Toichi Domoto Born on December 11, 1902, in Oakland, CA. He was the first son of Kanetaro “Tom” Domoto, who had been born in 1866 or 1867 in Wakayama Ken, Japan. Tom grew up as one of thirteen children born to Teru Morita Domoto. The family were mostly rice farmers, and they were in the section where the Mandarin oranges were being grown. At age sixteen in 1882 Tom and his brother emigrated to ttheUnited States, arriving in Seattle. The next year found them in San Francisco. With little knowledge of English and in need of a job, they began as kitchen helpers at the Palace Hotel. Sometime later Tom worked in the gardens of the Adolph Sutro estate (now Sutro Heights Park) out near the Cliff House, where they had a big home and garden. He started taking care of the garden there.
About this time he entered his first business venture by importing a quantity of Unshiu or Satsuma oranges from Japan (no import restrictions in those years!). The novel fruits reached San Francisco in good condition and sold well. But a second and bigger repeat shipment arrived totally rotted and he "lost his shirt," as he recalled later. Undaunted, he and another brother, Motonoshin, started a small nursery in Oakland, about where Third and Grove Streets are now. This was a success and in a few years, in the late 1880's, they bought four acres of land on Central Avenue and East 14th Street in East Oakland. This is now 55th Avenue and East 14th Street, in the Melrose district of Oakland. Subsequently, in the 1890's, they added four more acres to the property. Here the two brothers soon established a range of greenhouses and lath-houses. Their main business was the growing of chrysanthemums and carnations in the greenhouses for cut flowers. They also raised some seasonal flowering plants in pots. By 1890 they were importing plants from Japan that were shipped during the dormant season. They also brought in Australian specialties, imported forcing azaleas from Belgium and bulbs from Holland for forcing in pots or as cut flowers. Among their earliest importations of camellias from Japan was Camellia japonica 'Usu-Otome,' which Toichi's father renamed 'Pink Perfection.' By this time the brothers had acquired new first names and were known far and wide in the trade as Tom (or Thomas K.) for Kanetaro Domoto, and Henry for his brother Motonoshin Domoto. They also more or less divided the responsibilities of the thriving nursery. Henry managed the cut flowers and the selling end, while Tom took on the growing of ornamental shrubs, trees and pot plants such as coleus, pelargoniums, holiday peppers, poinsettias and Easter lilies. A forty page Descriptive Catalogue of Japanese Plants and Shrubs, issued by the "Domoto Bros., Proprietors" in 1892 was not illustrated but did list a great variety of ornamental plants.
Tom Domoto made a trip to Japan and was married there on June 29, 1899. He brought his bride to East Oakland and established a home on the nursery grounds. Toichi's mother never went back to Japan. Toichi was eventually joined by two brothers and eight sisters.
During those years the Domoto brothers were leaders in the cut flower and potted plant business, About this time the area surrounding the nursery property started to build up with homes and so on November 11, 1902, a month before Toichi was born, the brothers bought forty-eight acres in the Fitchburg district of Oakland, where 78th Avenue and Olive Street meet now. They called this place the "New Ranch." Here they put up twenty-five greenhouses, each 28 feet by 200 feet and raised cut roses and carnations in them. (Those greenhouses probably came from back East or even maybe Europe because greenhouses as such in Japan are a much later thing. ) The final move from the nursery on 55th Avenue to the "New Ranch" was made in 1910. During those years the Domoto Bros. Nursery received, via railroad from New York, boxcar loads of English laurels, Grecian laurels or bay trees and boxwoods imported from Holland. These were four to seven feet tall, all trained in pyramids, globes, standards (tree form) and other shapes (including what the trade now calls "poodles"). Each one was grown and shipped in a fancy, painted wooden planter box. "They were the devil to unload from the box cars," he recalls. The nursery had a fine reputation, and a name as ”Domoto College” because of the horticultural education and experience and start in life it gave to sons of Japanese and Japanese-American families. Many of California's most prominent flower growers got their start in the trade by working for the Domotos, including the Maedas, Nabetas, T. Honda, Enomoto, Korematsu, and Riohitsu Shibuya. The Caucasian growers nicknamed the place 'Domoto College."'
His father's business was started mainly in importing plants from Japan. The shipment wasn't year-round; it was generally through fall and early spring, when the plants were dormant. the plants would come in big crates, and we would unpack them, and sell the plants. The plants that came in from Japan at that time—the ones I remember as coming in in quantity were camellias, daphne, aspidistra, those were the main things. Then later, the fruit and nut trees from Japan. Some of the first persimmon trees and Japanese pear, summer plums. And chestnuts. Importing those mostly for not directly retail, very little retail. Most of them were sold to other nurseries in California for planting. They used to call it two-year, bare-root trees. They'd come in boxes, about three by three by six or seven feet. Those boxes, they used to be called ton baku. Ton baku, I guess it was more or less equivalent to our one ton, and baku means box. Since they came by boat, that was the unit of measurement for charging the freight. If it was heavy, they'd weigh it. If it was light, they'd be charged by the cubic feet. at least a month on the steamer. So the plants that came in, it would mean at least a month and a half from the time it was packed to the time it got to Oakland, San Francisco. There was no care on shipboard. They were all in enclosed boxes. They could still come in with the soil at that time, so the roots would be wrapped with spagnum moss, and then wrapped very tightly with rice straw, and rope, wound around, and made a tight ball, and then packed into crates. One crate, they would have maybe three sections where the ends of the balls would be up against the end of the box, and then each group was squeezed in very tightly. there was very little in the way of inspection. They were supposed to be clean plants when they came, but after they came to San Francisco, we had to fumigate them in the nursery. The two-horse express wagon would leave the nursery in the dark early morning hours, get on a ferry for San Francisco, make the deliveries and usually get back in the middle or late afternoon.
