Item No: #307841 Gadena goroku / A Gardener's Essays. Shoji Nagumo.
Gadena goroku / A Gardener's Essays
Gadena goroku / A Gardener's Essays

Memoirs of a Leader of Japanese American Gardeners

Gadena goroku / A Gardener's Essays

Notes: The memoirs of a leading organizer of Japanese American gardeners in Southern California. Nagumo discusses the management of unions and associations, gardening techniques, and anecdotes about people and nature. While he was interned at Heart Mountain, he spends little or no time on the subject.

Beginning in the 1930s, Nagumo was the most prominent voice for Japanese American gardeners, promoting the profession, organizing them as business owners and entrepreneurs, and fighting prejudice and discriminatory legislation. The book was published by the Southern California Gardeners' Federation, the most successful of the Japanese American gardener organizations started by Nagumo. At its peak, about the year this book was published, it had more than 4000 members. Nagumo's memoirs were republished in Japan in 1970 and again in 2007. The first edition is scarce.

Nagumo was born in Japan in 1890. He graduated from a teaching college, married, converted to Christianity, and then emigrated to the United States in 1918. He did not find work as a teacher and ended up as a gardener in Los Angeles, a profession he fully embraced. He began organizing Japanese American gardeners in 1933 to resist a campaign to keep Japanese gardeners out of Beverly Hills. During World War Two, he and his family were interned at Heart Mountain, where he organized a Victory Garden. After the war, he returned to gardening in Southern California and organizing. He founded the Southern California Gardeners' Association in 1955, and it continues to this day. He died in 1976.

7, 5, 620 pages. Plus four pages of black-and-white plates.

OCLC: 318360381

Edition + Condition: First edition. A very good to near fine copy in stiff green covers and a very good dust jacket, tanned at the spine with an old tape repair on the verso (back) of one of the flaps. Uncommon in the jacket.

Publication: Los Angeles: Nanka Teiengyo Renmei, 1959.

Item No: #307841

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