A Bittersweet Leave-Taking

The juniper is sculpted into precise green mounds, held as if in offering on the palms of outstretched branches. It stands next to the driveway, where Kuni Tamura, 79, chases dried leaves, dust and loose grass into a pile with a leaf blower.

As Tamura steps into the Cerritos street, he turns and sees a single leaf left behind. It would be easy to dismiss it, the way an orchard worker might dismiss one small apple left hanging on a tree, but Tamura quickly circles around and herds it to the pile with the others. The morning and an era pass in abiding rhythms as Tamura sweeps up, loads his van and moves on to the next client.

In Southern California during the 1930s and 1940s, gardeners of Japanese ancestry made up about 80% of the industry, says Cal State L.A. sociology professor Ronald Tsukashima. For issei (first generation) and nisei (second generation), the work served as a foothold during a time of limited opportunities. Gardening allowed families to send children to college, build churches and communities, carve out a place in America.

But now, as postwar gardeners grow old, few of their children or grandchildren are following in their steps, and an era is passing. Footholds are almost always that way. They are meant to be left behind.

“Almost all my colleagues come from families where the father was a gardener,” says Tsukashima, 59. “Their attitude was the same. They wanted their children to go into something else. They wanted them to go to college and get into a white-collar situation. Had it not been for the gardening of the second generation, a lot of third-generationers [sansei] like myself would not have had an opportunity to go to college.”

Tamura and his wife, Toshiko, who did factory work, sent four of their five children to college.

“At least,” he says, “I was able to do that.”

He is largely retired now, although he still works three days a week and maintains about 16 customers to stay active. Gardening, he says, has been good to him. He started in 1947 after returning home from Japan, where he served as an interpreter in the Army following World War II.

“I went to the employment office in Inglewood to apply for a job,” he says. “They never did call me. Other people that came after me, they filled out the forms and they got called. I was the only one who didn’t get called. I was the only Japanese there. Maybe that’s the reason they didn’t call. That’s how I took it.”

A friend told him of some families who needed a gardener, so Tamura, whose parents were truck farmers, became a gardener. It was that simple. Like many of the Japanese Americans who entered gardening, Tamura knew nothing about the work. He figured it out as he went along, and within a few months, he had built a steady clientele.

None of his children took up gardening, and that’s fine with him. Footholds are not legacies. For Japanese American gardeners, it is not the work they hand down. It is the gift of sacrifice, hard work and the notion of hope for a “better life” that inspires all immigrant families.

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“It is so characteristically Japanese, the way lives were made more tolerable by gathering loose desert stones and forming with them something enduringly human. These rock gardens had outlived the barracks and the towers and would surely outlive the asphalt road and rusted pipes and shattered slabs of concrete. Each stone was a mouth speaking for a family, for some man who had beautified his doorstep.”

--From “Farewell to Manzanar,” by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston

Southern California’s first Japanese gardeners started work in the late 1800s, some riding bicycles and strapping push mowers on their backs to move from client to client, according to “Green Makers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California,” edited by Naomi Hirahara and published last year by the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation.

At the time, most issei worked on farms throughout California as many had done in Japan, but starting in 1913, California laws were changed to prevent “noncitizens” from owning and, later, leasing farmland. The practice of not allowing them to become citizens was formalized by law in 1922, when the Supreme Court limited naturalization to “free white persons and aliens of African nativity.”

Many men arriving in the Los Angeles area from farms in search of work stayed in boarding houses, which served as employment and training centers for the gardening business. According to “Green Makers,” there were at least 78 of these boarding houses in the city before World War II.

When war began, people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were forcibly imprisoned in hastily built relocation centers in remote areas of the country. Even there, from bare ground never before irrigated or cultivated, gardens sprang forth in an attempt to create more homelike settings.

“When I thought about children being raised in the desert without grass or trees, I was sure they would become human beings who would not feel joy or pleasure in anything,” wrote Shoji Nagumo (referred to as the “father of Southern California gardeners”) in “Green Makers.”

So they planted and irrigated and created what beauty they could, and when the war ended, many turned to gardening not as a means of adornment, but as a means of survival.

“Right after the war, gardening was the backbone of the Japanese American economy,” says Tsukashima, who teaches a class called “The Asian American Experience” at Cal State L.A. “Gardening was one of the few niches in the economy still open to the Japanese after the war. The anti-Japanese atmosphere was quite significant. Even if you were an educated nisei with a college degree, you had a lot of difficulty finding work, so what a lot of the Japanese did, both issei and nisei, was to funnel into gardening. This was their opportunity to support their families.”

They formed associations and federations to help protect their interests, share information and develop professional standards. In 1955, the Southern California Gardeners’ Federation was founded. Made up almost entirely of gardeners of Japanese ancestry, its membership approached 4,000 in 1980 but has been steadily declining as members age.

For the most part, they did not create gardens patterned after Japanese styles, says Kendall Brown, assistant professor of Asian art history at Cal State Long Beach. What distinguished them was the quality of their work.

