Japanese Tea Garden - The Hagiwara Family's Garden
Photo: Mike McBey, CC BY 2.0 (cropped)
A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.
The oldest public Japanese garden in the United States began as the Japanese Village exhibit at the 1894 fair. When the fair closed, Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant gardener, took charge, and he and his family lived in the garden and tended it for decades, enlarging it and filling it with plants, koi and stone lanterns. Hagiwara is often credited with serving some of the first fortune cookies in America here, a claim other cities dispute.
In 1942 the Hagiwara family was forced out and sent to an incarceration camp, and they were never allowed to return to the garden they had built.
Look for the steep wooden drum bridge and the five-tiered pagoda. Check the garden's website for hours and admission.
More on Wikipedia: Japanese Tea Garden · Makoto Hagiwara · Fortune cookie
Stops on this tour
- Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
- Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
- Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
- North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
- Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
- Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
- The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
- Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
- Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
- Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
- The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
- The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
- Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
- South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom