Concern for a South Bay Japanese Garden Sanctuary
Sunday, May 27, 2007

JA caretakers of Cal State Dominguez Hills garden worry about its future.

RYOKO OHNISHI/Rafu Shimpo
From left, John Fujikawa, Professor Donald Hatta and Haruo Yamashiro pose in front of the Japanese Garden at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson.

Since its completion in November of 1978, the Japanese Garden at California State University, Dominguez Hills 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 said. “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 decades’ relationship that this campus garden has cultivated with the community.

In collaboration between with Cal State Dominguez Hills and the local Japanese American community, the garden was created in eight months after the site was purified in a Buddhist ceremony. 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 Hatta, 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. Designed by landscape architect Haruo Yamashiro, who also volunteers his time tending to the garden at the Japanese American Cultural and Com­munity Center in Little Tokyo, the structure is based on traditional Japanese teahouses.

Every spring, members of the GVGA return to the CSUDH 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.

Hatta 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 said. “Never again, would they have their loyalties questioned by their neighbors.”