Stone lanterns, a moon bridge, and a pagoda fill the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States around you. The Japanese Tea Garden was created for the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition in Golden Gate Park, designed in the style of a traditional Japanese garden with stone lanterns, a moon bridge, a pagoda, and meticulously raked gravel. After the exposition, a Japanese landscape designer named Makoto Hagiwara and his family were given custody of the garden and maintained it for 45 years, expanding and improving it with their own funds and labor.
The Hagiwara family lived in a house within the garden and developed a close pastry served with tea that they called a fortune cookie — a sweet biscuit with a message folded inside — which was later adopted by Chinese American restaurants throughout the country after the family was removed. In 1942, under Executive Order 9066, the Hagiwara family was forced from the garden they had tended for nearly half a century and sent to an internment camp. The city renamed the garden the Oriental Tea Garden during the war.
The Hagiwara family was never compensated for the loss. The garden was restored to its Japanese name after the war and remains one of the most visited attractions in Golden Gate Park. The arched moon bridge and the stone lanterns are original.