The Garden Name That Disappeared for a Decade

The garden on your left was built for the eighteen ninety four Midwinter Fair, laid out by an immigrant from Australia named George Turner Marsh, who hired Japanese craftsmen to construct it. Its real story, though, belongs to the family that ran it for the next half century.

A Japanese immigrant gardener named Makoto Hagiwara became caretaker shortly after the fair closed and spent roughly three decades expanding the garden into something close to what stands today. After his death, his daughter Takano Hagiwara and her own children carried the work forward, three generations of one family shaping the same few acres of Golden Gate Park.

San Francisco has long credited Makoto Hagiwara with another invention entirely: the modern fortune cookie, supposedly served here and baked locally by a bakery called Benkyodo. A bakery owner in Los Angeles made the same claim about his own shop, and the dispute got serious enough that a San Francisco court of historical review actually ruled on it in nineteen eighty three, finding in favor of Hagiwara. Los Angeles never accepted the verdict, so the true origin remains genuinely disputed.

What is not disputed is what happened to the Hagiwara family during the Second World War. As anti Japanese sentiment spread after Pearl Harbor, Takano Hagiwara and her children were forced from their home here and sent to an internment camp, along with Japanese Americans across the West Coast. While they were gone, the garden itself was stripped of its name, relabeled the Oriental Tea Garden, and several of its Japanese structures were torn down.

The name was not restored until nineteen fifty two. The road bordering the garden was finally renamed Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive in nineteen eighty six, decades after the family that built this place was forced out of it by its own country.