Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

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MH: This is an interview with George Yoshio Nakata, a Nisei man, seventy years old who lives in Portland, Oregon, on August 23, 2004, at his home. The interviewer is Misako Hinatsu of the Oral History Project, Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center. George, tell us when you were born and where?

GN: Well, I was born in Portland, Oregon, around Nihonmachi, delivered by Doctor Tanaka, assisted by a midwife in 1934, January 19th, to be specific, and I was the youngest of four children, and my older brother was Kikuo, known as Kay living currently in the Gateway area. My sister Michiko was next. We call her May, and unfortunately, she passed on two years ago. And just above me is Sumiko, Mary, two years, my elder and currently living in Hillsboro, so product of Nihonmachi, 1930s.

[Interruption]

MH: What was your father's name and your mother's name, and what did they do?

GN: My father was Shigeu Nakata and my mother's former Kane Yamamoto. My father in the early 1990s, 1900s rather came from Okayama to Oregon and settled in Portland together with his grandparents. The grandparents shortly thereafter returned back to Japan, and my father continued on first working for the railroad. He then returned back to Okayama. He actually resided in a rural area, and my mother was just starting her teaching career in Okayama-shi, the city. They got married and returned back here to Portland and settled in downtown Northwest Portland having a hotel called the Pomona Hotel. My father managed that business for quite some years until the outbreak of World War II. But simultaneous to that, he together with Josuke Nakata out on Columbia Boulevard, opened a fruit and vegetable stand. And several years thereafter, in the mid-1930s, they opened up a second Nakata Brothers number two vegetable stand also on Columbia Boulevard. So in effect, my father and mother operated the hotel, which mostly my mother made the beds and tended to the office, and my father concentrated on the Nakata Brothers Fruit and Vegetable Stand out on Columbia Boulevard. So actually, he was in two different businesses for quite some years preceding World War II.

MH: Can you remember what that, what those stands were like in Columbia Slough?

GN: The Nakata Brothers Fruit and Vegetable Stand was one of the larger ones out in that area. There were quite a number of five, seven, eight different vegetable stands up and down that short stretch on Columbia Boulevard. It was a wooden structure. It was filled with shelves, crates of fruits, peaches, apples, oranges, bananas, everything, plums, cherries, depending on the season. And adjacent to that, they had a stand of flower products, potted plants mainly. So it was a fairly sizeable operation and Josuke Nakata, who had four sons, Alfred, Albert, Harry, and Frank, had on their property row crops, so they grew their on cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants, a lot of vegetables that they actually, they sold at the fruit and vegetable stand. We would have the opportunity to go out there on some weekends and simply play around. I was at a young age. I remember the barn. I remember the horse named Baby. I remember the dog that they had. I remember Albert Nakata practicing his piano lessons out there, but I remember going actually to the stand. A lot of the workers there, it was their summertime job, and many of them had come up to me later and said, "I used to work for your father out on Columbia Boulevard. It was my summertime job." And a lot of them told me that as a very young child of five or six or seven years old, I used to run around out there and throw peaches around and get into a lot of mischief. But I also remember in the back, they had a tent, and they would be wiping and cleaning tomatoes. My dad would be sometimes back there. He was rather clever as an artist really, and he would be the one that make most of the signs, how much peaches were by the crate or how much strawberries were by the halic. So it was kind of an interesting certainly not a modern supermarket by any means. But in the 1930s, a lot of Portland people used to venture out to Columbia Boulevard. It was during the period when there were no, quote, "farmer's markets" in downtown Portland or Beaverton, Hillsboro, or Milwaukie. So in order to get really fresh produce then, they would venture out to Columbia Boulevard and go to one of the Issei/Nisei fruit and vegetable stands. So there were many summer days that we would spend out there particularly during the summer and even during the winter days during the weekends.