Frank Okamura, 94; Expert Took Spiritual Approach to Bonsai

Frank Okamura often began his classes by saying, “I am not licensed to preach in church.” That was true. But he made such frequent reference to heaven, Earth and deity that his students could easily imagine they had signed up for a course in religion instead of one on Okamura’s specialty: bonsai.

Okamura, 94, who died Jan. 9 of natural causes at his New York City home, was a master of bonsai, the horticultural practice of training dwarf potted trees that was developed centuries ago in China and Japan. Okamura introduced thousands of students to the ancient art through a spiritual approach that set him apart from other major bonsai teachers in America.

“His philosophy was if you looked at a tree, you had to communicate with it. You had to feel what the tree wanted you to do,” said Philip Tacktill, former president of the Bonsai Society of Greater New York, who considered Okamura one of this country’s most influential bonsai teachers.

Japan recognized Okamura’s contributions to the art in 1981 by awarding him one of its highest honors: the Order of the Sacred Treasure with Silver Rays.

A scholarly looking gentleman in thick-rimmed glasses and a wispy beard, Okamura demonstrated his great skill when he turned a neglected assemblage of miniature trees at New York’s Brooklyn Botanic Garden into an internationally renowned collection. He began his work there soon after the end of World War II, when most things Japanese stirred intense hatred among Americans embittered over four years of warfare.

Over the next three decades, Okamura contributed to the rise of bonsai cultivation as a popular hobby through classes for more than 6,000 students and demonstration lectures around the country. In particular, he developed methods for raising bonsai indoors that made it an attractive pastime for people in cold climates. He also wrote entries on bonsai for the World Book Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Japan.

Making a living was uppermost in Okamura’s mind when he went to work at the Brooklyn garden in 1947.

He had left behind California, where he had been forced to give up his home and a small landscaping business for confinement at the Manzanar relocation camp for Japanese Americans. He was among nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent in four Western states who were sent to internment camps in 1942, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor launched the United States into the war. No internees were ever found guilty of espionage or sabotage.

If Okamura was bitter about his losses, he kept his feelings private. Although some Japanese immigrants, upset about their treatment in the U.S., returned to Japan, “he chose to stay,” his daughter, Reiko Okamura, said in an interview from her New York City home. “He wanted to show what the best of Japanese culture was.”

Frank Masao Okamura was born in Hiroshima on May 5, 1911, and immigrated to Sacramento at 13 to join his father, a farmer. An only child, Okamura worked in the fields picking cherries until he was 17, when he was hired as a gardener’s assistant. He returned to Japan briefly to find a wife and married Toshimi Nishikubo. Back in the U.S., the couple established a gardening business in West Los Angeles.

Then came Pearl Harbor. In the anti-Japanese hysteria that followed, the Okamuras, like thousands of other internees, were given 24 hours to pack for their evacuation to the California desert.

“They weren’t able to take anything but my diapers” in the two suitcases allotted them, said Reiko, who was only 1 at the time.

Eventually, 10,000 Japanese Americans, mainly from the Los Angeles area, were incarcerated at Manzanar, one of 10 relocation camps the federal government operated during the war.

Okamura would share little about the experience with his daughter, except to say that men in the camp were shot at by guards when they escaped the barbed-wire compound to catch rabbits for their families to eat. “He had a black leather jacket with a bullet hole in it. He was shot at because he went to get food,” Reiko recalled.

When he and his family were released at the end of the war, Okamura decided that life in California would be unbearable. He left for New York, where he found menial jobs in a restaurant and a bowling alley.

His fortunes shifted in 1947, when he learned of an opening for a gardener at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

George S. Avery, the director, initially assigned Okamura to tend the Japanese Hill and Pond Garden, which had been vandalized during the war. By the early 1950s, Okamura was in charge of a rather sad bonsai collection, consisting of 11 plants out of an original 32 that had been imported from Japan and donated to the garden in 1925 by an American enthusiast. Under Okamura’s care, the collection eventually grew to more than 1,000 trees and shrubs, from fuchsias a few inches tall to California redwoods a few feet tall.

During his early years at the Brooklyn garden, however, the bonsai collection was a low priority. Its status did not improve until Avery began to notice that many GIs had returned from the war with souvenir bonsai trees that they did not know how to care for. Many of the soldiers contacted the garden when their trees had problems, so Avery decided to launch classes in bonsai, which Okamura taught.

Popular from the start, the sessions attracted students not only from New York but from Chicago, Boston and other cities. What many students remembered most keenly was Okamura’s conception of bonsai as a mystical pursuit.

“I remember great philosophic discussions,” said Felix Laughlin, a Washington, D.C., attorney and president of the National Bonsai Foundation, who took a class from Okamura in the early 1970s. “He would talk about bonsai representing this connection between man, God and Earth. That’s what stuck in my mind. It’s been a bedrock of my own bonsai practice.”

Of course, success would have eluded Okamura without his eye for shaping aesthetically pleasing trees, knowledge of their proper maintenance, and agility with the special tools for pruning branches or untangling roots. Okamura demonstrated these skills expertly and without arrogance, associates and former students said.

At the core of his practice, however, was a more mystical quest. Okamura always told his students that between heaven and Earth grow people and trees. But the trees, he said, are the crucial link. The bonsai grower must communicate with the tree, which communicates with God.

“Bonsai,” Okamura told interviewer Robert Hubert years ago, “is a representative of God. Its roots no longer touch the ground when in a bonsai container. It can communicate with the deity and then with the trainer.”

In acknowledgment of a higher power, Okamura instructed students to avoid planting their trees in the exact center of the container but to choose instead a more deferential position, behind the center and slightly to the side. The center is reserved for the deity to descend and admire the beauty of mortal work.

Okamura created scores of trees and nurtured others that had come from Japan. Among the latter was a gift from the imperial collection, an ancient pine growing on a rock slab. Years later, in the 1960s, when Emperor Hirohito’s bonsai master came to Brooklyn to visit the tree, he “stood in front of it almost in tears,” recalled Elizabeth Scholtz, who later became director of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

“He said, ‘I cannot believe how beautiful this tree is. It has been so well looked-after.’ It was the care given it by Frank over the years. It was probably the best tree in our collection,” Scholtz said.

Okamura retired as the garden’s bonsai chief in 1981 but remained for some years as a consultant. He and his wife lived in a brownstone on the upper west side of Manhattan, where they rented rooms to visitors from Japan. Among the most notable was Daisetz T. Suzuki, the scholar whose writings in English were instrumental in spreading Zen Buddhism in the West. Reiko’s sister, Mihoko Okamura, who lives in Kyoto, became his secretary and has written three books about him.

Reiko said she did not think their father’s contacts with Suzuki influenced his views on bonsai.

His former students believe Okamura learned about bonsai largely by trial and error, and intuition.

“I have no notes on bonsai,” Okamura once said. “I use a kind of sixth sense for knowing the needs of the tree. If you look at the tree every day, the tree will talk to you.”

He was patient with those for whom such communication remained a mystery. But he was not above a little ribbing. Once, when a student asked him how to make a trunk appear larger, the master paused a moment to ponder the question.

Then he replied, “Wait 20 years.”