Jesse Kuroiwa, director of the Visual Resource Center (VRC) and lecturer in the College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) at CU Denver, is investigating the lives and treatment of Japanese immigrants in the United States during World War II and how they expressed their culture through gardening. As a Japanese American whose grandfather immigrated to the U.S., Kuroiwa draws on his personal history and academic interests. His work in both landscape architecture and architecture led him to explore gaimenteki doka, a Japanese tradition of conforming outwardly, while quietly preserving their cultural identity.
During the war, the U.S. faced significant food and labor shortages. Authorities incarcerated many Nikkei, Japanese emigrants and their descendants living outside Japan, regardless of citizenship status and forced them to work in internment camps to boost food production. In these harsh environments, officials pressured Nikkei to project a narrative of national pride, which they presented outwardly to avoid punishment for acts of defiance.
“The majority of these sites were located in remote landscapes with arid climates and were susceptible to harsh temperature extremes and dust storms,” presented Kuroiwa to the audience at the 2026 Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) conference in Mexico City. “Plants were a critical element in creating a hospitable living environment. Camp gardens also provided benefits to Nikkei wellbeing, as they were able to exercise some degree of agency over their lives and their regimented surroundings through gardening.”
Resistance Gardening
Aesthetically pruned tree (fallen). Photo by Jesse Kuroiwa
Kuroiwa teaches photography in the college, and he also teaching a course titled, “Memory in Built Form,” which looks at the ways in which society remembers people and events through public sites of memory, like sculptures, memorials, and monuments.
Many Nikkei practiced Shinto, but authorities outlawed the religion. So, in a silent rebellion, Nikkei applied gardening methods in the internment camps, displaying an act of solidarity with Americans and portraying the care for their gardens, while displaying their resistance and reclaiming their religion through the care and attention of their personal gardens.
“There are classical Japanese gardening techniques, the use of bridges, the use of ponds that are meaningful and significant,” said Kuroiwa. “The administrators in the army and the U.S government viewed these things as the Japanese people buying in and making this place theirs and contributing American productivity. They would say, ‘They’re so patriotic. Look at these beautiful gardens they’re creating.’”
But these techniques, including rock arrangements symbolic in Buddhist and Shinto practices, were signs of resistance through the secret practice of meaningful, religious traditions.
“So it presents like a glimmer of hope that the unspeakable narrative—the narrative that this whole thing is unjust, that we should be able to hold on to that which makes us different. We should be able to do that,” said Kuroiwa. “By doing it surreptitiously, by doing it secretively, it allows someone like me, 80 years later, to go to a site and to read it in the landscape.”
History Told Through the Landscape
Site of former koi pond at the Amache National Historic Site. Photo by Jesse Kuroiwa
Kuroiwa references the Amache National Historic Site in southeastern Colorado as an example of these arid landscapes that once was home to Nikkei. He noted that in the 1990s, Archaeology Professor Dr. Bonnie Clark unearthed evidence of a former koi pond. She also discovered a rustic species of rose, now called the Amache Rose, that, against all odds, researchers successfully propagated and brought back into bloom in 2022.
Recently, a CU Denver team led by Assistant Professor Louise Bordelon and Professor and Associate Dean Ann Komara, identified a fallen branch trained in the Japanese ornamental tradition at the Amache site during a cultural landscape inventory funded by the National Park Association.
Kuroiwa presented his findings he recorded in his paper Gaimenteki Doka: Gardening as Resistance in Japanese Internment Camps at the SAH conference in Mexico City April 15-19, 2026.
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