Densho Digital Archive - Henry Nishi Interview II (denshovh-nhenry

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RP: Last summer you came back to Manzanar for a very special reason, and that was to help excavate the garden that your father had designed and constructed.

HN: Yeah.

RP: And actually you were, I think, the best shoveler of the whole group. [Laughs] You made a comment last time we did our first interview about, you didn't really have a high opinion of your father's landscape designs, some of his gardens and things like that.

HN: Well, it's... this is something that he loves to do. But I, in my opinion, that's what he likes to do. He could do this every day of his life. It'd be fun to him. I didn't think he had that real artistic, natural artistic instinct to create. He had, he had ideas, good ideas, and he could execute his ideas. But, you know, some people have that artistic ability and some people don't. I mean, it's just... and I don't think... he didn't have that certain artistic ability. But he knew how to construct things, how to make things grow. Like I had, I had a lot of teachings in, and working with a real artistic person, Mr. Kawana, Koichi Kawana. See he was a, I thought he had... he was a real artist, but he had no idea how to do it. That's why I worked with him.

RP: What I was getting at is when you saw what we uncovered at your father's garden, did your impression or opinion change at all?

HN: I think it did. The concept was really nice. Had good material to work with, nice rocks. Placing rocks, it is an art. There's... some people can do it nicely, some people just can't do it to make it look right. The rocks up there are nice. They're really nice rocks. And the whole, the scheme of the garden is nice. I think he could have done a better job of placing the rocks. But it's just a matter of that artistic ability, that natural ability to do in a nice arty way. That's just a lotta people just can't do that. It's like a lotta people can't paint nicely, but they like to do it.

RP: They have the technical abilities but maybe not the artistic abilities.

HN: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

RP: Uh-huh. Did it surprise you what you saw as the garden was excavated?

HN: I was surprised at the, at the scale of the garden. It's pretty big. I didn't realize it was that big. 'Cause I didn't spend the time to be there, to have the time to see it develop. But the overall scale of the garden and the layout of the garden is nice. And you have, when you have the material, when you're working with rock and you have nice rock, that's another, it's easier if you've got good rock to do a good job.