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Mr. Omoshiroi: Notes from a Baby Boomer Sansei and Bonsai Sensei
By Dennis Makishima
With Jennifer Hasegawa
Design by Noreen Rei Fukumori
Dennis Makishima is best known as a bonsai sensei and trailblazing aesthetic pruner in practice for more than four decades. In this autobiography, we also learn about Dennis as a Vietnam veteran and third-generation Sansei Japanese American growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In these pages, Mr. Omoshiroi shares reflections and insights from his life that aim to illuminate our collective human experience and the connections that unite us.
Meeting Dennis Makishima for the first time—twice
by Jennifer Hasegawa
In December 2022, Zentoku Foundation asked me to write a profile about Dennis Makishima, a bonsai master trained in Japan; a living treasure who insists on not being called a “master,” but rather a “practioner.”
Because we both live in the San Francisco Bay Area, the thought was that this would help make it easy for us to meet up and talk.
As I conducted a bit of research about Dennis before reaching out to him, I quickly realized that there was more to this editorial matchup than physical proximity.
First, I found a photo of Dennis giving a bonsai workshop at Liliʻuokalani Park, a humble jewel of a park in my hometown of Hilo. A park I explored as a toddler. A park where my dad and I used a bright red net to catch ʻopae shrimp darting around murky green ponds. A park where we had many a Fourth of July picnic, eating musubis and fried chicken and watching fireworks climb the sky above Coconut Island.
Dennis Makishima demonstrated pine tree pruning at Liliʻuokalani Gardens in Hilo to County workers and Master Gardeners. April 2011. Photo by Bill Eger.
Second, I realized that I’d met Dennis over two decades earlier at the opening of a Japanese garden at a friend’s home. Dennis helped design and create the garden and I helped plan the programming for the opening event.
I distinctly remember the moment I met Dennis. I was introduced and was so awkward and shy, I bowed in my cream-colored kimono with cherry blossoms on the sleeves but didn’t have the courage to look at him. So the first time I met Dennis, I didn’t MEET Dennis.
After talking with Dennis and reading his autobiographical notes (originally written only for the eyes of seven of his students), I knew we needed to write more than an online profile.
I’d just read This Is Not My Memoir by André Gregory and Todd London. I saw a bright line connecting one of the best memoirs I’ve read—and Dennis’ masterful storytelling and thoughtful curation of events from his extraordinary life spanning the globe and spectrum of human experience.
Dennis’ notes needed to be turned into a book available to generations to come. I pitched the idea to Zentoku Foundation and was so grateful to have their support as we began our journey to publish Mr. Omoshiroi.
There were so many fun opportunities to enrich Dennis’ dispatches from the crossroads of history with content from the public domain. For example, while I knew Toshiro Mifune from watching serials on KIKU TV with my mom when I was little, I found myself scouring Wikimedia Commons for a Yojimbo movie poster in the public domain to introduce Mifune to new audiences.
Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo (Bodyguard), a 1961 samurai film by Akira Kurosawa
We wrote Mr. Omoshiroi to be read in a couple of ways. You can read it from start to finish, or simply open it to any page for a hot take or a laugh.
For me, this book is about self-actualization. When I think back to the anxious young woman who couldn’t look Dennis in the eye for fear of not being worthy, I wish I’d had access to the fire and truth of Dennis’ words earlier in my life.
If I had access to a book like this back then, perhaps I could have raised my head and truly met Mr. Omoshiroi, the first time around.