COLUMN ONE : Era Passes From the Landscape : Japanese-American gardeners are retiring, yielding routes to Latinos. Their pride and skill is recalled--along with the racism that forced them into a difficult trade.
Up along winding Belfast Drive, amid a lushly planted terrace in the Hollywood Hills, the last Japanese gardener on the block prepared for a change of seasons.
Ted Koseki plopped flower bulbs into freshly dug holes beneath blooming rose bushes that seemed to dance in the stiff breeze on a recent morning.
When the bushes lie dormant in late winter, dutch irises, daffodils and tulips will bloom in their place, said Koseki.
And who will replace the gray-haired Koseki--already semi-retired after more than 45 years in the business--as caretaker of this hillside garden one day? Probably not another Japanese-American gardener.
“I used to talk shop with them, and I would see them on the road,” the gravelly voiced Koseki said of his fellow Japanese-American gardeners. “But I don’t see them anymore.”
The former legions of Japanese-American gardeners, whose profession flourished amid prosperity and prejudice in Southern California, are fast disappearing from the suburban landscape they mowed, trimmed and pruned with renowned skill and pride for nearly a century.
Most of the gardeners have reached retirement age and are giving up their routes or selling them--many to Latinos and other recent immigrants. The vast majority of younger Japanese-Americans want nothing to do with the physically demanding profession that brought their fathers indignity despite the care they brought to their work.
“There is no new blood to follow,” said Takeshi Kotow, general manager of the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, whose 3,000 members are predominantly Japanese-American men in their 60s. “The Japanese gardener--their quality, their pride--it’s soon going to be lost. Most of today’s gardening is just cut and blow.”
The end of an era--when a Japanese gardener attired in khaki work clothes and pith helmet was a suburban status symbol--meets with mixed emotions among Japanese-Americans, who recall the racism that forced so many men to labor under the sun six days a week.
Japanese began gardening in California at the turn of the century, another ethnic minority for whom manual labor was the entry point into the U.S. economy.
Though gardening offered a decent living to men who couldn’t speak English--about $2 a day--there were other, less benign reasons why so many immigrants entered the trade. California’s Alien Land Laws forced many Japanese farmers to abandon their property; widespread discrimination severely limited job opportunities.
“Somehow, the public has a romantic notion that the Asian immigrant has a special skill that makes them gravitate to agriculture or horticulture,” said Ronald Tadao Tsukashima, a sociology professor at Cal State Los Angeles and the son of a gardener. “That’s not necessarily true. It was not their first choice. It was more of a matter of necessity, because of the barriers erected around them.”
Still, it was not till after World War II--after thousands of Japanese-Americans were stripped of their livelihoods and herded into relocation camps--that they came to dominate the gardening trade.
Leaving the camps with little money and few opportunities, the Japanese-Americans found a refuge in gardening, where they still were held in high esteem by West Coast homeowners and it did not take a lot of cash to get started. As a result, college graduates and former businessmen turned to the skin-toughening work, making as little as $5 a month per customer for once-a-week service.
In the Japanese-American neighborhoods of Los Angeles, it seemed as if everyone’s father was a gardener. A study shortly after the war estimated that seven of 10 adult Japanese-American males in West Los Angeles worked as gardeners.
“When we came out of the camps, we were all in the same boat--we had to make a living,” said James Kawaguchi, who scrapped his prewar plans to attend college to take up gardening. “I had other dreams. But I had to be realistic.”
The gardeners played a major role in rebuilding Japanese-American communities from San Diego to Seattle that were uprooted during the war, and they paved the way for the next generation to enter the professional class. Even as late as 1970, about 8,000 gardeners supported an estimated 20% of Japanese-American households in Southern California, according to an analysis of U.S. Census statistics by historian Nobuya Tsuchida.
“The Japanese gardener is the unsung or unrecognized hero of the Japanese ethnic community,” said Tsukashima. “After the war, they represented the economic backbone of the Japanese community.”
Despite their hard work, many skilled gardeners felt their profession never got the respect it deserved. One gardener recalled the formation of a Japanese-American service club for professionals. There were doctors and lawyers, but no gardeners--even though some made it big, earning $250,000 a year and directing groups of 10 or more helpers.
For most, though, the rewards were more modest--enough to buy homes and raise children.
“When Japanese-Americans are asked about a prominent individual or occupation, Japanese gardeners are often left out,” said Tsukashima. “It was hard work that did not confer very much status in the larger community of things.”
The children of the gardeners grew up with mixed feelings about their fathers’ profession.
“Most of my friends growing up had fathers who were gardeners,” said John Tateishi, now a 52-year-old public affairs consultant in Los Angeles. “We sort of compared notes on whose father had what movie stars. My dad was the gardener for Marilyn Monroe. He was the gardener when she died.”
But Tateishi has other childhood memories--like spending long, weary Saturdays helping his father at Bel-Air and Brentwood homes so big it took hours just to hand mow the lawns.
“You looked at some of your Caucasian friends, they went out on Saturday and played,” said Tateishi. “That gave you a notion that there were other ways to make a living. I don’t think any kid whose father was a gardener ever considered it as a career option.”
Bryan Yamasaki is one of the rare young Japanese-Americans who has followed his father into gardening.
As a teen-ager, the 29-year-old Yamasaki, a third-generation gardener, said he viewed the work as tedious and dirty when he would help his father on weekends.
But when the Los Angeles man started college, he began working a gardening route to finance his studies in landscape architecture. Eventually, his plan is to offer his clients landscape design, construction and maintenance, all from one source.
“I’m very picky about who my clients are,” said Yamasaki, who charges at least $150 a month. “To be my client, one has to listen to my suggestions to improve the yard. The customers look to me for input as to how to solve landscape problems.”
Yamasaki is the exception. Most gardeners these days are young Latinos, not young Japanese-Americans.
Mas Nishikawa, 70, who began gardening in 1950 and is now semi-retired, has passed along some of his former clients to an apprentice, Antonio Betancourt. “They will ask for a Japanese gardener,” said Nishikawa. “But I tell them I know a Latino fellow that is just as good.”
Betancourt performed house and yard work for a Los Feliz homeowner who also employed Nishikawa as gardener. After a while, Nishikawa began to entrust his gardening know-how--as well as customers--to Betancourt.
While the work is hard and the competition stiff, Betancourt enjoys working outdoors, and his route generates a sufficient income to support his wife and two daughters. But Betancourt--like the Japanese-Americans before him--vows no child of his will ever work as a gardener.
“If I had a son, I don’t think I would want him to have a job like this,” said Betancourt, who added he had never even thought of his daughters as future gardeners. “I believe they could get a better education and a better job.”
These days, Latino gardeners tend to most of the yards along Belfast Avenue where Ted Koseki has worked for nearly 25 years. Like most other Japanese-American gardeners, Koseki never encouraged his only child, Calvin, to enter the field. And his son never showed any interest.
“When he saw me doing this kind of work, he said, ‘I want to be something else,’ ” Koseki recalled.
“He wanted me to go to college,” said Calvin Koseki, a 44-year-old father of two young children. “When you go to college, you start to see how other kids’ parents make a living.”
Comparing his own generation to that of his father, Koseki said: “We just had more opportunity than they did.”
Calvin Koseki is an optometrist in San Diego. He takes care of his own yard, sometimes with the help of his father.
