Garden in the City
Spring is well established in the plaza and garden that adorn the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo. Lush bronzed leaves have succeeded blossoms on the plum trees that surround the stone sculpture of the plaza, and azaleas and iris are in full flower in the sunken garden beyond. It is a lovely time to retreat to these places, to contemplate the seasonal shifts--hard as they may be to identify in this gentle, consistent climate of ours.
“If you watch carefully you really can enjoy the seasonal change here,” Takeo Uesugi told us. He designed the Japanese garden at the center, celebrating ancient traditions of Zen aesthetics in the delicate asymmetry of walks, bridges, streams, flower beds, trees and lawns. Sooner than we can imagine, summer will be heralded by the blooming of the crepe myrtle. Then fall by the coloration of the maples.
The garden is closed these days for renovation-- a bit too well worn by cavorting students, by itinerants who converted the lawns to campgrounds. And when it reopens in May it will be on a reserved-entry basis. But no matter. It can be appreciated from the walkways above--a bird’s-eye view of what Uesugi calls “the subtleness of nature”--looking down over the tranquil scene, a corner of Kyoto delineated by black pine, weeping willow and coast redwoods that one day may help hide the city beyond.
Two 10-ton basalt stones from Japan, etched by Isamu Noguchi, form the center of the plaza that he designed just north and west of the garden. “My intention was to create a gathering place, a site for festivals,” Noguchi recalled the other day. He was at his New York studio, just back from the groundbreaking in Houston of the sculpture garden that he has designed for the art museum there. He was born in Los Angeles 80 years ago, but his first commission for a public place in the city of his birth came at the age of 76, when he was asked to do this plaza.
In fact, he said, he was asked to do something quite different--some stone sculptures to be hidden behind the Japan America Theater. He persuaded the planners to place the plaza in front, along the San Pedro Street frontage, with the theater behind. “Sculpture tucked away in back of a building, isolated, does not mean much,” he told us. “But, related to people, it can have great significance.”
The stones--one upright, one recumbent--honor the Issei, the first-generation Japanese who came to America, displaced, separated from their homeland. And across the plaza a quiet fountain surging from the depths of the earth recalls the nourishment of water, memorial to the role of those Japanese, and their descendants, in the development of California agriculture.
Stone, water and plant, so deftly arranged: Those are the pleasures of this plaza and this garden at the center of the city.
