Homecoming -- Junkoh Harui Reclaims His Father's Landmark Gardens On Bainbridge Island

CUTLINE: RIGHT - WHEN JUNKOH RETURNED TO THE GARDENS HIS FATHER CARVED OUT OF THE FOREST A GENERATION AGO, THE PLACE WAS NEGLECTED AND OVERGROWN WITH BLACKBERRIES. TODAY IT'S A FLOURISHING COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE ON THE ISLAND.

CUTLINE: ZENHICHI HARUI CAME TO TO BAINBRIDGE ISLAND IN 1908, MARRIED AND HAD FOUR CHILDREN. IN THIS 1938 FAMILY PORTRAIT ARE NORIO, LEFT, YOSHIO, MOTHER SHIKI AND JUNKOH, DAUGHTER TERUKO AND ZENHICHI.

CUTLINE: ABOVE - BEFORE THE HARUI FAMILY WAS RELOCATED DURING THE WAR, THE NURSERY AND GARDEN AREA FLOURISHED.

CUTLINE: RIGHT - THE GARDENS WILL NEVER HAVE THE GRANDEUR OR SCOPE THEY DID BEFORE THE WAR. THIS TIME THEY OCCUPY ONLY SEVEN OF THE 20 ACRES OF LAND ONCE TILLED BY SHIKI AND ZENHICHI HARUI.

CUTLINE: NEW MIXES WITH OLD AT THE BAINBRIDGE GARDENS, AS JUNKOH CHATS WITH LONGTIME CUSTOMERS MARGARET AND LAUER SMITH AT THE ESPRESSO BAR.

CUTLINE: NOW JUNKOH TENDS THE PEAR TREE HIS FATHER TRAINED SOME 70 YEARS AGO INTO THE SHAPE OF ITS NAMESAKE FRUIT.

CUTLINE: COVER: HIS FATHER'S ROOTS: JUNKOH HARUI IS CREATING NEW LIFE ON BAINBRIDGE ISLAND BY LOOKING BACKWARD TO A TIME BEFORE WORLD WAR II, BEFORE RELOCATION, BACK TO THE GARDEN HIS FATHER CARVED OUT OF THE FOREST.

Junkoh Harui pulled the wisteria vine from the tops of the towering firs, ending 60 years of its aimless struggle. Carefully, he reeled it back toward its roots and the traditional support of a bamboo trellis.

His dad had planted and cared for the wisteria in the benevolent, almost glorious, years before World War II, silently, tenderly shaping its future. He did no less for his son.

It seemed natural that the son would someday return to the gardens of his father, to reclaim them from neglect and blackberries. Certainly the reopening of the Bainbridge Gardens nursery on Miller Road this year as a Northwest destination and treasure is being saluted by those who love history and horticulture.

An old coal shed, the frames of greenhouses and the exotic 70-year-old nursery stock - for the most part - have been uncovered and saved, mixing memories of another time with an espresso bar of today. Old and new. East and West.

But the journey that brought Junkoh - it seems everyone on the island calls him that - back to the land of his childhood and the pride of his father was no easier for him than it had been for the wandering wisteria.

As it often has been for men of different generations, respect and understanding were missing when needed most; Junkoh and his father, Zenhichi Harui, were of different countries and different cultures. This situation was exacerbated by adolescence and by the hysteria of world war, when their roots were torn from the soil of their beloved Bainbridge Gardens by government-ordered relocation.

Like so many Japanese-Americans, the Haruis spent five years away. They farmed at Moses Lake, only to return to find their gardens and lives in ruin.

It seems significant that Junkoh Harui, then 12, can't remember coming home to the gardens and a family's first look at a postwar desolation right here in America. He remembers only his walk back to the grade school he'd left behind, wondering if the kids he remembered would ``greet me, or stone me.''

``My dad never said much about what happened, he was not a bitter man,'' Junkoh says. ``But I do remember as we'd drive around the island, and he'd see a particular plant in someone's yard and just say, `That one was mine.' ''

Junkoh Harui is 57 years old. His father died 16 years ago, at the age of 88. And while Junkoh frets that his timing is lousy - ``I should have done this when my parents were here to see it'' - the memorial a son hacks out for his father in rejuvenating the gardens in the center of Bainbridge Island is priceless and timeless.

The gardens will never have the grandeur or scope they did before the war. This time they will occupy only seven of the 20 acres of family land. Junkoh will sell shrubs and fertilizers, the normal fare of a nurseryman, but his obsession is honoring his parents, preserving their values through the plants that survived the war, the blackberries and a son's neglect.

After the war, Junkoh Harui picked up the pieces of a fractured life. He graduated from Bainbridge High School, earned a business degree at the University of Washington and was days away from accepting a job in a bank before he was drafted in 1957 into the Army.

