Renowned Bonsai Expert: Botanical Garden's Okamura is Dead

Renowned Bonsai Expert
Botanical Garden's Okamura is Dead

FRANK M. OKAMURA Frank Masao Okamura, who played a large role in popularizing the Japanese art of cultivating plants and trees in miniature during 34 years at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, died Jan. 9 at the age of 94. His daughter, Reiko, said the cause of death was believed to be either heart or respiratory failure.

A Bonsai Pioneer Here

During his tenure as its Japanese gardener and bonsai master, the Botanical Garden received numerous honors, including first prize in the International Flower Show. He became a renowned teacher of bonsai and created the world's first indoor collection of the immaculately cultivated miniatures. In 1981, the year he retired, Mr. Okamura was honored by the Emperor of Japan for furthering knowledge of bonsai.

Mr. Okamura spent World War II in a California relocation camp for JapaneseAmerican citizens - a xenophobia, he noted during a 1981 interview, that was not applied to German-American and Italian-American residents of this country although their native lands were also at war with the United States. When he was released shortly before the end of the war, he left his wife and two daughters in California to try to find a better life for all of them in New York.

Rebuilt Japanese Garden

He was at first employed as a busboy and a cabinet-maker, but in 1947 learned of an opening at the Botanical Garden and was hired there. His first job, ironically, was to rebuild the Japanese Garden, which had been destroyed by vandals during the war.

Mr. Okamura was born in a rural part of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the only child of a farmer, and when he was 13 he and his mother emigrated to California, where his father had settled in Sacramento.

As a teenager, Mr. Okamura picked cherries with other migrant workers, but at 17 he got a job assisting a gardener and discovered a calling.

He is survived by his daughters, Mihoko and Reiko, who retired as an Assistant Professor of Graphic Arts at the New York City College of Technology.