Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

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GN: After Lewis and Clark and joining, having the good fortune a few days after to join that company and to learn, to get my ground, just the well grounded and the fundamentals of international trade was invaluable to me as I later joined Pacific Supply Cooperative, became their marketing manager, and then joined the Port of Portland Far East. Those kind of things may not have ever happened unless I had that kind of background if you will that, in any profession. I think sure, the bank president was once the runner for the mailroom, a kind of story, but there's some truth to that, that learning from the bottom up is a great way to go, and so spent a number of years there at Mitsui and got my first taste of Japan. And although it doesn't exist today, Pacific Supply Cooperative is an agriculture regional cooperative that has branches all over the Northwest. Pendleton Grain Growers is a member of Pacific Supply. The cooperative in Hillsboro is a member, McMinnville, Klamath Falls, on and on, had 108 members all over the Northwest, headquarters in Portland. And I first started off as the export manager, moved into the marketing manager. And so with that position, we imported fertilizer, uria. We imported steel fence posts, bailing twine, barbed wire, and we exported, wheat, grass seed, peas, mint oil. And here in the Northwest, perhaps not everybody is aware, we have some of the finest spearmint and peppermint grown in America which is needed for soap, toothpaste, cologne, whatever, and big companies like Lotte and others would come here to buy those products. We would have grass seed and any golfer knows about bent grass, but a lot of them don't know that most of the finest bent grass of the world is produced in Stayton and Silverton, Oregon. So Highland bent grass, Astoria bent grass, you know, they used to call it 95/90 purely germination numbers, don't want to get too technical, but the finest grass seed bent grass of the world is grown here in Oregon and we at Pacific Supply shipped these over to Japan on a very regular basis, some of the rye grass going over to the pastures and meadows for feeding purposes. They'll go to Hokuran which is a big cooperative in Hokkaido. They go to Taki Seed down there in Kyoto. They go to Sakata Seed in Okayama and had the chance to visit some of these ultimate buyers and had this unique opportunity to see a product in the field being harvested, bagged, brought to the dock, loaded on board a ship, and then seeing it over there in Asia. It's really, you kind of complete the circle by seeing sort of the end use of some of these products. We brought over two executives from the Hokkaido cooperative when I was with Pacific Supply. They wanted to improve their heifer or their herds and wanted to get a breeding bull, Angus bull, so I remember spending two weeks going all over the Northwest and looking at prize Angus bulls, and that industry works. Many of the prize bulls here are 1/8 owned by this person and 1/16 owned, but this cooperative in Hokkaido wanted to buy this extremely to me expensive sire bull to impregnate their herd and they did. And so I learned a little bit about livestock, learned a little bit about their beef in Japan which at that time, good beef sold, converted to U.S. dollars sold for about $35 a pound, some of the cut choices, maybe now it's more. But things that maybe at Fred Meyers, Albertsons, and supermarkets here might be $2, $3 a pound were $35 a pound, same cut of meat.

So you see that over there, and you really, I really felt my profession of being in international trade was really not a job but it was more of a passion. I enjoyed it. I was interested in it. I was fascinated by it, and I was really thrilled by the opportunity to go to Kyushu and go to Hokkaido, not only to Sapporo but Obihiro and Wataru and some other places and to really see how their azuki bean grows, to see how their grass seed grows. And one of the things that I, even to this day think about, is there is the breeding of grass seed where you exchange data, and the Japanese of Hokkaido were fascinated by a particular red clover that they call Sapporo red clover. They only had a few bits and pieces of seed. We managed to bring that over to America. We got a grower, and then we multiplied that seed and reshipped it back to Hokkaido, so they then today have acres or hectares and hectares of Sapporo red clover seed all over Hokkaido, and we kind of pioneered that effort. And after the Angus bull and the Sapporo red clover and a few other things, was awarded the Presidential E Award for excellence in exporting. It's an award that is given by the President of the United States to certain individuals and certain companies that have done something unique or something different because America was always striving to have a good balance of trade to export more than they import. And so strategies and programs that might export more grass seed or any products here in the Northwest, be it wheat or be it barley or be peppermint, be it peas, be it beans, we continued to expand on that.

My career at Pacific Supply was quite interesting. I went to Rotterdam quite often and opened up a Rotterdam office, and this great Dutchman, Erin Vondenauker, we became very good friends, and he spoke many, many languages. But eventually, we had agents all over, seventeen of them, some in Europe, in Venezuela, Lima, Peru, Taipei, Kao Shung, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, Korea, and so traveled to many of these places. It was a very, very interesting experience. Most of the time, I traveled alone, really, and there were times that I needed a translator, traveled on some trade missions, but I was not too fond of trade missions, went over with Governor McCall and Jack Myer and John Fulton, and there were a lot of ceremonies and lot of speech giving but not a whole lot of business in my opinion, and so I preferred really to go there and conduct business with our real customers, so that's what I preferred to do. May or may not have been the right choice at the time, but I enjoyed it and enjoyed my days at Pacific Supply Cooperative. So that kind of crosses over between my personal life and professional life because with that got very active in international activities and became acquainted with the international bankers and international lawyers, and just like any person, you kind of gravitate to that area of commerce, and I chaired the World Trade Committee of the Portland Chamber and became the World Trade Person of the Year, one year. You know, some of these kind of things that if you're around long enough, you kind of fall into some of these awards by accident.

So I enjoyed a lot of the people that I met and the opportunity to be a bridge between cultures. They do business differently in each country. In Taiwan, you're going to meet Mrs. Wong and sometime relatives that are going to come to a business dinner with you. In Japan, you meet with the business person and you never meet the family. In Korea, it was different. In Hong Kong, I stayed with families, and in each place, it was just so different. China, it was right after normalization and now I'm with the Port of Portland and it's 1979, and I'm there right after Jimmy Carter and the normalization relationships with the PRC, not too many Americans have they ever seen. And here is an American that looks like a Japanese stepping off the plane in Beijing. It was a time that you cannot go to China without a host, and so my visa was approved by a host. My hotel was arranged by a host. So I met with China Ocean Shipping Company. I met with the minister that's the head of the ports of all of China, great opportunity to learn all about China. And you learn that when they take you to the Great Wall, they want to show you their rich history, their four thousand years of history.