A remembrance of Japanese flower growers blooms in Richmond

On a recent grey day Larry Oishi and Jim Oshima are in southeastern Richmond, looking out over piles of dirt near brushy Baxter Creek. Nearby sit boarded up old wooden houses stored behind a chain-link fence on a vacant lot off South 47th Street. One of the homes was severely damaged in a fire.

City workers are there, digging and pounding in a few spots. A metal shipping container sits heavy on the ground.

Oishi and Oshima, longtime childhood friends, make their way along an asphalt path, scanning the hodgepodge of rough open ground, grass, park benches, and a relatively new multi-story senior housing complex, all of which occupy a roughly 14-acre pocket of land just west of Interstate 80. 

Today, this relatively isolated swath of city property is largely undeveloped, with small signs of construction and occasional walkers or bikers in the Miraflores Greenbelt, a slice of park along  the freeway. 

But in their memories, Oishi and Oshimi see the bustles of their families’ legacies, a time when the area was a hub of Japanese immigrant flower nurseries, established in the early 1900s, interrupted by the World War II detainments and finally succumbing to economic changes in the cut flower industry. 

Soon, this legacy will get a permanent acknowledgement in the footprint of 100 years of giant glass greenhouses once filled with fragrant carnations and roses. 

In the latest step along a long and bumpy road to create a city park honoring the Japanese growers, work is almost complete on a series of interpretive signs explaining the site’s unique past. 

“It’s important to me,” Jim Oshima said of the project.

The beautifully crafted steel signs, designed to look like life-size doors, aim to capture this chapter of Richmond’s immigrant history, from their arrival by ship ready to work, through their incarceration in relocation camps during the war.

The signs will offer a strolling history of the area plus information about others who lived or worked there. 

“We worked together for a really long time developing the interpretation,” said Donna Graves, a local planner and historian and a major force behind Miraflores, as well as the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park. 

“Each node [sign] is developed around a theme that communicates an important aspect of the story of these families in the nursery community. But a theme that also is broad enough that you could tell the stories of other people in Richmond,” she said.

Key to the historical message, said Graves and others close to the project, is the wartime juxtaposition in Richmond, a time when thousands of migrants flooded the city to work in the Kaiser shipyards, while others, the nursery families, including babies and elders, were forcibly removed solely because of their race — victims of a national hysteria that they were a threat to security. 

The United States didn’t formally apologize for the incarcerations until 1988, making reparations to families held in the camps. 

“The genesis of the project stems from recognizing the location’s local, state, and national significance,” said Lina Velasco, Richmond’s director of community development. 

How a slice of land can keep history alive

The Miraflores Greenbelt, a 4-acre slice of the city’s overall former nursery area, is largely earmarked for housing. But city plans for the area, which it acquired in 2006, have been hindered by funding challenges, vandalism and developer bankruptcy. 

It was once home to nurseries run by the Sakai, Oishi and Maida-Endo families. 

The land was first purchased by the Richmond’s Redevelopment Agency, but when redevelopment ended statewide in 2012, the project moved to the city’s redevelopment successor agency for completion. 

At the onset, the site, a polluted brownfield, needed environmental cleanup that was funded by the state and completed in 2018.

But slowly, its future is taking shape. 

A 79-unit affordable senior housing complex was finished in 2018. And a planned market-rate housing project that stalled when the initial developer went bankrupt appears to be moving forward under new ownership, according to city officials. 

The greenbelt, always intended as a buffer from I-80 noise and grit, is coming together in stages, as funding becomes available. Completed work includes the restoration of Baxter Creek, hundreds of new trees, play areas and a biking/pedestrian path that links to the city’s other paths. 

Volunteer labor has played a significant role in this work. 

And now, the historical interpretative signs are being installed, with a ribbon cutting planned for September. 

“It’s an important site and it’s an important project,” said Marcia Vallier, a Richmond-based principal planner with CSWST2, a consultancy firm that has worked with the city on Miraflores for years.