Two years in France changed him. He began to appreciate his parents' agrarian lifestyle, seeing it memorialized on canvas in France, the spirit of a life in harmony

with nature. He returned to Bainbridge Island and with his wife opened a flower shop.

His parents, meanwhile, struggled with the gardens, growing vegetables for food and money where they once had exotic and valuable flowers, shrubs and trees. But those days, the final days for his parents, Junkoh was busy with his own growing family of two daughters and two sons. He replaced his dad as the island's resident nurseryman, operating the Town and Country Nursery at the juncture of High School Road and Highway 305, a place islanders called ``The Village.''

It was not as if Junkoh had dreamed forever of reclaiming the family land at Bainbridge Gardens. In fact, he had tried to ignore the property cocooned by island vegetation.

But a forced relocation of a different sort finally brought him back. Relocation, 1990s style: a bulldozer running over the top of Junkoh's own nursery, where he had been for 17 years.

Junkoh had eight months, ending last Fourth of July, to find another location. Eight months before the asphalt went down and huge buildings to house Safeway and Pay'n Save went up. Back in 1942, his dad had one week to say goodbye to a lifetime of work.

To find a new spot, Junkoh looked first across the street. A longtime family friend, Don Nakata, offered him a lot that eventually would be the site of the island's first McDonald's.

For Junkoh, there was more guilt than memories associated with the family property. The remnants of the once-beautiful Bainbridge Gardens were a store front, a rusted canopy for the gas pumps that used to be there, a poignant reminder to all driving by of a country's great mistake.

The neglect was obvious, palpable, the disenfranchisement more subtle. For there was a time after the war that Junkoh cried out to be anything but of Japanese ancestry. A time when to leave the gardens and the backbreaking work would be heaven. A time when he admitted he was ashamed of his Old World-looking parents, even as they came to hear him address the graduating seniors at Bainbridge High School as their student-body president.

In the 35 years since his graduation from high school, the 45 years since the end of the war and his return to the island, Junkoh Harui has finally made his way back home.

Sunlight splits the towering Japanese Red Pines as Junkoh stops beneath them as a pilgrim would at the feet of a giant, medieval cathedral. Tears fill his eyes, but his voice is not troubled. He is speaking about his dad, almost to his dad. If nothing else, his words surely are the echoes of what he was taught by him as a boy.

``This is a special place,'' he says slowly. ``My dad loved his pine trees. You'll find them all over our property, but this group is the most special of all. As long as I'm alive, nothing will happen to them.''

These particular trees on the east side of the 17-acre gardens have come to replace the tattered, overgrown buildings as a memorial of a different kind. And to a different cause.

Those of Japanese ancestry on Bainbridge Island were the first to be relocated in the dizziness of post-Pearl Harbor. While the Haruis avoided an internment camp by agreeing to farm in Moses Lake, they still were given only a week in which to say goodbye to their homes.

``My dad had a bunch of pine trees in clay pots; they were seedlings,'' Junkoh says. ``He loved those trees; they were his favorites. He had brought the seeds originally from Japan. He rushed into the forest and planted them in the ground, pots and all.''

Zenhichi Harui came with his brother to Bainbridge Island in 1908. They had left Japan for San Francisco in 1905 to find a better life. They'd been orphaned by a killer flood that washed away their parents and their hopes for any kind of a successful life.

In the years that followed, Zenhichi married Junkoh's mother, Shiki, and they had four children. Starting with a team of horses and a pocketful of dynamite, they made beautiful gardens out of what had been thick, virgin Bainbridge Island forests.

There was the sunken garden of Oriental magnificence, ponds filled with colorful carp, surrounded by sweeping willows and celebrated by sculptured lion's heads. Even though they spoke what Junkoh describes as English-Japanese-Bainbridge Island dialect, they prospered. The Bainbridge Gardens was grocery store, nursery, gas pumps, a place people enjoyed visiting both for its beauty and warmth.

In time, it became a favorite destination for island visitors, as Junkoh remembers it, a smaller version of Butchart Gardens in Victoria, B.C., clearly commercial but so obviously the manifestation of a person's life work that it was ``gardens'' rather than just a nursery.

It was with a heavy heart last summer that Junkoh began clearing away the blackberries that had concealed the gardens. He knew where to go first: the pear tree.

Now, on a sunny summer day in 1990, the pear tree is at the center of the Harui Memorial Gardens, a plot set aside to honor his mom and dad and the Japanese-American community that cared so much about the island and its horticulture.

His dad had grafted and shaped a pear tree in such a way that its trunk split, turned outward and then rejoined to form the outline of a pear. It is a remarkable legacy to a time of patience and peace.

