Architect Built Bridge Between 2 Cultures : Memorial: The late landscape artist Koichi Kawana is honored at the Japanese garden he designed in Van Nuys. The tranquil spot is fed by the adjacent water treatment plant.

They came to pay homage to a man who was much like them--a soft-spoken Japanese immigrant who translated the principles of Zen Buddhism and a love for gardening into a high art form.

Forgoing their work clothes, pith helmets and boots for business suits and dress shoes, the Japanese gardeners and landscape architects gathered at a six-acre Van Nuys garden of waterfalls, footbridges and Japanese black pine trees that is the masterpiece of landscape artist Koichi Kawana.

Kawana, the dean of traditional Japanese garden design in California, died in his Santa Monica home earlier this month of cancer at the age of 60. More than 100 people honored him Monday in a memorial service at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, where Kawana built the garden in 1984.

“The eyes, the nose, the ear, the mouth--when these are satisfied, you have peace in your heart,” Haruo Yamashiro, 60, said as he stood in the garden’s cedar-wood tea room, looking across a pond filled with koi fish. “Everything in the garden is symbolic. . . . He knew the Japanese traditions and he introduced those concepts to this country. He was a bridge between two cultures.”

Born in Hokkaido, Japan, to a poor family, Kawana came to the United States in 1953. An architect, he retired last October from UCLA, where he had been a professor since 1963. Among his most noted achievements are the 14-acre garden at the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis and the recently completed garden at the Pavilion for Japanese Art next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“He brought a pure form of Japanese landscape architecture to Los Angeles,” said Robert Singer, curator of Japanese art at the museum. “There are gardens that were brought here before him. But that feeling of Japan, that’s very hard to achieve.”

Singer said that Kawana also pioneered the use of native Southwestern plants in the gardens, allowing them to survive the dry Southern California climate, which contrasts sharply to the moist air of Japan.

The tranquil garden retreats have become common throughout Southern California, testimony to a growing influence of Japanese culture in the West. They are designed and built by gardeners who keep alive a tradition dating back several centuries, re-creating in miniature the Japanese landscape while following the Buddhist teachings of harmony between Earth, heaven and man.

Kawana designed the Van Nuys garden using water processed by the adjacent sewage treatment plant.

Three men, all gardeners, stood on the garden’s winding dirt path Monday admiring Kawana’s handiwork.

As they spoke, a large white egret came to rest under a pine tree on an island in the center of the pond--the bird, along with the koi, is said to bestow upon the visitor a mood of tranquility.

“He taught me that to create a Japanese garden is an art form; you have to have your own artistic idea,” said Dick Kobashigawa, 75, who studied with Kawana in the 1960s. “Everything here is green. He didn’t use too much color. With too much color it’s too busy. You don’t feel relaxed.”

Kobashigawa’s brother, 71-year-old Hiroshi, admired the manicured black pine trees. The brothers, along with 77-year-old Ken Morioka, come to the garden once a year in May or June to trim the pine needles according to Kawana’s specification.

“Dr. Kawana wanted all the black pine to be bonsai shaped,” Hiroshi Kobashigawa said. “He was a well-educated man and a very gentle person.”