Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

<Begin Segment 28>

GN: The first thing my father and mother wanted to do was get us back into school. School had already started, so went up to school in Saint Johns called James John Grade School, elementary school, and I later found out that Betty Nakashimada, Grace Sakano, and we were the first Japanese ever to set foot in that grade school, quite an experience. Day one, I go into registration homeroom, and the teacher says, "This is George Nakata. He's new to our class. We all have two to a locker. Who in this room will be the locker partner of George?" And not one hand went up. Finally after seemingly silence forever, a hand pops up, Jean Styles. "I'd like to be George's partner," went out to the locker room, put my jacket and lunch box in there, and for forty years thereafter, I kept communication with Jean Styles. It was interesting on day two. I'm sitting in the back of the room, and there's a girl in the front looking in her pocket mirror back at me. I guess she wanted to see what a real Japanese looked like. Well, I had a number of other things happen, some with a teacher. But couple of my friends said, "George, do you ever play football?" I said, "Yes." "Well, we play the other home 'reg' room, and we play a game at noon out here at the playground. You can play?" "Yes." "Can you catch a ball?" "Yes." Luckily, I played quite a bit of football between Stafford School and Block 34. So I played, and maybe it's fate, catch the football, and you run it for a touchdown. We beat the other registration homeroom. Now I've gotten new friends. Now they think I'm okay. And so we're walking home to Saint John Woods to my house along with a couple of friends, and there's guys on the sidewalk saying, "Hey, you dirty Jap," and it's my, quote, "football friends" that go up to them and say, "What did you call my friend George?" And they became my friends, my protector, my classmates, and we became very, very close. So you encounter prejudice. Few days thereafter, we went to Rose City Cemetery. There was an infant son that my mother and father had, a little tombstone. We couldn't find it because many of the tombstones at Rose City were torn down. We couldn't find the location of our particular family tombstone. So you run into these kinds of things, little by little as you try to resettle back into Portland.

The rest of the school year went well with the one exception that after about one month, I was called into the principal's room, Mr. Brown, and after a lot of small talk of how things are going and how class is going and how Algebra is going and how this is going, he said, "Now, I'm going to ask you very bluntly, are you being treated okay?" And finally we got into the real meat of his purpose, that my teacher happened to be extremely prejudiced against Japanese and was mistreating me in every possible way she could, and so I never set foot in that classroom again, and I was transferred over to Miss Simmons' room, great teacher, most friendly, help me a lot. To this day, I remember this white haired lady as one of my fine teachers that I won't forget. So had that little incident happened there at James John School. Mary later on when I got and started in the eighth grade, she was of course into Roosevelt High School then.