“More than the style of their work, it was dedication to the task, really being concerned about doing it right, as opposed to the modern mow, blow and go style,” Brown says. “It was a sensibility, for example, that you nurture trees, cut them back sharply and really care for the tree.”

In their own yards, however, some gardeners incorporated a Japanese touch: carefully pruned shrubs and trees, bonsais, representations of natural elements such as earth and water.

“If you write ‘landscape’ in characters, it’s mountain and water,” says Brown. “Since a garden is, at one level, a symbolic landscape, it will have hard elements--rocks--and wet elements757954401fluid pattern.” More than beauty, it was hard work. That’s what Annie Takata, 79, of Arleta remembers most vividly. When her husband died of cancer in 1962, she found herself with five children and no way to support them, so she climbed into her husband’s Ford pickup, learned to drive and took over his gardening route.

“For the first two weeks, I felt like my bones were going to break apart,” she says. “Every part of my body just ached so much, but I had to keep going. I had to keep the children in school. One lady, a gardener’s wife, said, ‘That’s not dignified work,’ but I had to make a living. I had to exist some way.”

Takata quit gardening because of allergies, then worked at home improvement stores before retiring in 1997. Nearly blind, she now spends most of her time at home, where she built a koi pond and tends to vegetables and the cymbidiums she loves. It is still hard work, but it seems more than that now. Even though she can no longer see its beauty, she says, her life would feel empty without a garden.

Brian Yamasaki guides his lawn mower, its rubber wheels worn thin, around the outer edges of the grass. Behind him, paper-like azaleas cascade down the side of a granite planter like red and lavender water. In the backyard of his home overlooking Glendale, there is a pear tree, and in autumn its leaves turn a deep, sweet mixture of purple and red and orange, reminding Yamasaki of candy.

A third-generation Japanese American gardener, Yamasaki, 39, works full time at the Los Angeles Zoo; in his off hours he often lends a hand in friends’ gardens for fun. “I don’t know of a single nisei who wanted their son or daughter doing this,” Yamasaki says. “I was a little bit of a dummy. I didn’t listen.”

At age 4, he would ride his bicycle to his grandfather’s house and go with him on his gardening route. “Work hard,” the old man would instruct. “Do your best, especially on payday.”

Growing up, he considered other careers. There was a time when he thought he might become a mechanic or engineer. “I loved engineering,” he says, “but I loved plants more.” He studied landscape architecture at Cal Poly Pomona but quit school a couple credits shy of a degree in order to work. He takes pride in doing the work that his father and grandfather did.

“My father was a gardener for the city of Santa Monica,” he says, “and people taking walks would go to the section he was taking care of because they knew he was the type of guy who wanted things to be presentable. He did good work, and because of that, people would communicate with him. It was his forum for relating to other people.”

Yamasaki has two younger brothers, one a marketing manager and the other a maker of eyeglass lenses. He says he finds increasing satisfaction from his work

. “I’ve been lucky. I’ve been able to do this kind of thing and make people happy. That’s the ultimate, which takes a long time. I can make people happy, and that’s not always the case in this field or in any field.”

Yamasaki has two daughters, and a third child is due this fall. While he loves his work, he says, he wishes it paid better. Like his father and his grandfather, he wants his children to have more opportunities in life, opportunities to be happy.

“I wish I could be making another zero on my paycheck. I wish I could drive a nicer car, but sometimes you have to be humble. I’m lucky to have gotten this far, to the point where I am trusted and people say, ‘Brian’s pretty good.’ ”

Tom Shima of Venice also grew up as the son of a maintenance gardener. From the time he was 6 till all the way through college, he spent summers with his father. This time of year, when one perfect day follows another in Southern California, or when he steps outside his home and hears a mower purring in the distance, he thinks of his father, Matsusho Shimabukuro, whose clients included Gene Kelly.

He remembers the time he and his father were working at a home in Beverly Hills and a woman was rushing her two young children to the car. Both carried ice cream cones. The woman did not want them to get in the car with their ice cream, so she looked around and saw Shima standing there with his rake and grass catcher.

“Just drop them on the ground,” the woman told her children. Then, looking at Shima, she said, “He’ll pick it up.”

Shima was outraged and turned his back. His father, overhearing the woman, walked to the children and told them to drop their ice cream. Silently, he scooped it up and walked away.

Even now, Shima, a television writer, gauges weather by his perceptions as a youth. When it’s cloudy and a storm seems about to hit, he thinks about gardeners racing the rain to complete their work. When it’s cool but sunny, it is a good day for heavy work. Like the weather and the sound of a mower, driving through Beverly Hills also brings back memories of his father. Shima looks at the yards, magnificent in size and scope but, even years later, somehow not as pretty as they once seemed.

Not as pretty, he suspects, as they will ever be again.

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Duane Noriyuki is a staff writer with The Times’ Southern California Living section.