Japanese Tea Garden

About this audio guide

This guide to the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco follows the Hagiwara family, who spent nearly fifty years building it tree by tree after an immigrant named Makoto Hagiwara stayed on as caretaker of a temporary Japanese village built for the 1894 Midwinter Fair. It traces the garden's growth under Hagiwara and, after his death in 1925, his daughter Takano, who raised her own children among these paths, up until 1942, when Pearl Harbor changed everything for the family living here. Notice the arched drum bridge and the five-tiered pagoda as you walk, both part of what the family spent decades shaping by hand.