The Japanese Tea Garden occupies an abandoned limestone quarry in Brackenridge Park, transformed in the early twentieth century into a terraced garden featuring native and ornamental plants, koi ponds, stone paths, and traditional Japanese landscaping elements. Also known historically as the Sunken Gardens, the site reflects both San Antonio's early twentieth-century municipal park development and a complicated history involving the Jingu family, who managed and lived at the garden for decades before their eviction during the Second World War.
Origins and Early Development
The garden site originated with an 11-acre tract donated to the city in 1915, adjacent to an abandoned limestone quarry and the newly opened Brackenridge Park. Ray Lambert, San Antonio's Parks Commissioner, recognised the quarry's potential and oversaw its conversion into a designed landscape. The steep rock walls and natural depressions created by quarrying provided the foundation for a sunken garden design, with terraces, water features, and plantings integrated into the existing topography.
The garden opened to the public in the early 1920s. Its name and aesthetic drew from Japanese garden traditions—koi ponds, arched bridges, stone lanterns, and carefully arranged plantings—adapted to San Antonio's warm climate and the quarry's limestone setting. The result was a hybrid landscape, neither strictly Japanese nor conventionally American, but distinctly tied to its location and era.
The Jingu Family and Wartime Eviction
Kimi Eizo Jingu, a Japanese immigrant, was hired to manage the garden and operate a tea house and refreshment pavilion. The Jingu family lived on site, with family members—particularly Jingu's daughters—dressed in traditional kimonos to serve tea and snacks to visitors. Jingu is credited with creating iced green tea to suit San Antonio's hot climate, an innovation that became locally popular.
In 1942, following the United States' entry into the Second World War and amid widespread anti-Japanese sentiment, the Jingu family was evicted from the garden. The city changed the name to "Chinese Sunken Gardens" and hired a Chinese-American couple, Ted and Esther Wu, to operate the refreshment pavilion. This renaming reflected wartime prejudice and the erasure of the Jingu family's contributions. After Mr Jingu's death in the late 1930s, his family had continued managing the garden until the 1942 eviction.
Restoration and Renaming
In 1984, under Mayor Henry Cisneros, the city restored the original "Japanese Tea Garden" name during a ceremony attended by Jingu's children and representatives of the Japanese government. This formal recognition acknowledged both the historical injustice of the wartime eviction and the Jingu family's role in creating and maintaining the garden.
A major restoration project culminated in a grand reopening in March 2008, with members of the Jingu and Lambert families present. The Jingu House, where the family had lived, was renovated and reopened in 2011 as part of a Texas Local Park Urban Indoor Recreation Grant Project. These restorations preserved the garden's original design elements while improving accessibility and infrastructure.
Visiting Today
The Japanese Tea Garden remains a public park within Brackenridge Park, accessible year-round. The garden's combination of quarried limestone walls, terraced plantings, koi ponds, and stone pathways creates a microclimate distinct from the surrounding park. Visitors describe the site as serene and surprisingly cool, with the quarry walls providing shade and the water features moderating temperature.
The garden's history—both its design origins and the Jingu family's experience—adds interpretive weight to what might otherwise be a purely ornamental site. The restored Jingu House and informational signage provide context, though the garden's appeal also lies in its simple function as a shaded, contemplative space within a large urban park.
The nearby Historic Mexican Village at Brackenridge Park, built in 1920 and originally housing local artisans including sculptor Bacilio Aguilar, offers additional cultural and historical context for visitors exploring this section of the park. Together, these sites illustrate San Antonio's early twentieth-century efforts to create public spaces reflecting the city's diverse communities, even as that diversity was sometimes erased or distorted by political and wartime pressures.
Sources: San Antonio Japanese Tea Garden - Wikipedia • Japanese Tea Garden - San Antonio Parks Foundation • Japanese Tea Garden - Densho Encyclopedia • San Antonio's Japanese Tea Garden backstory - MySA