<Begin Segment 16>

RP: You, you mentioned that you made a connection with a professor at UCLA who was a, quite a landscape designer.

HN: Yeah, he was, he was a real artist that had a, had a, what I thought had a really, a good talent for, for garden design. And of course that's what he taught. That's what he got his doctorate in, in landscape design. But he was a natural, he had a natural talent for, for that... he was an artist.

RP: What was his name?

HN: Dr. Kawana. Koichi Kawana.

RP: Dr. Kawana, Uh-huh.

HN: I don't know, have you ever heard of him or anybody ever brought up his...

RP: No, I never had until yesterday.

HN: Oh, really?

RP: Yeah.

HN: Yeah. He, he... at the time he, when he got, really got involved in doing gardening, he got well-known. He built several gardens in other parts of the country, in the United States, big gardens. Either, yeah, mostly municipal gardens, Japanese gardens. I know the one that he built in St. Louis was supposed to be one of the... which I never went to see, but it was a big, big garden. And there's others, too. Of course, he built, he built the garden in Van Nuys for the water reclamation...

RP: The Tillman plant?

HN: The Tillman plant, yeah. That was his design and his execution. I think that's one of the last gardens he built, was the, was the Tillman garden.

RP: That wasn't too long ago, was it?

HN: The garden today is, I think, I think is about, what is it, I forgot the year that it was, about, what, twenty, twenty years old about? Twenty or Twenty-five years old. Pretty new garden for a Japanese garden. It's, I think it's really a beautiful garden.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.