<Begin Segment 26>

SY: I'm gonna, I want to skip ahead 'cause I remember that there was a smear campaign with you in the kendogi. Was it kendogi? Tell us a little bit about that.

GN: Well, the Easy Reader newspaper was publishing Torrance People Magazine, and so happened they wanted to, and then at that time I was a candidate for the state assembly, and they wanted to photograph me in my kendo equipment. And the photograph was taken at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center Japanese garden, and so anyway, my wife does naginata and so both of us were on top of a rock, I think it was, and with our equipment on, and they took photograph and then they did a long -- I should've brought a copy for you -- they did a long write-up on me. And what happened was one of my -- well, this was the first time I ran, and so the samurai thing was not an issue at all. It didn't even come up. But it was two years later, my opponent, Republican opponent, was Gerald Folando, who's known to be very dirty in campaigning, and so he tried to use the photograph and associate with me with the Firestone tire problem that they were having.

SY: Japanese company.

GN: Yeah. And so that's what happened. But it, it didn't go anywhere. No one responded to that. I think I beat him by sixty-four percent, in a district where I had, I think by that time I had a five percent advantage in the registration.

SY: But you never felt that it being so, the sport being so, or the art being so Japan-oriented might be a problem for you? In terms of...

GN: What is interesting is this: when I ran for city council in 1984, and I had already been doing kendo in Torrance and we had a kendo dojo, and in one of our campaign brochures there was a picture there where I'm teaching kendo, and actually I'm teaching kendo to Gavin Wasserman. He was about twelve years old.

SY: Gavin Wasserman being the man who...

GN: He's an attorney right now, yeah.

SY: He eventually, didn't he, wasn't he the one who asked you to run for state assembly?

GN: No, that was, it was actually Vince Okamoto, who's a law partner of Gavin Wasserman's father, Ron Wasserman.

SY: So you're teaching Gavin.

GN: Gavin, the son. So we had a photograph of that in my campaign brochure, and this guy's a professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills in the business department and he was a friend of Ron Wasserman, and he happened to stop by his office one day and he asked him if he's seen my brochure. And he said he did, and so he asked him, "What do you remember about the brochure?" "Oh, that George is a black belt." So that was that, okay, but just keep that behind, keep that in mind. So we fast forward from 1984 to 1998 when I ran for the state assembly, and my consultant at that time, yeah, my consultant at that time had, you know when they do...

SY: Some sort of report?

GN: No, no, where you get a group together to...

SY: Oh, yeah, like a, it's called something group...

GN: Yeah, and, and so...

SY: Focus group.

GN: Focus group. And so they, for the focus group they put forward all the positive things about my background and all the positive things about my opponent's background. Then they went with the negative things about my background and negative things about my opponent's background. It didn't register much. And so finally, almost out of frustration, they said, "George is a black belt in kendo," and the thing went off the chart.

SY: Negative or positive?

GN: Positive.

SY: Positive.

GN: And so that, when I heard about that I felt that when I ran for the city council back in 1984 and had no one on the city council endorsing me, that that probably was a big plus for me in terms of getting elected at that time. I came in a very close second. I was like, I was in the lead during the day when the votes were coming in and there were eleven candidates, and when the last count came in I came in second, thirty-five votes behind the incumbent that was running for reelection. So anyway, when we did this, what, fourteen years later for the assembly race, that was the outcome of the focus group, so the consultant decided to have some aspect of that in my TV ad, so on the TV ad, that comes into play in the -- it's a thirty second TV ad -- at the last second. And so the first twenty seconds has to do with other things, and the last twenty seconds shows a picture of my, in the kendo equipment, and I think Helen is in there too with her naginata. And I said, and I told the consultant that, "Do it sort of like an afterthought, not the main focus, because then it becomes too ethnic." So they described me about other things and then as an afterthought, in the last ten seconds, oh, by the way, George is a black belt in kendo, and showed the visual, me with the kendo equipment. And so that was done based on that focus group. So I'm walking precinct in Hermosa Beach and the, I see this white couple walking toward me -- I'm doing my precinct walk -- and he recognized me from the TV ad, and he says, "Oh, Mr. Nakano, I saw you on TV." And he makes a motion like he's holding a sword, and he says, "I'm going to vote for you. I saw you on TV." He doesn't ask me about any issue, but that kind of indicated that the positive effect that that had on the campaign.

SY: That's amazing. And never, you never got any negative other than this little smear campaign that had...

GN: That this one guy was trying to use.

SY: Right, right. So it never, that's really...

GN: I didn't think it helped. I think it backfired on him.

SY: Right, but this actually, in fact, it was the opposite. It actually helped you. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. It must've been hard to give it up, huh?

GN: It was. It was probably the hardest thing to give up 'cause there's nothing really to replace it. In terms of exercise I ended up walking for exercise, so I've been doing that since 1986.

SY: Really?

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.