Kaneji (Kan) Domoto was born on November 5th, 1912 in Oakland, CA. Raised by a family of nursery workers, Kan Domoto worked in his family nursery from a young age, ultimately influencing his career in landscape architecture. The Domoto Brothers nursery, based in Oakland, was renowned throughout the Bay Area and is credited as the first nursery in Northern California to commercially produce camellias, wisterias, azaleas, and lilies imported from Japan. In the late 1920s to early 1930s Kan studied physics and math at Stanford University, but dropped out after two years to help his family with the nursery during the Great Depression. The economic recession resulted in the Domoto family filing for bankruptcy, and the nursery was foreclosed upon and seized.

In 1938, Kan returned to school, enrolling at University of California, Berkeley to study Landscape and Architecture. During this time he worked on the Japanese gardens at the World’s Fair in both New York and San Francisco. After the close of the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, Kan helped secure the transportation and installation of the rocks from the Exposition’s Japanese Pavilion Garden in San Francisco to UC Berkeley’s Botanical Garden in Strawberry Canyon, in the hills above the UC Berkeley campus. After working for the New York World’s Fair, Domoto apprenticed for Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in Wisconsin from August 1939 until November 1939. In 1942, Domoto and his wife Sally Fujii (a fiber artist who also studied at UC Berkeley), were incarcerated at the Granada Relocation Center in Amache, Colorado.

After World War II, Kan and Sally Domoto moved to New York. Kan continued working with Frank Lloyd Wright and designed five homes for the Usonia Housing project in Pleasantville, New York; clients include Bier; Harris; Silson; Lurie; and Siegal.

Around 1960, Domoto shifted his focus from architectural to landscape architecture projects. Based in New Rochelle, New York, he designed gardens for private residences and also larger institutions such as Dartmouth College, Hopkins Center for the Arts (Hanover, New Hampshire) in 1965; the New York Aquarium Penguin Pen (New York City, NY) in 1967-1968; AMF/Schulman Investment Corporation (White Plains, NY) circa 1980; and the Jackson Park Japanese Garden (Chicago, IL) circa 1981. His designs focused on Japanese landscape traditions and were heavily influenced by Japanese rock gardens, using rocks as sculptural forms in most of his projects. Major residential projects include: the Beskind Residence (Scarsdale, New York) in 1955 and the Durst Residence (Scarsdale, New York) circa 1965.

From the early 1960s through the 1970s, Domoto was involved in the Bonsai community in the United States, attending exhibitions and teaching workshops. Domoto once stated in his book Bonsai and the Japanese Garden, “Developing a Bonsai has been a very satisfying form of art to me. It has given me a great deal of pleasure creating beautiful shapes and giving character to ordinary plants. The Bonsai art is different from painting sculpture or ceramics because it is a ‘live art.’” (Domoto and Kay) In 2002, Kan Domoto died in New Rochelle, NY at the age of 89.

Kan Domoto’s rich career in architecture and landscape design spanned over fifty years and included over 800 residential, commercial, recreational, and educational projects primarily on the East Coast. He received many awards for his gardens including the Frederick Law Olmsted Award for his Jackson Park design in Chicago circa 1981.

Sources:

“Kaneji Domoto Obituary,” New York Times, New York, February 10, 2002. Domoto and Kay, Bonsai and the Japanese Garden.