About George Tanaka

GEORGE TANAKA, 1912-82 - A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

George Tanaka was born in Vancouver of Japanese parents. He attended Vancouver Technical School and not long after graduating in 1920 began working with a Nisei gardener, a Mr. Moritsugu. He studied architecture and landscape architecture on his own, reading books and periodicals in the public library, and was greatly influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright's comments about Japanese gardens. When Canada's War Measures Act forced Japanese-Canadians to move from the west coast, Tanaka separated from his family in 1942 and came to Toronto, where he worked in electronics while becoming politically active in the Japanese community. Tanaka actively served as a volunteer in the Canadian Army Intelligence Corp for over a year near the end of the war, when his participation finally was allowed by the Government. Afterwards, he continued his efforts on behalf of Japanese-Canadians, first as chair of the Japanese Canadian Committee for Democracy in 1946 and then as national executive secretary of the National Japanese Citizens' Association, from 1947-53.

He returned to landscape architecture in 1955, established his own professional office, and almost immediately achieved recognition in the field, with articles about his work in various professional and popular publications. He was elected vice-president of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects, 1967-70, and in 1969 won two of the three top Excellence in Design Awards at the first national competition of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects. From 1972-74 he was elected a member of the Board of the CSLA and served as its secretary. Tanaka was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1975, and in 1976 was honoured by the Department of Landscape Architecture, Ohio State University, by a retro-spective exhibition and guest lectureship. He was introduced as having "distinguished himself through a number of award-winning projects in Canada as one of contemporary society's foremost landscape sculptors and landscape architects. His work displays a unique sensitivity gained from his Japanese heritage to the intrinsic beauty of natural materials."

As part of his talk to students and faculty of Humber College, Toronto in 1981, Tanaka said: "the materials of Nature - the rocks, the stones, the trees, the plants, the water and the earth itself - are used as the 'Design-Tools' by which the landscape-forms take shape. The use of Tension in design as between diverse elements: the hard element against the soft; the rugged rock against the flowing curve of a pathway, for example, gives the design a spirit of tension and an aesthetic quality. Whatever the qualification of the design problem, the results are to find a happy Balance and Harmony in all of the elements. Nothing is left to casual chance or to irresponsible placement." He also said: "All of the hopes and dreams, and even the fears, that played a part in my total experience, has influenced me."

George Tanaka and his wife, Cana, were tragically killed in 1982 in an automobile accident. In 1988, the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto, which Tanaka had helped to found some twenty-five years before, honoured him with a special tribute and retrospective exhibition of his design projects.

Bernard Katz, Head

Special Collections and Library Development