Densho Digital Archive
Oregon Nikkei Endowment Collection
Title: George Nakata Interview
Narrator: George Nakata
Interviewer: Masako Hinatsu
Location: Portland, Oregon
Date: August 23, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-ngeorge_2-01-0005

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GN: Our hotel by the way was located on Second and Burnside. Not the greatest hotel as I think about it now and transients and, if you will, bums would come in at all hours of the night. On the first floor, they'd get a bed, huge room with about twenty beds, no partitions or anything, for twenty-five cents a night I think it was. And on our floor, there'd be of course a hallway that went all the way around the hotel. My mother would make the beds, but they were not the fanciest of rooms. I remember my father used to have a spray, and he'd kill the bedbugs every now and then, and we'd help Mom sweep the hallway with this little carpet sweeper. So it wasn't the fanciest of hotels, but it was, night clerk was named Adam Manola, and he was a Finnish gentleman, a great friend of ours and remained our friend for all the way through, wrote us letters occasionally while we were in Idaho, Minidoka. Another friend that I had was a Bulgarian gentleman that stayed for years at our Pomona Hotel, and his name was Jimmy Moldenov. Jimmy Moldenov taught me how to play checkers, and at an young age, he taught me a Bulgarian song, and I think I learned that song at the age of four or five. Well, a few years ago, I was in Europe and I happened to sit down, found out that this lady was Bulgarian, and I sang this Japanese, or this Bulgarian song to her, and she completely understood this song. And I kind of amazed myself that I had either the words or enunciations halfway proper so that she could understand my one Bulgarian song that I learned way back in the mid-1930s from one Jimmy Moledenov who stayed at the Pomona Hotel with us.

But we ate a lot of Japanese food there. Our living room was where we spent most of our time. We had a big console radio that we bought just before the war broke out. I think my father spent $100 for that radio, a GE console radio, and we don't have those radios today. It was a radio that stood on the floor, and at four or five years old, it was taller than I was. And I remember when we had to go to the Portland Assembly Center, my father sold that radio to the policemen on the beat for five dollars, and my mother was just crying and weeping, not only that but so many things that she, possessions that we or my family had worked hard for, my father and mother in particular, had saved for and now had to sell at mere pittance just pennies on the dollar. But in our living room, we had a canary, a yellow canary, that used to fly around. They'd open up the door and he'd fly around all the time and sing just something terrific. And after a couple of years, we came back, Mary and I came back from school, and our parents told us the canary had died or flew out, and that was a sad day when we lost our canary. We used to have a tank not only for goldfish but tropical fish that I used to admire, our introduction to angel fish and some of the exotic fishes and how we'd learn that's how you pump air and oxygen into the fish tank and don't overfeed it, and we were good, we'd get to feed it during the day. So our living room was kind of where Mary and I played. My greatest possession was a Lionel train set, had kind of spokes that you put the tracks together in either a big circle or a circle eight or a figure eight, didn't have many cars but had a locomotive, had a couple cars and a caboose, off and on switch. But that Lionel train set was really one of my prize possessions. The other prize possession wasm as I mentioned earlier, Mr. Yasui uncle of Yoji Matsushima, used to come around to take orders. One day, he came over and he brought a gift to me. It was a coin purse, but it was a leather coin purse made like a catcher's mitt, a zipper on it, had these stitchings, really perfectly resembled a catcher's mitt. That was my other prized possession. I kept that with me every day. I brought it to me to the Portland Assembly Center. I brought it with me to Minidoka. And somewhere during the three or three and a half years there, I lost that coin purse. To this day, I often think about that great leather catcher's mitt coin purse that Yasui-san brought over, gave to me as a gift. So we spent many, many hours there in the living room playing. In the meantime, sister Michiko and brother Kikuo, Kay and May, went to Japan to visit grandparents in late 1938 or early 1939, and they stayed there because of the outbreak of the war. So many years from that point forward, Mary and I spent time together, just the two of us. Yes, there were four children, but for the most part, it was just Sumiko, Mary, and myself going to the assembly center, Minidoka, and so forth.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.