Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

<Begin Segment 19>

GN: Summertime, of course, we'd walk out to where the good farming community would be growing extra vegetables and Japanese things, Japanese eggplants and gobo and a few things, extra treats for us. We'd walk out to the water tower, and it seemed very tall and enormous to us at that time. But Stafford School was where we learned a lot of games, games that I don't even know are played anymore. The jintori, you know, all the kick the cans and all those kind of things that we played. That's where most of us learned organized sports. Even at a young age, we learned what touch football was about. We learned about what softball was about. We played softball with what was called a Roman shortstop. We had ten people out on the field rather than nine who played sort of behind the regular shortstop in left center field. We had very few left-handed batters, for example. So it was kind of a unique experience, and Japanese Americans, there were some pretty good athletes, and we always had teachers, Roy Okazaki and Hank Matsubu, far, far older than I at the time, right next to the mess hall of Block 34 catcher's mitt. Hank Matsubu used to throw to me. And at the end just before we left camp, he was a big man and he played for the "No Name Team," he would throw curve balls to me at his hardest, and that's where I learned how to really catch a fast ball and a curve ball and a knuckle ball. But we all learned sports from older Niseis there, how to hold the bat and little things of digging in and batting stance and even learned how to throw a curve ball myself and never thought I could, but all the little things about sports, about touch football. We rarely had tackle or real football because we didn't have the equipment, and there was all the fear that, well, too many people are going to get hurt without shoulder pads and without shin guards and without proper equipment. So basically, we played touch football. The guy with the ball, you got to touch him below the belt. Of course, it always leads to many arguments. "You touched me above the belt." "No, I didn't." But we had a lot of fun playing touch football. A lot of games, a lot of recreation, but when it came time to study, I think Stafford School in my way of thinking did really an outstanding job given the circumstances.