CSUDH Japanese Garden: Legacy of a WWII Generation Will Need Future Caretakers

Since its completion in November 1978, the Japanese Garden on the ground floor of the Social and Behavioral Sciences building has provided a calming sanctuary for students and visitors. But the future of its upkeep has some people nervous.

John Fujikawa, president of the Gardena Valley Gardeners’ Association (GVGA), which offers annual maintenance of the garden, is concerned that the association’s members are aging and soon will no longer be able to work on the garden, and that the generation after them is not trained to do so.

“We are all getting up there in age, those of us who go out there to work on the garden,” he says. “This might be the last year, but the members say we have to keep it going. We don’t know how we’ll get anybody to take care of it when we retire.”

The concern and commitment represents a nearly two-decade relationship that this campus garden has cultivated with the community.

In collaboration with California State University, Dominguez Hills and the local Japanese American community, the garden was created in eight months after the site was purified in a Buddhist ceremony. The GVGA, along with the Pacific Coast and Los Angeles/San Gabriel Valley chapters of the California Landscape Contractors Association, and the Centinela chapter of the California Association of Nurserymen, donated their labor and materials, joining with CSUDH administrators, faculty, staff and students in the first community-campus effort of this nature and magnitude.

“This was the first evidence of community support on campus,” says Donald Hata, emeritus professor of history. “This was built during the mid-70s, when the anti-Vietnam movement was dividing the nation, especially on college campuses. We named it the Peace Garden, as a way to bring us together as a community.”

At first, the idea was merely to landscape the concrete courtyard, but it was decided that camouflaging the staircase would be more pleasing to the eye. The structure, designed by renowned landscape architect Haruo Yamashiro, is based on traditional Japanese teahouses. Yamashiro has contributed to the design and construction of numerous traditional Japanese gardens and structures, including the Japanese Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and gardens at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo. The story of how he started his career illustrates how he was also inspired to create beauty and tranquility in the wake of war.

“My uncle influenced me to go into the landscaping business,” says Yamashiro. “When he worked for the State Department, he was sent to Guam, Saipan, and other countries where the war destroyed nature. When the Korean War came, I served as military intelligence and traveled to Kyoto and Nara. I was a pre-med student, but after seeing the world-famous gardens there, I agreed with my uncle, so I became a landscaper.”

Every spring, members of the GVGA return to the campus to do their annual pruning and finessing of the garden so that it looks its best during the graduation season.

The absence of a new generation to take care of gardens like the one at CSUDH is the result of the gardeners’ offspring having been able to attend college and enter professional lives, unlike their fathers, who turned to gardening as a way to make a living in the post-World War II climate of discrimination toward Japanese Americans. Hata notes that community-based efforts such as the CSUDH garden were meant as a goodwill gesture from Japanese Americans to cement their place as loyal citizens.

“Every project made them exemplary core elements in the growth of community,” he says. “Never again, would they have their loyalties questioned by their neighbors.”

- Joanie Harmon-Whetmore and Amy Bentley-Smith

Photo above: (L-R) John Fujikawa, president, Gardena Valley Gardeners Association; Donald Hata, emeritus professor of history and Haruo Yamashiro, landscape architect and former president, Okinawan Association of America. Photo by Joanie Harmon-Whetmore