Profile – THE ARTISTRY OF CABINETMAKER MILTON KANDA

Gwen Muranaka
Republished With Permission

Editor’s note: This article was originally published on the Zentoku Foundation website (zentokufoundation.org/miltonkanda). The Zentoku Foundation was created to help grow and strengthen the Japanese American community by developing a user friendly, meaningful path for each generation to connect with one another. They bring amazing stories, news and events that enlighten our lives and the world we live in today. Zentoku in English means “virtue.”   

“He wasn’t cookie cutter, he was like an artist,” Jolene Backman said of her father, custom cabinetmaker Milton Jiro Kanda. For decades, Kanda transformed pieces of oak, alder and walnut into finely crafted cabinets. He was born on January 31, 1932 in Pähala, Hawai‘i, a small sugar plantation town, where his father worked as a machinist.

When he was 13, Kanda asked his parents for a hammer and saw, and started to make crafts on the front porch of their small home. From an early age he showed the qualities of a master craftsman: an agile, creative mind and skill with tools.

At Pähala High School Kanda’s favorite subject was geometry. His Uncle Minoru spoke to his young nephew and encouraged him to think about his future. That talk, along with encouragement from his shop teacher, led Kanda to study woodworking at the Milwaukee Vocational School in Wisconsin.

Kanda was drafted in the U.S. Army at the end of the Korean War, serving as an infantryman in Germany. When he returned to Hawai‘i, he tried a variety of jobs, eventually building rattan furniture. Most importantly, he married Edith Yoshida at Higashi Hongwanji Temple in 1956. The couple had known each other since their days as classmates at Pähala High School. Edith studied at the University of Hawai‘i to become an elementary school teacher.

“We were playing poker, and a cousin said you should get married,” Edith recalled.

Milton and Edith Kanda moved from Hawai‘i in 1957 and eventually settled in Orange County. Edith described the discrimination they faced as Japanese Americans. She remembered a real estate salesman who refused to sell to Asians in a neighborhood tract in Westminster. Kanda took note of the agent and later had the opportunity to tell the development owner who happened to come by the cabinet shop he was working at of the racism they experienced.

“(Milton) said ‘Hey, you folks don’t sell to Orientals.’ He met the owner at the tract and dad pointed out the salesman, and the owner fired him on the spot. Dad put his name on the list for a home in the tract and, lo and behold, over time there were several other Japanese on that list being considered,” Edith said.

In their home in Westminster, Kanda started his business, making end tables and coffee tables from castoff doors. The couple had their first child Stacey, the same year he opened his first shop in what was a converted chicken coop. He would later move to a larger shop in Costa Mesa where he opened Milton’s Cabinets. Two more…