As Junkoh and his wife, Christina, began reclaiming the gardens, he was filled suddenly with memories that made his spirit soar. Gone were the worries of having nothing to eat, of hating to weed one more garden bed, of being a minority, of the guilt he'd known as he left his father and mother after the war to attend college.

He looked at the skeletons of the old greenhouses and remembered the train system his father devised to deliver the coal necessary to heat them. He discovered that 6-foot-high nursery stock, - poplars, holly trees, birch, hawthorn, ashes, ornamental cedars - were now 70-year-old miniature forests, a bizarre assimilation of cultured and wild plants in a forest like few have ever seen. He has carved a nature trail through them, a place for him to meditate and for others to understand his family's history through the struggle and beauty of these plants.

His guilt was replaced by his gratification. The hours working with plants were no longer his penalty, but his pride. He understood, this second time around, the peace and prosperity his dad dug from the soil, an awareness that he had been shaped like the pear tree, with love and patience and dedication.

``My dad was not an educated man, he had but a second-grade education,'' says Junkoh. ``But he had these two magnificent tools. His hands. Gnarled as they were, they did incredible things, from fixing furnaces to creating wonderful

bonsai.''

The work in reclaiming the gardens was overwhelming, the time and money in precious supply. But instead of leaning on his Western values, the bachelor's degree in business, the years running his own nursery, Junkoh fell back on those values that he now realized had gotten him through the terrible time during and after the war:

Gaman shi na sai. Practice perseverance.

``We were instilled with gaman,'' he said. ``When I would complain of work or of being poor, my parents would remind me to withhold and persevere.'' It shouldn't be surprising that Junkoh Harui, a popular man in today's island society, is a bold blend of East and West, a man, unlike his father, who can and will talk about his feelings.

A man who can know disappointment without bitterness.

``I do like to dream,'' says Junkoh, who looks and acts 10 years younger than he is, surprising for the torturous years during and after the war but consistent with

people at peace with themselves.

``I think that is one reason I like bonsai, as my father did. It is a chance to fantasize that you are inside that miniature forest you are creating, that you can do and be anything.''

And Junkoh fantasizes about what might have been.

``If the war had been against China and not Japan,'' he says, ``we would be multimillionaires now. I'm sure of that.''

Instead, he learned how people react when they are frightened. As much as he hated it, he seems to understand it. ``Suppose you lost your son, or two sons in the war with Japan,'' he says, standing in the shade of those magnificent trees his father planted. ``You wouldn't have warm feelings for someone from that ethnic race. Hysteria takes its toll. It is stupid, it was stupid then, but I understand it.''

Moses Lake was a horrible experience for a young Japanese-American boy going through puberty. There was a teacher who helped him, and a principal who ridiculed him. But mostly there were the other kids.

``These kids had never seen a Japanese before. One of them, he was two grades older than I was, would beat the hell out of me every day. We would play war, and you know what side I was on. There were rocks in snowballs directed at me, and they hurt.''

Then, Junkoh didn't know exactly how he survived. Now he does. It was gaman, the practice of perseverance. His parents had taught him to respect living things, even the weeds. Soon the weeds began to appreciate this exotic flower in their midst as well.

If leaving their beloved gardens weren't

enough, the Haruis were also split East and West. Junkoh's older brother and sister had been sent to Japan for schooling in 1939 and were stranded there, people without a country, until the war was over.

Upon their collective return to the gardens, they found the greenhouses collapsed under heavy snows and much of their nursery stock in yards across the island. No one ever again saw the lion heads that decorated the ponds. The Haruis were broke, and survived only by running the store and growing vegetables. ``I know I was poor,'' Junkoh says, ``because as a kid going to school I used to hide my sandwich at lunch. It was a potato sandwich and the other kids had meat.''

Junkoh was going through a period of rejecting his Japanese beginnings. The trauma of transition left him wanting to be Americanized, anything but different. At home, there was endless work - now just for survival - but no pay.

``I remember during my sophomore year that I had a falling out with myself and with society. I was tired of being poor, I was tired of being a minority and I went from an A to a D in a math class.

``The teacher, a fine, fine teacher named Robert Kidder, gave me the D when I didn't really think I deserved it. He told me, `Junkoh, you're capable of doing things, and shape up.' And I did.''

Junkoh made the honor roll, was elected student-body president for the Class of 1951 and was asked to give the ``Toast to Parents'' at the senior banquet.

``When something good, something constructive is done by youth,'' he wrote in 1951, ``I feel that it is greatly characterized by your parents' influence. To illustrate this point, and I hope you will excuse some individualism on my part, may I bring up the question of my race. I state my race as a question, not a problem. And thanks to you parents, through again the influence of your minds, your voices, your hearts and your hands, you have shaped kids who have given me an ideal answer to that question.

