Japanese community resources in San Fernando Valley, CA

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

The San Fernando Valley Japanese Community Center is an invaluable community resource serving the Northeast San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County. This community asset offers many educational and recreational activities for not only the Japanese community, but also the larger community in which it is situated. The SFV Japanese Community Center hosts many weekend festivals in honor of several important Japanese holidays. I invite those educators who live in the San Fernando Valley to get to know this invaluable cultural center. They offer dozens of activities in entertainment, sports & fitness, music, dance, arts, etc. For more information contact the center at:

12953 Branford Street
Pacoima, California 91331

Contact: Harold Suetsugu or Bob Makuta

(818) 899-1989

http://www.nikkeifederation.org/commcenters/sanfernando.html

[Anonymous]

The Japanese Garden in the city of Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley is a beautiful community resource offering a calming and aesthetically beautiful site of several acres for the community to enjoy and learn about Japanese culture. To contact this garden and learn about docent-led tours and other activities held at the garden such as formal tea ceremonies, use the following information:

The Japanese Garden
6100 Woodley Ave, Van Nuys,
California, 91406

818 756 8166

http://www.lacity.org/SAN/japanesegarden/index.htm

[Anonymous]

A little about the history of the San Fernando Valley - including the taking of 3,177 residents of Japanese descent from their farms. A good background for those of who teach in the Valley.

http://americassuburb.com/brief_history.html

[Anonymous]

In response to jpena's informative post of 08-22-2006, I visited the Japanese Garden in Van Nuys, which is on Woodley Avenue between Oxnard (the Orange-Line Street) and Burbank, across from Lake Balboa. The supervisor of the Garden was not there when I stopped by recently, but I had spoken with her by phone earlier and learned that the Garden is open during the day on Saturday and Sunday and from 12:30 to 3:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday. It is open to docent-led tours on weekday mornings (except Friday), an excellent opportunity for field trips where students can learn about the principles of Japanese garden design, the basics of Zen aesthetics and the pervasive impact Japanese concepts of garden design have had on public and private gardens throughout California. (See my post on a recent Los Angeles Times article about the history of Japanese gardens in the Asians in America thread.) In addition to its extensive displays and walkways, the Garden contains an appropriately small, separate section of bonsai trees, an enchanting world of miniature live trees in pots certain to delight students of all grade levels, who will no doubt have many questions about exactly how you manage to grow a tiny evergreen in a small, cramped container.

The majority of the Garden is devoted to the three essentials of Japanese garden design: stone, water, trees. A large landscape displays the famous Zen raked-gravel "streams" that flow around "mountains" (medium-sized boulders). Real water flows in artifical streams and small waterfalls spanned by several arching moon bridges, one of concrete, the other, more traditionally, of wood. Lily pads dot small inlets and a large artificial lake. Waterfowl are colorful and dramatic. The day I was there I saw a small white crane, graceful as any adorning a Japanese scroll, and a majestic great heron. As you wander meditatively along the walkways of the Garden, you pass several times, and from several different directions, a stand of trees that provides a remarkable illusion of a large forest with a soft breeze wafting through the tree branches, right there in the urban heart of the Valley. At the far end of the lake is a spectacular tea pavilion looking out over the water. Inside the pavilion you can look out across the lake and the rest of the Garden through wooden lattice-work and walk past paper-covered sliding doors and feel like a character out of an Akira Kurosawa period film. The floor of the pavilion is tile rather than the more traditional wood. But inside the pavilion, in a discrete side chamber, sealed off with a glass wall and restricted to public access, is an authentic replica of a Tokugawa-era teahouse: small, austere, with blond-wood floor and walls and a simple, rustic-looking teapot, very much in the spirit of the real thing, ideal for holding an authentic Japanese tea ceremony. Unfortunately, as I learned from my talk with the Garden's supervisor, there has been only one tea ceremony held during the nine years she has worked there. (Perhaps if more of us express an interest in attending one, more might be held in the future.)

The Japanese Garden as a whole reflects at every turn the grace and delicacy and subtle use of contrast that comprise the Zen aesthetic. (Even the public restroom, with its wooden lattice-work frames for fluorescent lights, manages to bring off an unexpected Zen awareness.) It is perfect for a field trip with your students or for your own brief mini-respite, with serene beauty and meditative calm, from the frenetic, jagged pace of urban life.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School

[Anonymous]

Tonight I am attending the Obon Matsuri- Obon Festival at the San Fernando Valley Japanese Community Center. My dad works at this festival every year. He is active in the SFV Bonsai club and each year they showcase their prized bonsai. I am looking forward to the aray of food, the dance performances, and many carnival booths. This is a great event to experience some Japanese culture.

John Yamazaki

[Author]

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