Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

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MH: We're going to kind of leave your business over here on the side for a while. Talk about your family. You married Keiko, when? How many children do you have? What expectations do you have for them?

GN: Well, like a lot of people, you kind of tell yourself that how blessed you are to have such a wonderful family, and I, deep in the marrow of my bones, feel that way. Keiko growing up in Okayama, coming here, not knowing English, learning her English by watching John Wayne movies on television but getting so acclimated to the American way of life and graduating with no problems through Buckman and Washington High School and then going down to the University of Oregon. But she's been a tremendous supporter all through the years, and she's, of course, been affiliated with the Beaverton School District for a good many years, at first as a volunteer and just going to a number of schools to do a variety of things and then being more of an aide, a library aide, an audio visual person at the end, and really going to three or four middle schools and grade schools, but having a very nice career with the Beaverton School District. And I think being with children, young children, every day and recognizing their challenges has been good for her and for us because everyone lives differently, everyone is an individual. They all have their different priorities and agendas, and so her tenure at Beaverton School District I believe was quite helpful. She enjoys her work. And during the early years, she made sure that she was always home when our young children came home. And so whether it was by school bus or in the case of Ridgewood, our children can walk there. In the early afternoons, she was always home. And all the things that little children feel important, the friends and activities and things they do at home, mother Keiko was always there.

Deena, our firstborn, went through the schools identical to Carla and with Darren, our second and third, and that is through Ridgewood Grade School to Cedar Park Middle School and through Sunset High School. And I served on the local school committee, didn't want to run for the school board because of my travels, but we, Keiko and I paid a great, a lot of attention and interest to school activities. We tried to participate whenever we can, and, fortunately, our children all did very well. They were very active. I didn't know Deena was a singer, but she had the lead role in her grade school play and didn't know she could hit that high note, but she did. And Darren was in a play and Carla, and they all won scholarships to universities. They all won what's called the Centurion Award that's given to a handful of people that get out of Cedar Park. So academically, scholastically, they did quite well. Deena, of course, went to Occidental down in California then went to the Honors College at University of Oregon. Carla went to University of Oregon, got her masters, and now is in speech pathology and working with challenged children in the Beaverton School District, and I'm really proud of all of them. Deena is, was voted the Pfizer which is a huge multi-national company. She was voted the marketing person of the year several years ago, won several awards, has won several trips with Pfizer, is now the business analyst for the West Coast which is kind of a fancy title of developing strategic plans for Kaiser consumer products that are sold to Fred Meyers, to Costco, to Albertson's, to Safeway, some of the larger mass marketing supermarkets. She travels a great deal to their annual meetings and so forth, but very, very disciplined. She lives not too far from us in the Bethany area, has her office in her home, and when it's 8 o'clock, she's in her office and doesn't come out until twelve, goes back in before one and is there till five, and has two young little boys, two proud little grandchildren of ours, but is so disciplined that when it's work time, she works. And Keiko of course goes over to babysit a couple days a week. So Deena really pays great attention to her own family and her little, her son Ethan, our grandson, now four and a half going on five years old goes to school a couple days a week, make sure he gets there and gets back, and I go pick him up sometimes when I'm free. But she makes sure that be it swimming lessons or be it activities or discipline or the time outs that are sometimes necessary, she's doing that. And sometimes confided, "Yeah Mom, yeah Dad, you were kind of tough on us, but sure glad you were. Now I'm kind of applying those to my own children."

Carla, I've been to her school. I've seen some of her students, and yes, they've had difficulties, but I really have to say no other way to say it, but I admire Carla and her gift of working with these children. Very early on, she took on a boy, autistic boy, when he was just a tiny tot, worked with him for years. This boy came to Carla's wedding, and I saw him. He used to come over to our house and just stare out the window never to say a word, and now, he'll smile, and he'll say hello and he'll talk a little bit, and I think that Carla just did wonders for this boy. And there are a number of cases like that that she's really given children direction to find their way, that things are all right, that they can do things. You can build self-confidence. And so her career, and she had a daughter Lindsey that's almost two now, our granddaughter, a lot of fun, some days chatty but a lot of smiles, calls us up, very humorous, throws in a Japanese word or two to us that shocks us, but a total delight, and Carla will next year bless us with another child, so we're looking forward to that, be our fourth grandchild. So as we, as Keiko and I kind of think about our lives and now we're both, we can get our senior discount, we kind of look around and really count our blessings because we have both our daughters that are close to us, and we have the grandchildren that we can see, and as any grandparent will say, "You can love to death your grandchildren, but at the end of the day, you can say well goodbye, see you later," and the luxury of that is kind of hard to describe unless you are a grandparent.

Darren did very well in school academically, and he went on to Stanford and got his master's, and luckily for us because of tuition, he's got several sizeable scholarships there. He then worked at C.H. [inaudible] as an engineer and environmental. And he looked around and he's not sure, but he's interested in environmental law, international law and corporate law. University of Michigan of course is one of America's top law schools ranked right along with Yale and Harvard, so he graduated, and he has already been offered a permanent associate job in really one of the renowned law firms in New York, a law firm that handles quite a bit of work for the Fortune 500, so it's going to be tremendous legal experience for Darren. He just graduated, and he just boned up for the New York law bar exam which was as most lawyers will tell you extremely intensive, but he will be in New York, and he'll be working there, and it's hard to predict how long he will be with this particular law firm or eventually whether he might relocate back here to Portland. But just looking at the client list and the kinds of opportunities that he has there, major, major, corporations, and whether it has to do with litigation or with patent or with mergers or with acquisitions, certainly the opportunity there in the legal profession is there in front of Darren, so I'm very happy that he's going to have that chance to go along in the legal profession and in the next few years, chart his own course.

Keiko and I have been blessed with three children that we feel have given us a great deal of happiness. Sure, during the growing up days, we went on trips, we enjoyed things, whether it's through Central Oregon or to the coast or up to Canada. I visited Deena when she was attending Waseda University in Tokyo. She was quite fluent in Japanese at that time. She could tell me all the transfer stops of the subway system. She told me the great places to eat. Unfortunately, she is now kind of forgotten quite a bit of her Japanese. At the same time, Darren in Michigan had a lot of the Todai, University of Tokyo graduates in law taking graduate work at the University of Michigan, became friends with a number of them, studied some Japanese, surprised me the other day, coming home, he could speak pretty good Japanese and understand quite a bit. Darren, probably in our family,, some people are gifted a little bit more linguistically. When he went down to Cuba, not too many people by the way have ever been to Cuba, but he's been there. He spent several months there. He could converse quite fluently in Spanish. I took Spanish, studied rather hard. He was way ahead of me. So Darren learned some Japanese, and he went to Japan recently, and he saw some of his lawyer friends, enjoyed that a lot. And so, yes, we've been blessed with three children, Deena, Carla, and Darren, and now we have three grandchildren, soon to be four, and grandchildren Ethan, his name is Ethan Yoshio, and so we kind of kid each other, we're both Yoshio. Second grandson Noah, his middle name is Nakata, so his name really is Noah Nakata, and Lindsey is Lindsey Kei. It's not K-A-Y, it's Kei for Keiko, so how lucky can we be but to have grandchildren that are carrying on our name and know who Grandma and Grandpa are, and we enjoy playing with them. So recently, we've really had a great time.