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JG: Alright, so we're back with Mark Nakagawa, Reverend of the Centenary Methodist Church. This is Jim Gatewood. Dana Hoshide is behind the camera. It is September 1, 2010. So what we're gonna do, Mark, is pick up where you left off, basically, and then transition more into your kind of, your ministry and the work you've been doing over the last several years, pastoring to the Japanese American community. And then I want to talk to you a little bit about the work you've been doing on the history of the church, the history of the Methodist church relative to, relative to the work it's done helping Japanese Americans during World War II and the resettlement era, as well, just talk a little bit about what you've been doing with that. And then finally, we'll conclude by talking about a subject that you and I have been talking about kind of in an informal way, about the future of the Japanese American community and the future of the Japanese American church, which is something I'm really interested in. So when we last left off, you were talking to me, you were in school. You were in seminary, and you were beginning to transition... you had gone to seminary not really intent on becoming a minister per se, but going to seminary for the experience of it. You spoke with someone who told you, you were talking about languages and your desire to learn Latin and Greek and someone had advised you you should probably learn Spanish and then it somehow ended up with Japanese, but I just want to talk to you a little bit about those, those years again at the PSR. And tell me, maybe we can start by having you tell us a little bit about this gradual transition towards the ministry.

MN: Okay, sure, Jim. As I have mentioned previously, my decision to enter seminary, and I entered after the fall of '82, wasn't with the intent of any particular vocation or profession in mind. I really just decided to enter seminary and go through the seminary experience for the experience. As I previously said, I felt that whatever I was gonna do with the rest of my life, I would most likely benefit from having the experience of a seminary education, so that really is the honest reason why I entered. Other people may have thought differently, but that really was the reason I decided to enter seminary. In the culture that we live in here in America where everything has to have an end game plan or there has to be an end product, that was really, I guess, counter cultural to most people's line of thinking as to why they would enter some kind of graduate program. Usually it's with a particular occupational goal in mind, but honestly for me, it was just for the experience. Now naturally, the thought of possibly entering the ordained ministry was there. I'm not gonna say that wasn't in my mind, but really that was not the primary reason I decided to enter into seminary.

My seminary experience at the Pacific School of Religion was very good, and for a native born Los Angelino who, who's idea of anathema is the Bay Area, I really enjoyed my time in Berkeley. And I laugh because I've always said that I've never been able to figure out where the, my ending up doing seminary work in the city of Berkeley was God's judgment on me or God's judgment on the city of Berkeley. Whatever the case is, that's how it happened, and PSR, being one of nine schools in a consortium -- the Graduate Theological Union there at Berkeley -- was a very good studying for one to do seminary work. Not only was I physically removed from everything familiar to me here in Southern California, but just academically it was a very good environment to be in. You've got, we had nine member seminaries there, plus you had UC Berkeley and some other educational institutions around Berkeley, so it was a very stimulating environment, not to mention just the people in Berkeley. It was just a very stimulating and positive environment to be in. So that kind of is the overall reason how I ended up there. The other thing that happened, and I have to say this, weather was also a factor of why, not so much how, but why I ended up doing my seminary work there in the East Bay. That previous year here in Los Angeles, we had what was for me a very cold winter. It was, like, fifty-five or sixty during the days and I think for most people in L.A. it was a very, very unusually cold winter. And so that following year as I was, I'd already made up my mind to go to seminary somewhere, and as I thought of some schools that I might apply to, on one level, when I really daydreamed I thought of maybe Harvard Divinity or Yale Divinity on the East Coast, and then I also thought about Iliff School of Theology, which is in Denver. It's a United Methodist school. But after thinking about those schools, the thought occurred to me that those are all cold weather cities in the wintertime, and since I had a hard time surviving in sixty, sixty-five degree weather here in L.A., how was I ever gonna survive, you know, being in Cambridge or New Haven or, God forbid, Denver? So by default I decided, among other reasons, to apply to PSR, but I had heard a lot of positive things about PSR and knew some, had some friends that went there. So I have to throw that in there, weather played a big part of how I ended up, why I ended up going to seminary in Berkeley.

JG: You know, Mark Twain said that the coldest winter he ever experienced was the summer in San Francisco. [Laughs]

MN: That's right. I, although that's San Francisco. On our side of the bay the summers were nice, but there some times when I went into San Francisco, and it was in the middle of summer, and it was kinda cold there. So that all worked out fine. As I mentioned, I really entered without any initiative to go into the ordained ministry, but my feelings did begin to change, probably around the second and definitely by the third year. I had gone through most of my formal studies. I had also at that time gotten to know some of the Nisei ministers and some of the Sansei ministers who were already in the ministry at that time, and they would invite me -- well not just me, but my other seminarian colleagues, Japanese American seminarians -- to some of the meetings there in Northern California. And as I got to know them and hear some of their stories, I really began to critically question, or maybe I should say entertain the idea of going into the ordained ministry. I also need to say that simultaneously my seminary studies, I guess, really challenged me to, again, critically examine my life and more importantly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and so those series of events coming together at the same time started to transform my way of thinking from, in the beginning, not seriously thinking about the ordained ministry to starting to shift in that direction. Now, at the same time I did start to intern at a local church in Berkeley, a Japanese American congregation, the Berkeley Methodist United Church, which was pastored by then Reverend Dr. Grant Hagiya and that was actually his first appointment at the time. And that was a very positive experience for me. Even for someone who had grown up at Centenary, at Japanese American church, being in another church and, and where things were on the one hand very familiar to me, but on the other hand also involving different groups of people. Again, these are people from Berkeley, and other influences started to, again, challenge me as to what I wanted to do going forward with my life.

JG: Had you given any thought to other kind of vocations? What were some of the other, I don't know, prospects you were entertaining at the time?

MN: Well, prior to entering seminary, the four years from 1978 when I graduated UCLA 'til '82 when I entered PSR, the fall of '82, sure, I had thought about other fields. The traditional ones for Japanese Americans, law, medicine. I actually spent a year in the teaching program at UCLA, but then decided as much as I was interested in teaching, I thought at the time that I wanted to do something else before teaching. But all your traditional areas that most, in my opinion at least, most Sanseis of my generational time span were kind of urged or conditioned to undertake, they were safe, they were secure professions. I mean, that is if you were smart enough and intelligent enough to enter them. And so I thought about them, but again, just the thought of entering seminary and going through that experience, I felt even if I were ultimately interested in one of those professions, I felt the seminary education would be beneficial to me and whatever else I did with my life.

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