Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

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GN: In Northwest Portland, we had our own Japanese school. Southwest Portland had their Japanese school, so did Montavilla and so did Columbia Boulevard have their own Japanese school and some of the churches, so I'm guessing that there were a number of Japanese schools that popped up in Portland during the 1930s. I was rather young, but when May and Kay or Michiko, Kikuo, my older brother and sister, Mary, started to go to a Japanese school after their regular school, I wanted to go too, insisted that I go too. So I went a year before I should have, but it was interesting. After, if you were regular school going there at four o'clock in the afternoon, learning a, i, u, e, o, and katakana and hiragana and picking up some kanji characters and figuring out how to in kanji write Nakata and while my mother would explain as an ex-schoolteacher, this means "center" and this means "field" and Yoshio, the kanji character for Yoshio. The "o" of course is the "o" character for otokono "o." So years later, when I was in my professional career going to Japan on trips and I'd see the restroom, I would see the character for otoko, and I'd harken back to when I was four or six years old and my mother telling me that, "That's the kanji for your 'Yoshio,'" so I'd never mistake going into the wrong restroom in Japan, of course. So Japanese school, we used to play jokes on each other. We used to pull the chairs so somebody would fall down, get into mischief. Probably you can say that my sister, May, got ito in her class, two, three years running along with the Ken Kitayama, but it was interesting. That's where we learned "Sakura, sakurasaita," you know, and "Saitasaita" and "Koishirokoi," learned the story of Momotaro. And upon coming home after learning about Momotaro and being able to read the Momotaro story in katakana, my parents explained to me that Momotaro really started in Okayama where my roots really are. And Okayama, that's where Momotaro grew up, and that's where he came out of the peach, and he got his friend, the monkey and the dog, and they ate kibidango and conquered the dragon, and all that fabled stories and the legend really originated in Okayama. So I learned about Okayama at a fairly early age, although I didn't get to Okayama until later on. So Nihongakkou was an experience of learning, yes, but also learning a little bit about Japan, learning some about my roots.

We used to have undoukai in the summertime when the Southwest Japanese school would compete against the Northwest Japanese school, and competition was very fierce, tug of war and races and three legged races using gunnysacks, and we were small, of course, and we had more simple games. I remember winning a tablet or a pencil. Grand prize might be a box of crayon, but prized possessions for all of us. And the competition would be, the Northwest Japanese school would be red and the Southwest Japanese school would be white, so it would be a competition between red and white, probably from the Japanese flag, but I never thought of it that way. But that kind of hitting the watermelon blindfolded and all of those Japanese competitive games that are even currently enjoyed at undoukai for the shokai group here in Portland, we had a taste of that during our early childhood.

So as one reflects back on Nihonmachi, it was really our world. It was our community. It was a place that we grew up. Yoji Matsushima and Dick Wasugi and the Matsumoto girls, Alice Ondo now and Jean Matsumoto, we'd be roller skating, we'd be riding our scooters, and we didn't mind. Yet, maybe people can refer to it as skid row, and sure we'd just dodge around the bums and the bummettes down there and try not to bump into them. We'd bunch into fire hydrants. I remember many times that we'd roll off the sidewalk, but we had just the greatest time in Nihonmachi. That was a life that as young as I was, I really could recall that it's almost like yesterday.

And I wanted to interject that we had a dear friend, a friend of the younger people of all Nihonmachi, Southwest and Northwest, and his name was Hojo. He was to us, Hojo-san. Hojo-san delivered the paper to all the hotels, all the laundries, all the restaurants. He knew everybody. Everybody knew Hojo-san, the Onishis, the Okas, all of us, the Uyesugis, everybody knew Hojo-san, and somehow, he became very close to our family, and he'd made his paper route such that the last delivery was to our family, to our hotel, and he'd always stay and oftentimes had dinner with us. And our parents would teach us discipline, not to go with strangers, not to talk to strangers, but if it's Hojo-san, you can go any place with Hojo-san, so we'd take his hand, and we walk around Nihonmachi. He was the one that took us to Washington Park a couple times a year. He was the one that walked us oftentimes down to the Blue Mouse Theater. He was the one that just a few blocks away walked us down to the Willamette River so I can throw rocks into the river. He was the one that just kind of showed us the way, and there's many Nikkei people today that will remember Hojo-san. His full name was Junnosuke Hojo, but we all called him Hojo-san, just the greatest, and he was a good cook. On Thanksgiving, he'd bring over a small turkey and cook turkey dinner for us. And after the war, when he passed on, it was just like I really lost part of the family. He was just so meaningful to us. He was just part of our childhood. So it's hard to talk about Nihonmachi or childhood without mentioning our dear friend Hojo-san.