Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

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GN: Well one of the elements of Minidoka that I recall well because of my sister Mary was the Norakura band which was basically a harmonic band. If you can imagine Niseis that had to pack bag and baggage only and go to the Portland Assembly Center and then on to Minidoka, you can't exactly carry a tuba or some huge instrument. And so most of them were able to bring their harmonica, and some of them were extremely talented, and a couple of them had small clarinets, and there was one used piano, and this little group could put out the best kind of music. And although the band was small and now we're going back to the 1940s and it was small instrument played by the mouth, still they can do their renditions of Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller and Harry James and all the rest of them. And I mention my sister because together with her best friend Betty Nakashimada, they became the two singers for the band. And I remember hours and hours where Mary and Betty would be practicing in our little apartment singing "Biru no mado" or "Shina no Yoru" or for the eighteenth time this hour, and I would just walk out. I could not stand it. But they were the two sisters, and they were asked to sing at many, many talent shows throughout the camp. Now, my sister Mary is not the most gregarious person. I can't believe that she was semi-professional performer in Minidoka, and I kid her about this even today. But she was a good singer. She had a good voice, Betty, and performed this duet. They became quite well known. Henry Matsunaga played the piano. But with a few instruments, they really performed throughout the whole internment camp. Beyond that of course, again an introduction to Japanese culture, we'd learned and hear instruments of their flute of their two string or three string instruments, hollow sounding bamboo things that produced the greatest sounds. We'd see dramatic plays and the clapping of two sticks. There's no curtain but that really opens the program or to close the program. The shibai may not be a grand kabuki presentation, but it was really well done. They put on the makeup as they, best they can, and people that were, you lived with in the same block, you didn't know it was them on stage. And so we would go to these, and I'm sure that there was probably a profound story behind all of this which I didn't even understand. I just laughed, looked at the costumes, looked at the white powdered faces, thought it was great, ate my popcorn, and came home again, but it was really entertainment. There was a lot of different entertainment. There was a lot of singers, very good singers. They had contests. I don't want to call them beauty contest, but I remember very well. Ise Azumano, Inuzaka at that time, was the sweetheart of Minidoka. So they had a variety of those kind of things going on. I remember Halloween going to the movie theater. This man from Seattle scared the wits out of us. He didn't have any props, but with a simple piece of Scotch tape on his face, able to make his eyeballs go every which way, sweat pouring down his brow, hair hanging down, pants loose, arms shaking, going up the aisle, and we climbing the walls to get away from the aisles, scared the daylights out of us. I'll never forget that performance. So there were simple things like that. There were more production things. We had a band, we had odori, we had contests, we had exhibits, we had sports. And so Minidoka really thrived as kind of a city built by Japanese and Japanese Americans that had, if you want to talk sports, if you want to talk entertainment, if you want to talk exercise, they used to have exercise classes. We used to get up early in the morning and someone in our block would lead us in calisthenics, and we'd learn different things, their version. Some older people would do their version of Tai Chi. We had so many things going on now that I reflect back on Minidoka. It's really the hazards of war, two nations at each other, the camp and other camps like it emerging because of that, but those of us in the camp trying to make the best of life and going on day to day. So it was really quite an experience.