“It’s been a real group effort,” she said. “We’ve been working on it and working on it. It’s dear to our hearts, trying to keep this project alive by any means possible. The park is so complex.” 

A collection of historians, nursery family members, community groups, city officials and staff fought from the beginning for the Miraflores project to include a way of honoring its Japanese immigrant history. These advocates included the Richmond Rotary, the National Park Service, the Park Plaza Neighborhood Council, the city’s Historical Preservation Commission and the Contra Costa Japanese American Cities League.  

It often felt like an “uphill battle,” Graves said, co-producer of the 2017 documentary “Blossoms and Thorns” about the nursery families, which screens regularly at the Rosie the Riveter park visitors center. 

A century of flowers met racism then market change

In its heyday in the first half of the 20th century about a dozen Japanese greenhouse nurseries occupied this flat stretch of land wedged between Wall Avenue, South 47th Street, the freeway and the BART tracks. 

It was a close knit community with shared language, culture, business interests, and likely some loneliness and isolation. 

A few more growers were nearby in El Cerrito, with another cluster in North Richmond, for a total of about 20 to 24 Japanese nurseries. Other Bay Area cities with nurseries included Oakland, Hayward and Redwood City.  

The growers, who didn’t necessarily have any prior nursery experience, were drawn to the area for its climate and ample cheap land to buy or rent, Graves said.

“They were here, they wanted to work hard, and they thrived,” she said. “One of the reasons why cut flowers became a niche, is because you can grow them in a short period of time which allows you to do it on rented land.” 

With tough economic times in Japan, Oshima, who now lives in El Cerrito, said his grandparents were seeking opportunity in the “land of opportunity.” This was similar, he said, to immigrants coming from Europe at this time and is a familiar story in Richmond and the rest of the country.

In the early days, cut flowers were toted by trolley to Oakland, then ferried to commercial flower markets in San Francisco, which the Japanese growers helped found.

Business was good for the families for decades. Carnations were easy to grow, and roses were in high demand.

Then came the invasion of Pearl Harbor by Japan in 1941, propelling the United States into a more aggressive role in the second world war.  By federal law, many western states, including California, rounded up anyone of Japanese descent, even those born in the U.S.and were citizens, and sent them off to the relocation camps, which were essentially prisons.

A few of Richmond’s nursery growers moved to “free” states that weren’t imprisoning Japanese people, but most were ultimately forced to live at the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, while others ended up at the Granada War Relocation Center in Colorado.

Unlike many incarceration experiences, most of the Richmond nurseries stayed afloat during these years, with friends or neighbors stepping in to care for the properties. Many Richmond operators owned their land before that became illegal, or had passed it to their U.S.-born children, before this, too, wasn’t allowed. 

Racism against Japanese people originally ramped up in the aftermath of the 1882 Chinese Expulsion Act, which banned most people from China from entering the United States, though it was enacted after Chinese immigrants built most of the country’s transcontinental railroad — extremely hard and deadly work. 

Arriving to fill labor shortages, as thousands of others at the time, Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s soon faced a host of local, state and federal laws banning them from becoming citizens, owning or leasing land, and eventually, like with the Chinese, from even entering the United States. 

“We want your labor, but we don’t want you to stay, we don’t want you to get permanent ownership, so we’re  taking away your land rights,” Jim Oshima said of these policies.

In time, these laws were reversed. 

During the years of incarceration, they suffered major upheaval, emotionally and materially, their futures uncertain, according to historical accounts. But most Richmond nursery families pieced together their businesses when they returned. 

At least for a while. 

In the 1970s, lower priced flowers from South America were outcompeting the U.S. market, dealing what became a final blow to the Japanese growers. Many started selling or leasing their land to developers, or to the city. Some lost chunks of their property under eminent domain when the interstate was expanded in 1955.