``For five years, ever since the eighth grade, I have been a part of this class. In those five years they have greeted me with such sincereness that I shall never forget. They have given me no barriers to work against, they have set aside the fact that my skin is of a different color. They have respected me and I in turn have tried to respect them.

``I take a great deal of pride on behalf of all the graduating seniors, your sons and your daughters, to thank you for your helping hand. Your scoldings were perhaps harsh, but we love you for it. We love you for your understanding and perseverance . . . If we haven't expressed our gratitude before, please let us express it now. Thanks dear parents.''

Only weeks earlier, Junkoh had been selected with two other seniors to represent the school at the Armed Forces Day celebration at the Puget Sound Naval Yard in Bremerton, including a cruise around Bainbridge on the admiral's barge. That was five years after being a virtual prisoner of war.

It should have been a time of great pride and honor for the Haruis, but the sad state of the gardens put them through economic misery. Even on the night of the senior banquet, Junkoh remembers being ashamed of his parents.

``You can picture them, immigrants; they wore different kinds of clothes, had different hair-dos, they were from the old country. The fact I was ashamed of them was stupid. But then, kids are stupid. It's so funny now to think of being ashamed of your parents when they nurtured you and cared for you. I feel just terrible about it.''

His father was a devout Buddhist. But Junkoh remembers only the smell of incense and the senseless chanting. He wishes now someone had explained to him the intellectual aspect of a religion he very much admires.

A s he and his nursery stock settle into the old place, there is as much a seeding of soul as there is of plants. A day doesn't go by that doesn't remind him of his parents. Now he can see their ways as gentle and kind, of giving. Of loving living things, not electrical appliances or foreign cars. He even understands, now, the value of weeding.

``When I left college I wanted to be a banker,'' Junkoh says. ``I promised myself I'd never be a nurseryman. I hated the hard work.''

Today he remembers his mother's words on weeding: ``First of all you have the wrong attitude. You are helping those flowers grow by taking out those undesirable weeds. Secondly, you must take the job as a challenge and after you are done you will find great satisfaction as you look back on that beautiful weedless flower bed you have created. Thirdly, while you're weeding, your world is your own. It is a quiet time. A time to think, a time to not think. Fourthly, weeding will teach you humility. No matter what you do in life, there are some menial jobs that have to be done and you may be the only one to do it.''

Junkoh Harui walks along what is left of a stream bed where as a youngster he once caught cutthroat trout with his hands. Across the way is the old coal shed. Instead of tearing it down, he wants to turn it into a small museum.

``Someone called and said they'd located my dad's old truck, the one with steel tires he drove in the 1920s,'' says Junkoh. ``I'd like to bring it back here.''

With his four children college-educated and off on their own, he and his wife have sunk their savings and their energy into reclaiming the Gardens.

``It's a gamble,'' he says, ``but I look at it as a challenge and an opportunity. So many people are behind us on this one. I didn't want to be around Safeway, around neon and asphalt. I guess I wanted to be here all along.''

BLAINE NEWNHAM IS A SEATTLE TIMES ASSOCIATE EDITOR. GREG GILBERT IS A TIMES STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER.

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This column by Junkoh Harui appeared in a 1986 newsletter produced for Town & Country Nursery & Florist.

In my more naive days I sometimes used to wonder about my father's motives. After a long hard day at work, my father would often sit on a hard wooden stool in front of a crude bench, wearing his dime-store spectacles, and work for hours . . . clipping, shaping, pruning, caressing, manicuring and even talking to a group of what seemed strange and odd-shaped plants. He seemed mesmerized by their stature.

Then one day he invited me to sit in on one of these sessions. He spoke nary a word and so neither dared I.

It was then that I realized that he had entered a different world. He was practicing the art of Bonsai, and when he was working on these plants he entered the miniature kingdom of trees and shrubs. It was his fantasy, but it was a fantasy of realism, with true meaning and feeling.

He lost himself in the dense woods in the forest, he was in closest contact with nature. He felt the exhilaration of the sight of a giant, graceful tree, appreciating the beauty of its bark, foliage, buds and fruit. He strolled in the meadow of moss at the foot of this lovely tree. And he captured all of this feeling within a space not more than 12 inches square on this crude working bench.

Today we are quick to pop pills and tranquilizers . . . my father needed only his Bonsai for his peace of mind. The art of Bonsai taught him infinite patience. It taught him that age and beauty have a direct relationship. How often have you noted that time adds to beauty?

The art of Bonsai also gives the opportunity for complete expression. My father transferred his heart, soul and mind into his Bonsai plants. The end product was a creation and reflection of his inner being.

What more can man do as a caring guardian of nature?

- Junkoh Harui