As with any art, Japanese-style gardens are diverse in form and fluid in meaning. They are shaped by such external factors as politics and economics as well as field-specific agents like persuasive teachers and influential books. First, though, gardens are the product of the designers and builders who set their direction. The initial step in understanding contemporary Japanese-style gardens is to meet their makers.
This book examines the gardens of Hōichi Kurisu, Takeo Uesugi, David Slawson, Shin Abe and Marc Peter Keane. Based on the impact, quality and number of their gardens and publications over the past four decades, these five men have been among the leading designer-builders in North America—the region with the best-developed tradition of Japanese-style gardens. Subsequent chapters analyze the recent public, commercial and residential gardens of these five figures in light of their life stories and their design ideologies. These chapters are not authorized but are interpretations derived from their work, writing and interviews.
To stress the dynamism of Japanese-style gardens, most of the gardens here are newly made. As such, they have yet to accrue the patina of naturalness that comes with age. These young gardens suggest not only the edge of an evolving art form but signal the need for dutiful care and thoughtful use. Thus, this essay introduces some of the critical ways in which gardens grow physically and functionally. First, however, it sketches the diverse lineages of Japanese-style garden makers in North America to establish a context—the ground from which the five featured figures emerge.
Fujitarō Kubota’s woodland stream-and-pond garden, created in 1961 at Bloedel Reserve, Bainbridge Island, WA, evokes both Japan and the Pacific Northwest.
The Topography of Garden Designers in North America
Most gardens built from 1885 through World War II were by men whose names and lives are obscure. Even when we know the biographies of first-generation immigrants (issei)—Tarō Ōtsuka (1869–?) in Chicago and Kinzuchi Fujii (1875–1957) in Southern California—their attitudes remain opaque. In a few cases, documents reveal more. New York’s famous Takeo Shiota (1881–1943) wrote that Japanese gardens are idealized landscapes holding spiritual connotations. By contrast, Shōgo Myaida (1897–1989), active from Florida to New York, and Seattle’s Fujitarō Kubota (1879–1973) fashioned “American Japanese gardens” that deployed native plants, reflected local landscapes and embraced evolving functions.1
After World War II, a new generation of Japanese immigrants crossed the Pacific to make a living and a reputation by making gardens. Repeating the pre-war pattern, a few, like Nagao Sakurai (1896–1973) in San Francisco and Eijirō Nunokawa (1905–87) in Los Angeles, were university-trained garden builders. Others, like Kōichi Kawana (1930–90), took up garden making as part of an identity crafted in America. They worked beside and in competition with second-generation Japanese Americans (nisei). Many, like Henry Matsutani (1921–97) in San Francisco’s East Bay, forged careers designing, building and maintaining Japanesque landscapes around Japan-inspired post-war ranch homes. Kaneji Dōmoto (1913–2002), heir to Oakland’s Dōmoto Brothers Nursery, represents another nisei trajectory. Dōmoto studied physics at Stanford, then architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright, but unable to find work in those professions due to his heritage, he pursued a landscape career, making Japanese-style gardens in the suburbs of New York City and beyond.2
Even as Japanese American landscapers were adapting Japanese garden styles to fit the largely residential and commercial environments where they worked, in Japan garden builders were evolving new Japanese garden styles. Most notable was Jūki Iida (1889–1977), whose devotion to natural-style gardens is captured in Seattle’s Washington Park Japanese Garden. His disciple, Kenzō Ogata (1912–88), known outside Japan for his gardens at the University of Hawai’i and Brisbane Botanic Garden, fused the naturalistic garden with the concept of kisei (spirit force). Ogata taught that gardens could soothe the mind and body through emphasis on implicit and often indirect natural force that informs every part of the garden, from its composition and sound to the pruning of a single tree.
Kōichi Kawana’s dramatic, romantic and symbolic Garden of the Three Islands at the Chicago Botanic Garden features views of the unreachable Island of eternal Happiness.
Kawana directs construction of the Garden of the Three Islands in 1980. Photo courtesy of Kris Jarantoski.
To create a quiet garden retreat for a residence on Whidbey Island, WA, Sadafumi Uchiyama included a grove of bamboo and andromeda that opens to reveal a pond filled with water hyacinth and edged with Japanese kerria, sweet flag and Siberian iris.
Ogata’s ideas inspired and infused a generation of garden makers in Japan, and several who came to North America through the curator-in-residence program at the Portland Japanese Garden, initiated in 1968 by Takuma Tono (1891–1987). Chief among these pupils is Hōichi Kurisu, Portland’s second curator, whose firm later employed several Ogata disciples. A product of that experience is Tōru Tanaka who, with five cohorts in the Ogata-kai, a group dedicated to continuing Ogata’s legacy, created a public garden dedicated to him in Albuquerque. The naturalistic Ogata-based style refined in the Pacific Northwest is evident in the Cascadesthemed Japanese garden at Central Washington University by Masayuki Mizuno, another former Portland curator.
From 1960 to 1990, an era of Japanese and American economic ascendance, Japanese masters created important public and private gardens across North America. Katsuo Saitō (1893–1987), Kannosuke Mori (1894–1960), Ken Nakajima (1914–2000), Tansai (Taichiro) Sano (1897–1966), Kinsaku Nakane (1917– 95), Yoshikuni Araki (1921–97), Tadashi Kubo (1922– 90) and Makoto Nakamura made gardens that express each man’s distinctive sensibility adapted to a new environment. Their impact is seen further in the work of Japanese pupils who emigrated to America, like Takeo Uesugi (Kubo, Nakamura) and Shin Abe (Nakane), and American students who trained briefly in Japan, including David Engel (Sano), Ron Herman (Kubo), Julie Messervy (Nakane) and David Slawson (Nakane). The next generation of Japanese garden builders currently active in North America includes Shirō Nakane, Shunmyō Masuno and Takuhiro Yamada, among an expanding list.3
The Japanization of the North American landscape is also the result of regional and often remarkable Japanophile landscapers and landscape architects. For instance, Samuel Newsom (1899–1996), scion of a Bay Area nurseryman and architect, was so entranced by Japanese gardens that he studied in Japan from 1934 to 1939, wrote books based on the experience and created gardens around San Francisco. In contrast, landscape architect Ethelbert Furlong (1894–1993) never visited Japan but leveraged Japanese design to create modernist Japanese-style gardens from Manhattan to Maryland between 1935 and 1965. His minimalist Garden of One Hundred Stones, in consultation with Thomas Church, at a house in Orange, New Jersey, won ASLA and Pace Setter awards in 1949! The post-war re-embrace of Japan as part of Cold War Orientalism gave rise to a generation whose exposure to Japan came during military service. Figures like John W. Catlin (1919–2008) in Los Angeles and Jack C. Miller (1924–2013), Philadelphia’s “Moss Man,” created gardens redolent of their interests and period styles. Current garden makers like Stephen Morrell and Chadine Gong near New York and San Francisco, respectively, demonstrate Japan’s continued refraction in vernacular landscape.4
Other garden builders resist easy categorization. Although born to a family of nurserymen-landscapers, Sadafumi Uchiyama studied at the University of Illinois, served in Japan’s diplomatic corps then, inspired by regional environmental design, returned to Illinois for a Masters in Landscape Architecture, writing on Japanese garden history. After work in Kurisu’s firm, Uchiyama set up his own business, then became curator at Portland Japanese Garden. His early gardens assert themselves with diplomatic restraint. At the Denver Botanic Garden, Uchiyama sensitively revised the flow in Kōichi Kawana’s original pond-style