This street has a delightfully tortuous etymology, so let’s work our way backwards. Minoru Drive was named in 1913 on a tract owned by the Altadena Country Club Park company, identified by the press as a “syndicate of British Columbia capitalists”. This takes us to Richmond, BC, just south of Vancouver, where on August 21st, 1909, there opened an equestrian racetrack called Minoru Park. (The track is gone but the park remains.) Minoru Park borrowed its own name from a racehorse called Minoru, who just two months earlier had won the prestigious Epsom Derby in England. Minoru’s sponsor was none less than Edward VII; the king leased him from William Hall Walker, who raised the colt at the Tully Estate in County Kildare, Ireland. So what inspired Minoru’s moniker? A little boy: Minoru John Granville Eida (1901-1975), the half-Japanese, half-English son of Saburo (c. 1860-1911) and Clara Florence Alice (c. 1872-1970) Eida. Saburo Eida, known as “Tassa”, was a London-based art importer whom Walker had hired to design a Japanese garden at Tully. (You can still visit it at Irish National Stud & Gardens.) Claims that Minoru co-designed the garden are spurious: he was only ten when his father died, at which point the garden was complete and Florence had taken him and his two brothers back to London. It’s reported that he later worked as an engineer and dropped the “Minoru” from his name during WWII’s anti-Japanese fervor. His son Brian appeared at the 2009 unveiling of a statue of Minoru the horse near Richmond, BC’s Minoru Blvd.
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