John Okumura

John Okumura


John’s love for woodworking and creating began at an early age. John was born in Los Angeles, California on December 20, 1925. The Okumura family moved to Long Beach, California in 1935 where, like many boys his age, he started to make model airplanes. He graduated to model ships and his pride and joy was a 40 inch replica of the Queen Mary, one of the great 20th century luxury liners and the original liner, ironically, was bought by the city of Long Beach in 1967 and where he visited in 1977. While attending junior high school in Long Beach where he began to make furniture and would bring them home on his bike. Like all Japanese American families living on the west coast, in 1942 John’s family was many who lost their civil liberties and were forcibly interned relocation camps in the interior U.S. The Okumura family was first interned in Santa Anita Assembly Center, California and then to a Navaho reservation in Gila River, Arizona just south of Phoenix. John continued to work with wood as a teenager by building a porch in front of the Okumura barrack resident that had congoleum (linoleum) floors, one of the few elaborate porches in the Gila internment camp. He was allowed to take left over wood that was placed in a wood pile approximately half a mile away. Because of John’s innovations as a teenager, the Okumura family did not experience as much of the torturous desert summers as most internees. He built an air conditioner with a quarter horse power engine with holes punched in a plastic tubing flowing water down on the excelsior sides to cool the hot dry heat in the small one room space where seven Okumuras were housed. John also built a closet, cabinets, tables and separators to give some privacy to his two older sisters and mother. John had four siblings, one older brother and one younger brother. On the outside of the barrack, he built window canvas shades that tilted at a 45 degree angle to block out the hot sun in the Arizona desert. Together with his father's garden, it became a popular gathering spot for friends because the roof provided shade to escape the hot weather. John graduated from Butte High School in Rivers, Arizona, in the Gila Internment Camp. This was towards the end of World War II. He left Gila to work in Detroit, Michigan. In the late 1940s he went to a school in Lansdale Pennsylvania where he learned to determine the sex of day-old chicks on the basis of very subtle perceptual cues. He was one of many Nisei (Second Generation Japanese American) “Chick Sexers.” This job required him to travel to poultry farms in the south for about four years. By then, having a wife and child, he decided to return to his first love, woodworking. He began by working at a mobile home company in Chicago, Illinois and then started his own business in Chicago with a his brother-in-law, Akio Uyeda, making custom crafted cabinets. They aptly named their business Custom Craft Cabinets. To accommodate his expanding business, they bought a building that was formerly a movie theater on Clark Street near Belmont. This is where his company started to make more complex architectural woodwork for commercial as well as residential clients. His Japanese interior and exterior woodwork is nationally renowned and his originally designed double sided shoji screen was made with a removable top so that the screen material could be easily replaced. After Akio’s retirement from the business in 1987, John continued his business under the name, “Custom Cabinet Corporation” and he moved briefly to a location in Chicago’s Humbolt Park for two years, later relocating Custom Craft Corporation to the southwest side at 4147 W. Ogden, also in Chicago. After the Osaka Gardens Japanese Gate project in June of 1995, John wanted to sell his business but be able to remain active in his lifelong work. He interviewed several potential buyers but his three main concerns were that he would be able to continue actively involved with the work he has known his entire life, that his employees would still have a job and that the owner(s) have an understanding of the industry. In mid/late 1997 he thought he had found an appropriate buyer and by January 1, 1998 he began working for the purchaser of the business. He was forced to leave in 2003. On December 31, 2006 John Okumura passed away at the age of 81. He leaves behind many loved ones and a treasure-trove of his work.

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