(15 August 1854 – 12 September 1925) was a Japanese-born American

landscape designer Landscape design is an independent profession and a design and art tradition, practiced by landscape designers, combining nature and culture. In contemporary practice, landscape design bridges the space between landscape architecture and gard ...

responsible for the maintenance and expansion of the

Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park The Japanese Tea Garden ( ja, 日本茶園) in San Francisco, California, is a popular feature of Golden Gate Park, originally built as part of a sprawling World's Fair, the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894. Though many of its ...

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, from 1895 until his death in 1925. Hagiwara is often credited with the invention of the

fortune cookie A fortune cookie is a crisp and sugary cookie wafer usually made from flour, sugar, vanilla, and sesame seed oil with a piece of paper inside, a "fortune", usually an aphorism, or a vague prophecy. The message inside may also include a Chine ...

in California.

Biography

Hagiwara was born on 15 August 1854 in a village in northern Kai Province (located in present-day Yamanashi,

Yamanashi Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshu. Yamanashi Prefecture has a population of 817,192 (1 January 2019) and has a geographic area of 4,465 km2 (1,724 sq mi). Yamanashi Prefecture borders Saitama Prefecture to the ...

) into a

peasant A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasant ...

family. His father died when he was 15 years-old and ran the family farm until he emigrated to the United States in 1878. He opened the first Japanese restaurant in

, and records show that he was the owner of a restaurant called Yamatoya in Chinatown.萩原眞
レファレンス協同データベース、2014年01月29日 Hagiwara opened another restaurant in nearby Oakland but this venture failed. After the close of San Francisco's 1894 World's Fair, Hagiwara was then hired to manage the fair's

tea garden A tea garden is an outdoor space or garden where tea and light refreshments are served, or any garden with which the drinking of tea is associated. Especially in India, it is also a common term for a tea plantation. The tea garden was a part ...

site. He personally oversaw the modification of the temporary Japanese Village fair exhibit to the permanent Japanese Tea Garden and was official caretaker of the garden for most of the time between 1895 to his death in 1925. It was there that he is said to have introduced the modern version of the

, which he is believed to have adapted from Japan's

References

External links

A brief history of the Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA USA, An account by Erik Sumiharu Hagiwara-Nagata. 1999.
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20090203140629/http://www.pacifichorticulture.org/article-search.php ''Makoto Hagiwara and San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden'' John Tambis, Pacific Horticulture Magazine,vol. 45,number 1 Spring 1984 Japanese gardeners American gardeners American landscape and garden designers California people in design 1854 births 1925 deaths Japanese emigrants to the United States People from Yamanashi Prefecture Golden Gate Park American designers {{Japan-bio-stub