Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

<Begin Segment 13>

MH: And let's go back to the Portland Assembly Center. How did you feel about it?

GN: Well Portlanders, some 3600 Portlanders plus, were all gathered together there in this Portland Livestock Exposition all under one roof, and I think it's hard for people that have not had that experience to picture this. The plyboard, plywood partitions. The roof over your head is the roof of the exposition center. Pigeons flying around. People next door snoring away, cots as beds, mattresses with straw in them, canvas doors. We lived in section three, no different than section two, section one. There's a mess hall. But that was as I reflect back, to me the first demonstration later on as I reflected, the first demonstration of the Nikkei Japanese community's ability and skill to organize, to make do, to make the best of a given situation because suddenly the Portland Assembly Center, there was someone looking after the mess hall. I think it was Francis Hayashi. There was somebody looking after a newspaper. There was somebody organizing the fire department. There was somebody in charge of education. There was somebody in charge of hobbies and recreation. There was, suddenly, things were organized. And I remember school started in the, what they hold the rodeos in. It's really the arena, and I remember our class going to a certain section there. And I think school started like at 9 o'clock in the morning until 11:30, if I remember. And the importance of education of course was instilled in all of us already, so we knew the value of reading and writing and arithmetic and the need to continue on our education regardless of the fact that we're in a livestock exposition. So teachers became teachers and barbers became barbers and doctors became doctors in the Portland Assembly Center.

I remember going to the mess hall. I never knew what oatmeal was, never had oatmeal in my life. They called it mush, and I love mush. It was great. I thought oatmeal was really something special. And there were things there that I never ate in my life. Cow tongue, what in the world, never liked it. But kind of having a Japanese diet as a child and being used to rice and fish and tofu and otsukemono and those kind of things and okazu and sukiyaki, and suddenly there's raw carrots, and suddenly, there's other things that you're just not accustomed to, and so it was an experience just going to the mess hall. But I found friends and where they were. Somebody was in section two and somebody was in one. And to a small child, all the corridors and the hallways look the same and everybody kind of had a canvas door. So you'd hear arguments in the next compartment, and you'd hear singing, and you'd hear conversation, and there's not, wasn't a whole lot to do there, but you'd kind of wander around and go to the arena and you'd go outside. As I reflect back on it now, it's probably the older people, older meaning teenagers that perhaps had a rougher time. After all, if you're in a livestock exposition and you're going to go out on a date, where in the world would you go? That never bothered me because as a eight or nine-year-old or seven-year-old, whatever I was, I never thought of that at the time. It was more important to play kick the can and seeing what they're going to have for the next dinner or lunch at the mess hall.

We had an interesting time. It was the summer of 1942 there at the Portland Assembly Center. I remember some people going out to, if you will, the fence and talking to friends that would come by on a Saturday or Sunday to see them. I recall meetings that they used to have that my parents would go to, never knew what the meetings were about. But that fall, of course, after several months there and it was kind of an ordeal in that a number of people really got sick. And as you can imagine living in such close quarters, several thousand people, suddenly bacteria and germs could just spread very quickly. And anyone that has been in that group of people would all remember the odor because it was a livestock exposition. And no matter how you clean it up, it's like going to a county fair. When you go there to check out the rabbits and the chickens and the cows, there's a certain pungent odor there, and that odor was there. So yes, those summer months of '42 in the Portland Assembly Center, short as it might be, for a young child, it's indelible. It's not something that one forgets, and it will probably remain with me forever. I can really picture the one room and the several cots that we had in there. Mary and mine and the parents. There's not room really to move around. It was a relatively small room and four of us sleeping there, and you know, you have your things that you could carry that you just have sitting on the side of the bed. So the days there were not really spent much inside your little compartment but rather kind of just wandering around with friends, trying to play make up games, and there weren't a lot of activities although the recreation chairperson I know tried to keep all the young people and the children as well as the adults occupied. They had hobby classes and they had language classes and they had things that appealed to a wide variety of people that were there simply because it was stressful I believe to the older people.