Toronto Bonsai Society 40th Anniversary Series
KENSUKE TAKATA: A Pioneer of Bonsai in Canada
by George Takata & David Johnson
The art of bonsai is not native to Canada. Introduced to Canada around the late 1800s and early 1900s, the first bonsai were most likely created by Japanese immigrants to British Columbia. (The introduction of the Chinese style of this art form known as "penjing" probably came with Chinese immigrants during the same period but that story is outside the scope of this article.)
From the centre of British Columbia, bonsai growers moved east. After WW II, some settled in the Toronto area because of the Canadian government order that prohibited Japanese Canadians, interned during the war, from returning to their home communities in British Columbia.
After WW II Kensuke Takata settled in Toronto. He was a teacher of bonsai and may have been one of the first bonsai growers to introduce the art form to the Toronto area.
Mr. Kensuke Takata with an award at Toronto Japanese Garden Club show standing beside a box garden or hako niwa.
Kensuke Takata was born on May 15, 1884 in Mukai Nada (a district in Hiroshima City), the fourth child/ third son of six siblings. He came to Canada in 1904 following his older brother Hayato (Harry) Takata who had arrived in Victoria, B.C. at the turn of the 20th century.
In 1906, Kensuke Takata moved to Rivers Inlet, a community north of Vancouver Island, to fish commercially. During the off-season he worked in a sawmill as a tallyman estimating lumber production and job requirements. In his spare time, he built his own fishing boat.
In 1918, he returned to Japan and married Misuyo Miyake. Kensuke Takata came back to Canada with his wife and settled in Rivers Inlet. In 1923 after he was seriously injured in a mill accident, Kensuke Takata left Rivers Inlet for Victoria.
Earlier in 1905, the B.C. Electric Railway Co. opened an amusement park at the Gorge in Esquimalt. Known as Gorge Park, it was serviced by a streetcar line from the city centre of Victoria. Also that year, Harry Takata and his partner, Yoshijiro (Joe) Kishida negotiated an arrangement with the B.C. Electric Railway Co. to build a Japanese garden, complete with tea houses, in Gorge Park. Joe Kishida brought his father Isaburo Kishida, a professional landscape designer, from Yokohama to design the project.
The Japanese Tea Garden opened in 1907 and caught the interest of Mrs. Butchart who commissioned H. Takata and J. Kishida to build an I. Kishida-designed Japanese garden in the former cement quarry which later evolved into the famous Butchart Gardens. Isaburo Kishida also designed a Japanese garden for the Dunsmuir Family (now called Hatley Castle at Royal Roads) before returning to Japan.
Photo of tea garden - "Japanese Tea Garden, The Gorge, Victoria, B.C." Bonsai were displayed here beginning in the late 1920s.
In 1923, Joe Kishida sold his interest in the Japanese tea garden to Kensuke Takata, resulting in a partnership between the Takata brothers. Every year the tea garden opened on May 24 and closed the Sunday following Labour Day. Gorge Park and the Japanese Tea Garden thrived until a fire destroyed the nearby amusement park in 1927.
In the off-season the Takata brothers were engaged in improving the gardens, repairing the main teahouse and nine smaller ones, importing ornamental plants from Japan and doing private landscaping.
During this period Kensuke Takata developed an interest in bonsai, an art form he had encountered when he lived in Japan. He imported plants from Japan that arrived bare-rooted in February in six-by-eight-foot containers. Mr. Takata would grow the plants in the ground for several years. Some of this material was used for landscaping, some for bonsai. By the late 1920s, he began to display the bonsai on three shelves at the tea garden. Some of the bonsai were shimpaku juniper and Japanese maple.
On April 22, 1942, all Japanese Canadian families living in Victoria were sent to Hastings Park in Vancouver as part of the WW II internment of Japanese Canadians. According to George Takata, Kensuke Takata's son, many Japanese Canadians thought that the evacuation would be temporary and that they would be back soon. Many personal belongings had to be left behind - including the bonsai - because they could only take 150 pounds of essentials. However, the Japanese Canadians who were evacuated did not return and after six months much of their property and contents were vandalized.