In 1917, the year Toichi graduated from Lockwood Grammar School in East Oakland, the nursery bought its first truck, a 1½-ton Denby, with flat, solid-rubber tires. They turned in six horses as down payment! That year the Domoto Bros. Nursery officially became Domoto Bros., Inc., in order to live with the anti-alien Land Law restrictions. Another gold medal exhibit at the Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 had been the collection of Kurume azaleas sent by the Japanese nurseryman, Kojiro Akashi. There were thirty plants in a dozen varieties and after the Exposition the Domoto brothers bought some of them. In 1916, they imported their first Kurume azaleas. Tom Domoto traveled back to Japan in 1917 to buy some Kurume azaleas from the association of growers of these azaleas in Kurume, prefecture of Fukuoka. He then had the exclusive sales rights between 1917 and 1921, introduced twenty-five varieties, and sold about 10,000 plants, half going to the East Coast. The plants returned to the U.S. on a different vessel than did Tom.
About the last of the big import orders came from Japan for the 1915 Fair. That was the last of the big import orders that came in, either from Japan or from Europe. Domoto Brothers wasn't incorporated until 1913, whenever the anti-Alien Land Law came in as law. That's when pretty near all the greenhouses and nurseries around went into incorporation. Even the plants that my dad used to import from Japan for sale weren't brought in on a large scale. The few that were brought in used to go to New York for sale, mostly the smaller ones. And then most of them were cedars. The cedars were the mos popular after the Chamaecyparis. Maybe the youngest one would probably be at least three or four years, the smaller--the younger plants. And the bigger ones, they were probably ten or fifteen years old. But even those, the ones that he got in, they weren't real big. The biggest ones probably would stand about table height. It wasn't until the time of the 1915 Fair that we brought the real big trees in, and that was brought in for the fair. [when it came in 1913 from Japan for the 1915 Fair it came that way, in a terra cotta pot. The age--someone used to say, oh, it was about two hundred years old, and someone said one hundred. When the top of it died I had to cut it off, cut it down to where it looked clear, and stabilize it. A professor at Berkeley came to look at the plant. He asked me what I was going to do with the branch that was cut, and I said I didn't know I was going to do anything, but it had enough of an interesting shape that I might do something. He said, "Could I have it?" I said, "Sure, what do you want to do with it?" I thought he wanted to do like I did, train something else on it. He said, "I want to count the rings." So he took it, and he said as near as he could find out--he said actually, the annual rings are not always true because sometimes it doubles up--but as near as he could figure it was between seventy-five to eighty years old, way up there at the top. When you were relocated during the war, Peter Milan kept these Oriental-shaped landscape trees going? Yes, it was just a matter of keeping them watered. So if some of them lost their shape, it was just a matter that I had to get someone to come and re-prune it and shape it. They were really not bonsai-shaped. They were more like irregularly-shaped plants. The tea garden in Golden Gate Park. See, that was really for the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition. But then the '15 Fair came along, and they kind of enlarged it a little bit and did some remodeling. And then during the '39 Fair—buildings deteriorate and they had to rebuild part of it. But the old Moon Bridge--that's the picture you see, "Japanese Tea Garden," that's the thing that they emphasized. The plants Toichi's father imported in '13 from Japan, one of the maples, a Pacific Basin maple. But the big cedars that were imported from Japan--. My father got the contract to supply the plants for the Formosan exhibit, but the Japanese garden was by another landscape man. My father supplied the plants, he didn't do any designing of it. ]
Nursery Stock Plant and Seed Quarantine 37 was promulgated shortly after and under the authority of the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912 and stopped all unlimited importations. Quarantine 37 went into effect right after War I. It stopped the importing of plants from all over--not just from Japan, but all over--for propagating purposes, to prevent disease and insects from coming in. But actually there was an embargo before that because the war was on and there was no space available for bringing the plants in. Then no more big plants coming in, nothing larger than eighteen inches. And they had to be plants that weren't too old, young plants, and they had to be brought in bare root and fumigated. That was just to get stock plants in for propagating. Bonsai plants, plants shaped like bonsai, were almost impossible to bring in. You could bring it on on a permit, but the chances of survival were kind of poor. But the limitation of imports was already on because of the war. The only way you could get their coming into the States either from the Orient or from Europe was by getting a special permit from the War Trade Board to use the boats coming this way if they had room, and that was very limited. Then because 37 was going to go in, the nurserymen here were just coming out of World War I and still trying to cope with their home propagation. They were trying to keep out the competition that would be coming in from Europe or Asia or wherever that used to come in, that is to work up a home industry in the meantime. After that, we could get only plants that were certified free of insect disease, and free of soil, and then mostly for propagating purposes only, so that the USDA was limiting the amount of plants that could come in. You wonder whether it wasn't really working to the advantage of American growers. Because it turned out economically harder to get foreign material, and so there was less foreign competition.
Toichi Domoto graduated in 1921 from the Fremont High School in the Melrose district of Oakland. He went to Stanford University from 1921 to 1923 where he enjoyed life in the Japanese student house on campus, took a general course, manned the rooting section at football games, and was consummately collegiate. Then in 1923 he would transfer from Stanford to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The floriculture program at Illinois was one of the best, and it would be a logical change. Toichi needed to get training in a field where work would be possible, and mechanical engineering, his first choice, was unlikely to offer promising jobs to a Japanese American. At Illinois he would join the Cosmopolitan Club, and while those associations would not prepare him for the experiences of prejudice that were ahead, the group would give him freedom to grow, more good college years to enjoy, and more memories of banquets and football games and rallies and collegiate traditions. He graduated in floriculture from the University of Illinois in February, 1926.