucks haven’t gotten any better. He’s still doing five jobs a week because he needs the money. But his kids all made it to college and today work in fields from engineering to accounting.
“We all made it through,” he says, no hint of complaint.
THE gardeners and their traditions began to intersect in American cities in the 1950s. The clean lines and simplicity of the classic Japanese garden turned out to be a good fit with Modernism. Sister city programs with Japanese metropolises produced a bumper crop of public Japanese gardens, tended locally by members of the Gardeners’ Federation.
“Gardens became more about style and landscape architecture. People wanted to have a more naturalistic garden,” says Takeo Uesugi, a former professor at Cal Poly Pomona who came to the U.S. in the ‘60s to study American landscape design but wound up carving out a career as an interpreter of Japanese traditions at his landscape architecture and design firm in West Covina.
“The Japanese garden is very flexible,” he notes. “Basically you just work with the natural elements, natural flow, natural cycle. It’s very easy to apply the Japanese garden to this area. Many Asian plants can survive if you’re careful with the soil.”
There’s plenty of evidence for transplanting capabilities at a Beverly Hills garden, where a tribute by an entrepreneur enamored with the form appears to have been beamed straight from Edo-period Japan. There’s a lake of a koi pond deep enough for scuba outings, a teahouse that could hold a Starbucks, even a couple of cherry trees in bloom. Designed by Uesugi, who is now a U.S. citizen, it’s a lesson in how the placement of nature can alter the inner landscape.
“The garden is a vehicle to bring peace, tranquillity and serenity,” says the soft-spoken Uesugi, as he wanders a winding stone path spilling down a hillside.
The Japanese garden is allergic to right angles. It’s all about meandering, making each step mindful enough to take in the landscape revealing itself anew at each turn.
The tools of this pulse-lowering trade, texture and shape, are on full display here, primarily the sublime curvaceousness of the natural world -- shimmering arcs of mondo grass, ground-hugging jasmine lapping over boulders; drooping willows, mounded platforms for trees, rounded Indian Hawthorne bushes. Cascading pines offer visual accompaniment to a gushing waterfall.
To create depth, the finer, softer textures are placed along the walkway, with rocks and taller trees and bushes nearer the pond. The payoff comes not from flower output, but from the whole composition, creating a sanctuary of idyllic wildness.
For all its subtlety, the classic Japanese garden can be downright cocky. It aims to do no less than “capture the whole universe of nature in a small scale,” says Uesugi. So you don’t need a spare park or waterfall in your backyard to capture the magic.
Cruise the streets around the four surviving Japanese American nurseries in the Sawtelle area and you’ll find a number of gardens in modest spaces. On Corinth Street, Uesugi finds a house with symbolic rock shore and a stepped arc of trimmed juniper and black pine. “This is a very small area, but it’s very clean, nice-looking.”
There’s a park-like feeling here, grass and foliage neatly cropped by those who share Roy Imazu’s attention to detail.
HEAD down, buried in a floppy hat and large, black-framed glasses, Imazu is a picture of diligence as he bends the Panorama City yard to his will. It’s easy to tell this is not just a job but a craft, a belief shared by a generation of his colleagues. That crew is shrinking. Membership in the Gardeners’ Federation is down to 700 from a height of some 3,000 members, and replacements are not on the horizon.
But Imazu pushes on, bringing his customers more than a green haircut for the premises. With contractor’s and pest control licenses, a specialty in sprinklers and a role in education programs at his gardeners’ federation, Imazu has that rare expertise born of craftsmanship.
He fell off a ladder and banged up his knee a couple months ago, a stupid mistake, he says. But he still likes the independence and being able to do his work outdoors. He grabs the mower and off he goes, the greening of an era, a neighborhood and city riding along with him.
--
A look back at nature’s sculptors
“Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden” opens Sunday at the Japanese American National Museum with a party from noon to 3 p.m., free with museum admission.
Where: Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. First St., Los Angeles
When: June 17 to Oct. 21
Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday;11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday
Price: $8 adults, $4 students (with ID) and children (6-17)
Information: (213) 625-0414 or www.janm.org
--
Serenity and sustainability can come together
KNOWN for their ponds and waterfalls, Japanese gardens may seem a stretch in the land of the drought, but they can be a savvy sustainable strategy. One of the tools of the trade is symbolism, so the design can substitute native plants and drought-tolerant elements in a desert region such as Southern California.
“Dry” landscapes, using sand and gravel to represent water, go back centuries in Japan to a time when people were broke from conflicts and couldn’t afford the more elaborate water gardens, says Takeo Uesugi, a West Covina landscape architect who is working on ways to blend the Japanese garden with our parched realm. “Sustainability is an issue here,” he says.
A hybrid of local plants and rock textures can create a Japanese-influenced California garden and an option beyond the cacti and xeriscape approach for the environmentally friendly home.
-- Joe Robinson
--
More photos on the Web
To see an expanded photo gallery of traditional Japanese gardens, visit latimes.com/home.