Restoring original buildings still in the works

When the city acquired its piece of former nursery land, some of the original glass greenhouses were still standing, though they showed signs of the years, along with the weathered wooded buildings, the houses and outbuildings. 

The initial hope of historical preservation advocates was to restore these as elements as a tribute.

But this has been challenging, with the damage of time and vandalism. 

This includes a 2025 fire that caused major damage to one of the two remaining family homes, the Sakai house, after the structures were moved to a nearby fenced lot for storage. 

Some, including former Richmond Mayor Tom Butt, an architect deeply involved in historic preservation, accused the city of not doing more to protect the nursery structures. 

But restoring and returning at least some of the remaining original buildings to near their original locations is still the plan, according to the city. Vallier, the consulting planner, said securing grant money for this is almost finalized.

It’s unclear if the Sakai house can be salvaged, Graves said. But the aim is to eventually move the second family house, which belonged to the Oishi family, closer to its original location in or near the greenbelt, for some kind of community use. A water tower and water pump will also be returned from storage. 

None of the glass greenhouses, some that were as large as 10,000 square feet,  remain intact. Pieces stored in a shipping container at the site include hundreds of panes of glass. It’s unlikely these would survive reconstruction, Graves said, but they may be used in some other interpretive or educational design.  

Sculptures and other educational features are also planned.

The initial development plan called for the market rate housing developer to help fund the restoration and maintenance of some of the historical structures in partnership with the city. But this became moot after the bankruptcy. It’s unknown if a new developer will be asked to do the same. 

The new signs were paid for by a combination of funds from the city, National Park Service, and Richmond Rotary. 

The Oishi house, deemed salvageable, belonged to Larry Oishi’s grandparents, but he spent a lot of time there as a child, hanging out with cousins. His family’s nursery and house were a few blocks south of the Miraflores site, in an area that’s now residential. Though the nurseries are long gone, sold to a developer, Oishi still lives in the family house.  

The Oshima family nursery was also outside of today’s Miraflores area, where Honda of El Cerrito, Home Depot and the freeway sit today. 

As they took Richmondside on a walk around Miraflores in late spring Oishi and Oshima reminisced about the nursery family community, with piles of cousins and neighborhood friends freewheeling across the properties, playing and sometimes pitching in to help.

They recalled the fertile smells of the greenhouses and mucking around in Baxter Creek, which they described as a ditch. And they remembered the scary chore of washing greenhouse roof glass. 

They reflected on their family’s roles, fates, and turns of history. Oishi’s father worked in the Richmond shipyards as a welder, then, in an ironic twist,  joined an Army combat unit while he and his family were interned in the Topaz relocation camp. The U.S military included some segregated units of enlistees of Japanese ancestry, who, in many cases, left internment camps to serve. 

Some historians believe they sought to prove their loyalty to the U.S., in hopes of receiving fair treatment in return. 

Oishi and Oshima understand how their family businesses were impacted by market forces, which led to their closure. Their parents worked diligently in the nurseries through floundering years, but their generation moved on to more reliable jobs. 

But like many of their relatives and peers, they’re struck today by how their U.S. immigrant story keeps repeating, in variations, from the treatment of Muslims to Latinos, detained, or forbidden entrance to the country, without evidence of crime. 

“In Richmond they were only given 30 days’ notice to leave the city. They’d been in business 30-40 years and were given 30 days to leave,” Oshima said. 

It’s an emotional piece of his history, he said, but also a modern day worry.

 “Deeper, it’s looking at the whole American community, that we don’t want unfair treatment to happen again,” he said. 

Oishi isn’t confident that many people will pay attention to the Miraflores signs since the park is off the beaten path, and at least today, leans toward ragtag even with volunteer love. 

But he hopes they do. 

“You’ve got to respect history, so you don’t do the same things later,” he said, recalling a lesson learned from an elder North Richmond nursery family member, Flora Ninomiya,, who was a docent at the Rosie the Riveter park. 

  “It’s almost as if we’re not learning,” he said. “For America, we should be better.”