The Otani Family: Generations put hearts and labor into Bryn Mawr nursery

Originally published Saturday, December 18, 1999

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

"Tiger" is one of those pit bull sort of dogs that looks like he should be lurking behind a junk yard fence -- not tiptoeing through the poinsettias of the Otani family greenhouses on the Bryn Mawr hillside overlooking the south end of Lake Washington.

Actually, Tiger is a walk-on who strayed onto the property at South 118th Street one day "and sort of adopted us," said Kunio "Tony" Otani.

Lucky dog. The close-knit Otani family is one of those down-home, old-fashioned, Norman Rockwell kind of clans that "pulls together for the common good and takes pride in the family business," according to Susan Otani, 45, Tony's niece.

Tony, 78, and his brother Shig, 73, Susan's father, are the working patriarchs of this firmly rooted wholesale floral greenhouse business. All told, six Otani kin work here. Another brother, Hod, and his wife, Betty, have for years run a similar 4-acre greenhouse complex above the Valley General Medical Center about five miles away. "When Hod became ill a while back, we decided to pitch in and pool the family efforts," said Shig, who spends part of his day in Hod and Betty's Valley View Greenhouses and part at the Bryn Mawr complex.

"When you're the owners, you get to work seven days a week," Shig said during a rare pause in work among the thousands of poinsettias. "If I knew back then what I know today, I'm not sure. . . ." And then he smiled. "Oh, I say that, and it's hard work for sure, but I wouldn't be here today, at my age, if I didn't like it. And if the kids were just coming into it, maybe I'd try to discourage them. But they've all grown up in the business, and we're hoping maybe they'll take it over." Tony and Shig's almost 100-year-old mother, Rise Otani, used to come into the greenhouses regularly -- "to sort of fiddle around and feel useful" -- until several years ago, Tony said.

The Bryn Mawr Greenwood Greenhouses got that name about 20 years ago, when the long-established Greenwood Greenhouses of the Otani family bought the several acres of greenhouses all the way across town. "It's been a lot of running back and forth, running both places all this time," said Tony, who along with Shig and their respective families still lives on the North 87th Street greenhouse property they bought back in 1958. Negotiations to sell that north property to Seattle for a city park closed last month, and now the family must consolidate and concentrate on their south end business.

Tony and Shig's father, Kunito Otani, was in the lumber mill business, "which took us pretty much all over south and southwest Washington," said Tony, who graduated from Raymond High School. "We were the only Japanese family in Raymond when the war broke out. The family was sent to the Tulle Lake (World War II internment) camp. And then my brother and I joined the Army. He was in the 522nd Artillery, which was attached to the famous 442d Battalion. And I was sent to Europe near the end of the war," Tony recounted.

Their father never realized his ambitions to run a successful lumber-export business, but the brothers were able to buy the Greenwood Greenhouses after a 10-year stint working for Columbia Greenhouses in Columbia City. "Oddly enough, I think they sold out about a year ago. There are houses there now. We may be the only wholesale greenhouses left in the city," Tony said.

"We started (at Greenwood) on a shoestring," he recalled. "It was pretty run-down, and we had to rebuild everything. With growing competition from larger domestic and foreign growers, the Otani family "had to concentrate on quality, and service. And it's paid off; we have very loyal customers," Tony said.

It hasn't exactly been a walk in the garden, though. In addition to trying to run two wholesale greenhouses with most of Seattle's terrible traffic between the two, there have been boiler breakdowns and windstorms that rip off poly sheeting. "And that 24-inch snow storm a couple winters ago took out 1,500 panes of glass in one evening!" Tony said, rolling his eyes as he recalled the near-disaster.

Even as he took time out to tell their story, the rest of the family was hard at work selecting, packaging and shipping out some of the 50,000 potted poinsettias for local supermarkets and retail nurseries. These beautiful plants, on which the Otanis have built their reputation for quality, were started as cuttings last summer, even while the Otanis still were shipping out bedding plants, mums, winter pansies and decorative kale and cabbages.

And across the valley at Valley View Greenhouses, Shig and some of their rotating work crews are also tending thousands of blooming cyclamen and ferns that will be matched with tulip, hyacinth and daffodil bulbs in blooming garden containers as soon as the last poinsettias are out the door. "And those will keep us busy until about Valentine's Day, by which point we already will have started our geraniums, and fuscias and fuscia baskets, and all the bedding plants," Tony said.

"Over the years, we've tried many, many crops, and it's taken a while to get the crop rotations down to a reasonable schedule."

What they haven't managed to schedule, even after a half century in the business, is their own retirements. But Susan, a University of Washington anthropology graduate, noted that the business "has pretty much gotten into our blood. We've enjoyed the work ever since they let us stack wooden flats and other stuff as kids.

"It's legitimate to wonder, as we get older, if we can make a go of it and sustain it. Our parents and uncles have put so much of themselves into it, to make it successful. And when the next generation tries to carry on, all you can do is work as hard as you can."

P-I columnist Jon Hahn writes three times a week. Contact him at 206-448-8317 or jonhahn@seattle-pi.com