Before leaving Victoria under the evacuation order, Kensuke Takata relocated several dozen Japanese maples - started from seed in 1939 - to friends' gardens for safekeeping until his return to Victoria. During the war the Takata family was split up: Kensuke and Misuyo Takata, their two daughters and youngest son went to the Sandon internment camp while three other sons went to Slocan.
After the war, Japanese Canadians (including the Takata family) were prevented from returning to B.C. As a result, the abandoned tea houses fell to neglect and vandalism. Eventually most of the tea houses were demolished as fire hazards. (On a brighter note, "Takata Gardens," as it was known, was rebuilt in 1998 by local citizens in another location at the Horticulture Centre of the Pacific in Esquimalt.)
By 1945 the Takata family had reunited in Toronto. Kensuke Takata purchased a house, worked in construction and renewed his interest in bonsai. Some of the seedlings he had stored in friends' gardens before he was evacuated were sent to Mr. Takata in Toronto. A cutting from one of these 1939 Japanese maple seedlings is still growing today as bonsai. One of his sons, George Takata, also has some of his father's bonsai: a juniper growing on a rock and a burning bush bonsai.
Japanese maple (acer palmatum) bonsai - October 2003.
In the early 1950s, many Canadian soldiers who participated in the Korean War returned to Canada via Japan. While in Japan, a number of these soldiers became interested in bonsai and brought this interest home with them. In response to an increasing interest in bonsai, the Toronto Japanese Garden Club (TJGC) approached Kensuke Takata to give a bonsai demonstration. He gave two demonstrations with the aid of his daughter-in-law. These demonstrations may have been the seeds that germinated to form the Toronto Bonsai Society.
Kensuke Takata doing bonsai demonstration with young assistant (circa 1965).
Later an announcement in the garden club section of the Toronto Star, March 19, 1965, said the following:
"The Toronto Bonsai Society meets Thursday, March 25 at 8 pm in the Japanese-Canadian Cultural Centre, 123 Wynford Drive, Don Mills. K. Takata, Roy Oyagi and M. Nishi will speak. Mr. Takata has been a bonsai fancier for 40 years. He will bring some of his dwarfed trees."
Kensuke Takata devoted all of his spare time to his bonsai activities which helped to keep him young. In addition to individual plants, he took great pleasure in creating miniature gardens which he called hako niwa, or box garden. Until his death, he made a miniature garden (two-by-three-foot) every year for display at the Toronto Japanese Garden Club show in October. Kensuke Takata's most memorable hako niwa depicted the well-known Miyajima Island near Hiroshima, his birthplace.
A group planting of Kensuke Takata that his son George Takata later took apart to create individual bonsai.
Kensuke Takata's philosophy was to propagate new plants from seed or cuttings, nurture them into a workable size and then train them into a desirable form. Mr. Takata never wanted to buy plants and was always on the lookout for rocks. He carried pruners with him on his travels in case he came across some interesting plant material.
In October 1979, Kensuke Takata put his bonsai in a cool cellar at home for winter protection with strict watering instructions while he, his wife, eldest son and daughter went to Japan to visit relatives in Hiroshima. In the dampness of the old Japanese home where he was born 95 years earlier, Kensuke Takata fell ill with pneumonia and died.
Mr. Takata was a member of the TJGC where there is a trophy named after him. Although he was not a member of TBS, Mr. Takata influenced club members and took part in TBS activities. Mr. Takata displayed some of his bonsai at the first TBS show on June 4-5, 1966.
Cut-leaf Japanese maple (acer palmatum dissectum) trained by Kensuke Takata from nursery material given to him by son George Takata on display in St. Catherines in later 1980s.
Bonsai pioneers like Mr. Kensuke Takata have made invaluable contributions. They made their mark on the bonsai, and the people and organizations they have touched. Kensuke Takata was among those pioneers in Canada who broke trail for the bonsai artists that followed.
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