NABF Newsletter #1

Feature #11

John Naka's Hawaii Connection

by Hawaii Bonsai Association

Hawaii’s bonsai community, particularly through the Hawaii Bonsai Association (HBA), has a bonsai friendship with John Naka going back over 30 years ago. We first met and came under the John Naka influence sometime in the 1970’s when Bonsai Clubs International during Horace and Connie Hinds heyday held a big bonsai convention in Pasadena, California and a large delegation from Hawaii participated. We were deeply impressed with John Naka’s bonsai artistry as he was the featured headliner of the convention and also visited his bonsai collection and others in the Los Angeles area. We noticed at the time that even with the predominant use of native American tree material, like the California juniper, John Naka’s bonsai exuded a distinct Japan bonsai flavor and strict adherence to the classic bonsai forms, which he must have acquired through his early pre-war exposure to his grandfather’s bonsai in Fukuoka, Japan. As an early bonsai teacher, the core of the Southern California bonsai community was made up of his students and disciples which contributed to the highest level of quality and excellence of bonsai to be found anywhere in the country. Even then it was easy to see and understand why John Naka was regarded as the premier bonsai master in America.

So when HBA hosted the BCI Convention in 1980 at the Waikiki Sheraton Hotel John Naka was the featured headliner demonstrator representing the USA which also featured Debbie Koreshoff from Australia and Saburo Kato from Japan. We insisted on the very best to represent American bonsai on the international stage, and it had to be John Naka. John rose to the occasion with a masterful job in shaping a giant Ohia Lehua (Meterosidiros) collected from the slopes of the Kilauea volcano. Again, when Hawaii hosted IBC ’90 in Hawaii it was John Naka who was the featured headliner on the program, who will be remembered for working on three collected Brazilian Pepper trees (Hawaiian Christmas Berry) with massive, curving trunks which still survive today at Fuku Bonsai’s heritage collection exhibit. In the ensuing years large delegations of Hawaii bonsaiists have gone up to California to attend and support bonsai conventions put on by the California Bonsai Society and the Golden State Bonsai Federation, in large part attracted by the prospect that John Naka would be the featured headline demonstrator at those conventions.

But the most indelible bonsai legacy left by John Naka to Hawaii’s bonsai community lies in the fact that so many hundreds of them learned their bonsai “the John Naka way and style.” Since 1970, the HBA has conducted the “ABC’s of Bonsai” classes averaging 40 students per class who were taught the basic fundamentals of bonsai using John Naka’s “Bonsai Techniques I” as the course textbook, which continues even to this day. Our course instructors have found that “Bonsai Techniques I” was the best instructional book on bonsai and the most effective teaching aid and tool for the bonsai beginners, enhanced largely by the graphic sketched illustrations and diagrams drawn by John Naka himself. The Naka rules of bonsai have been religiously followed by our bonsai students, for example the lowest branch always starts at least one-third up from the base of the trunk, notwithstanding that we have seen classic bonsai in Japan with bottom branches starting just a few inches above the ground. In Hawaii, John Naka’s “Bonsai Techniques I” is bonsai bible!