Arts & Entertainment

New Film on Local Japanese-American Flower Growers

"Blossoms and Thorns," an 18-minute documentary about Japanese Americans in the once-thriving flower nurseries of Richmond and El Cerrito, premieres Saturday at the Rosie the Riveter National Park Visitor Center in Richmond.

Memories of the internment experienced by local Japanese-American flower growers during World War II will come to life Saturday during the , Blossoms and Thorns.

The 18-minute film, directed by Ken Kokka, features interviews with local residents whose immigrant families built the original flower nurseries in Richmond and El Cerrito and were persecuted in the internment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

There will be three showings of the documentary at the Visitor Education Center of the in Richmond on Saturday, at 1 p.m., 3 p.m., and 3:30 p.m.

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At 2 p.m., there will be a panel discussion, which will feature Kokka, assistant producer Donna Graves, and members of several nursery families. NBC Bay Area reporter George Kiriyama will moderate the discussion.

Blossoms and Thorns is the culmination of a community effort that began years ago to document the stories of Japanese-American flower growers, whose nurseries were concentrated in Richmond and El Cerrito’s northwestern corner, just north of Cutting Boulevard.

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Graves, a social historian who is also interviewed in the film, said the process began in 2006 when members of the Contra Costa Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) expressed interest in preserving the memories of the local nurseries.

Chizu Iiyama, a 90-year-old El Cerrito resident and JACL member, strongly advocated for the making of a documentary, which unlike a temporary exhibit, would be a lasting project that future generations could view.

“We thought in terms of a video that could capture more than just the pictures, and that it would be made available to the schools and other historical museums,” she said.

A temporary exhibit on the local Japanese nursery community, also titled "Blossoms & Thorns," was held at the Richmond Art Center in 2010.

Iiyama and her late husband, Ernest Iiyama, spoke many times at schools and universities about their wartime incarceration and civil rights. In 2009, Chizu Iiyama spoke on behalf of 42 Japanese Americans who received honorary degrees at UC Berkeley, nearly 67 years after their studies at Cal were interrupted by the war.

Kokka, a visual effects producer who grew up in Berkeley and serves as a senior instructor at the East Bay Judo Institute in El Cerrito, was brought onto the project in 2009, in part because of his 2005 movie, The Chessmen, about a Japanese-American nursery.

According to Kokka, it was difficult to fit the long history of the Japanese-American growers into a film less than 20 minutes in length. 

“I was struggling to tell more of the nitty-gritty details of the Japanese American growers’ story, but then it was important to Chizu Iiyama and the others who chose me, that we tell the story of internment,” Kokka said.

The internment experience as told by survivors in the documentary, like Richmond resident Tom Oishi, struck a particular note with Kokka, whose parents and grandparents were interned.

"He (Oishi) didn’t think of himself as ‘other.’ He didn’t think of himself as Japanese American," Kokka said. "He thought of himself as just an American.”

Most of the photographs featured in Blossoms and Thorns came from the surviving members of local Japanese-American families, who provided them to Graves and the El Cerrito Historical Society.

The video footage of the greenhouses was taken at the Sakai and Oishi nurseries, the only remnants of the once booming local flower industry that was later destroyed by foreign imports.

Viewers may notice that the film makes no mention of El Cerrito. But some of the nurseries were located within the city’s borders, including that of the family of Ruby Adachi Hiramoto, who is featured in the film.

The makers of the film said the focus needed to be on Richmond, so that the documentary could be featured in the Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park’s rotating collection of films.

“We saw the opportunity to have this film shown at the Rosie the Riveter National Park as an important means to have this story reach a large audience,” Graves said.

Iiyama and many other members of the Contra Costa JACL have already seen the film, and hope high schools and colleges around the area will show students the film to highlight the diverse and rich history of the Richmond-El Cerrito community.

Blossoms and Thorns is the most recent of several efforts by community members to preserve the local Japanese heritage.

Tom Panas of the El Cerrito Historical Society has spearheaded efforts in the last five years to , and Panas is pleased that the film will shed light on a rarely discussed topic.

“For years people didn’t talk about internment or this kind of stuff,” he said. “This film is the first time the local community has come out to try and document this part of history."


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