BLOSSOMING WITH SPRING
Welcome to the Bay Area Bucket List, where readers suggest things to do around the Bay, and we go out and do them. Today, Joe C. asks us to check out the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park and its backstory.
Inch for inch, there's no place more beautiful in San Francisco than the Japanese Tea Garden, especially in spring. Around every corner something new amazes: Historic gates tower over stone walkways, hummingbirds sip from waterfalls, cherry trees explode in blossoms like frozen fireworks.
The wonderment continues in the gorgeous teahouse itself, which overlooks the precisely manicured vegetation and offers a variety of Japanese snacks and green tea, and the gift shop with its ceramics, colorful kokeshi dolls and fortune cookies. Yes, fortune cookies — no offense to what others have claimed, but it's likely this garden in Golden Gate Park was the birthplace of this crunchy treat in America.
“The evidence points toward (caretaker) Makoto Hagiwara introducing the fortune cookie” between 1906 and 1914, says garden supervisor Steven Pitsenbarger. “It's a modification of a Japanese senbei, or cookie, that was more savory, like a rice cracker with soy sauce in it. Makoto took that model and then turned it to American tastes — he made it sweeter.”
The Japanese Tea Garden, the oldest of its kind in the U.S., owes its existence to Australian emigrant George Turner Marsh. “Marsh was a guy who sold Japanese art. He had a store down on Market Street starting in 1876 and then expanded to have stores in Monterey, Santa Barbara, Pasadena and Coronado,” says Pitsenbarger, who's writing a book about the garden's history. “Oftentimes in association with his stores, he'd have Japanese gardens.”
Marsh knew the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition (aka the Midwinter Fair) was coming up, and thought it'd be a grand op
portunity to debut a representation of Japanese life — or at least life as Westerners imagined it.
“What the Tea Garden started out as was the `Japanese Village' exhibit. It's a world's fair, so represent the world, right?” says Judi Leff, a San Francisco humorist and historian. “For example, they had `Cairo Street,' where you could see supposedly how things went in Egypt, although I think they took some license with that. I don't know if they were conferring with experts on Egypt at the time.”
“The whole Midwinter Fair was really a venue for white people to come look at brown people from around the world,” says Pitsenbarger.
The original exhibit had a theater, a demonstration home, a bazaar that hawked Marsh's arts goods, two teahouses and a restaurant, and a studio where one of Marsh's Japanese workers entertained visitors with stories and pictures. “He would do sketches for you,” Pitsenbarger says, “kind of like when you go down to Fisherman's Wharf and can have someone do a sketch of you on the spot.”
While a lot of this seems awfully stereotypical, it could have been worse — in a different way.
“For `authenticity' Marsh decided to add rickshaws pulled by real Japanese men. Of course, that was considered racist as hell. Even in the 1890s, they were like, `No!' ” Leff says. “Japanese Americans demanded he drop the idea.
“So instead he got German men with darkened faces dressed in `Oriental' clothes to pretend to be Japanese men pulling the rickshaws. There's a picture on OpenSFHistory of this rickshaw being pulled by, you know, Fritz instead of Yoko.”
When the fair ended, the city acquired the exhibit and retained Hagiwara as caretaker. He moved his family into a home in the garden and enriched the grounds with specimens from Japan. When he died, family members continued to tend the garden — and then were sent to an internment camp after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
The city changed the name of the site to the Oriental Tea Garden, because you couldn't call anything Japanese at that point, says Leff. “They destroyed everything that looked Japanese (including the family home). That was really stupid. When the Hagiwara family came back from the camps, they were not allowed back into the garden. Then in 1952, I guess enough time had gone by that we liked the Japanese again, so they renamed it the Japanese Tea Garden.”
Today, the garden stands as a testament to its hundredplus years of immaculate cultivation. The name “tea garden” is a misnomer, though, because in Japanese culture, those are functional paths to a teahouse.
“When Japan first opened its doors (to the west in 1853), and we started seeing Japanese immigrants and arts and culture here in the West, for some reason people latched onto the phrase `Japanese tea garden,' ” Pitsenbarger says. “I think it evoked an image for them. Anything got called a tea garden, whether it was a restaurant or even sometimes, society ladies would have a party in their backyard and put up a couple of lanterns and say they were having a `Japanese tea garden.' ”
It is technically a “stroll garden,” which in Japanese terms is a larger garden where different sights and views unfold as you round the turns of the path. Seasonal sights at the moment include blooming cherry trees and azaleas, and as the weather warms, the garden will become fragrant with purple wisteria.
“Spring is always a nice time in a Japanese garden, because everything feels like it's alive,” says Pitsenbarger.
Year-round, there's a dry garden with boulders and gravel evoking mountains and water, and water populated with 50-year old koi. There are swaying clumps of bamboo, historical dwarf trees, patinaed sculptures of wildlife and a moss-carpeted grove of cryptomeria (Japanese cedar) so small you could park a couple of cars in there, but that conjures an old-growth redwood forest.
Careful attention is required to navigate creek paths made from disconnected chunks of rock and an almost Willy Wonkaesque “Drum Bridge” that people climb over like a ladder.
“The exaggerated curve of the Drum Bridge was a popular introduction in world's fairs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” Pitsenbarger says. “Ours dates to the origin of the garden in 1894. It was built by Shinsichi Nakatani, a carpenter who worked for George Turner Marsh. Some temples in Japan with curved bridges claim that you leave your sins behind when crossing these bridges.”
If these features seem purposely designed to slow you down, they kind of are. “Meandering pathways, steppingstones and changing viewpoints are all intended to help you focus on your surroundings and be in the moment. That can be viewed as slowing down, but it can also be viewed as having a greater focus,” he says.
“I think that's the best surprise in the garden — you can forget about your emails and texts and Instagram and Facebook, and just enjoy what's right in front of you.”