Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

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MH: I'm kind of interested. You know, when you gathered for dinner, did your parents speak Japanese? Did you have a certain place to sit at the table, anything like that?

GN: We always sat in the same chair, and we had these sort of, they don't have them anymore, these oil cloths, this linoleum oil cloth that you put over the table, easy to wipe up as we spill things. My father worked long hours, but he tried very hard to come home for dinner. Mind you, he really had two jobs. But for his Columbia River Fruit and Vegetable Stand, he left by 3:30 or 4 o'clock in the morning to go to the marketplace to pick up different things and make two trips before the stand opened, so he got up early every morning. And in the midafternoon, he'd take about an hour nap in a tent behind the fruit and vegetable stand, but he would do his best to come home for dinner. So on most cases, he would be home. And because of Japanese school and other reasons, we would eat around 6, 6:30, 7. And as I grew older, of course, Kikuo and Michiko left for Japan, and so there were just the four of us. Most of our conversation was entirely in Japanese. But as Mary and I grew older, we, of course, started to speak more and more English. My father owning and operating a fruit and vegetable stand didn't have any formal English education, but he learned English just from his job, his profession, so he understood quite a few English words. My mother only learned through the office or the check-in at the hotel. So for the most part, we learned Japanese just by conversation at the dinner table, but my mother would help us with Japanese. I believe that as a former, a short career but as an ex-school teacher, she wanted us to pronounce the words correctly or the emphasis on the hatsuon, the emphasis on accents because whether it's a spider or a cloud, it's kumo. And so we learned Japanese words, and we tried to learn them not furo but ofuro or ohashi or tried to teach us in the proper way. There's no slang in Japanese technically but to learn clean proper Orthodox Japanese. But I feel and she told us later that she and my father really spoke Okayama-ben, if you will, the Okayama dialect, and so there would be some phrases that was strictly regional Okayama-ben rather than the Kanto/Kansai-ben of Osaka or Tokyo-ben. But Mary and I learned our conversational Japanese there. But of course during the day, we would be speaking English all day with the Catholic nuns and with our classmates, and so the dinnertime conversation was interesting. It wasn't any particular agenda, but we would talk about what happened at school and what happened at Japanese school and what my father did today. And at that time, his fruit and vegetable stand was I believe fair to say that doing well, and he would buy peaches and watermelon and cantaloupe by the truckload and literally compete with Fred Meyers at that time. Fred Meyers is not the, you know, several hundred store network being a part of Kroger chain of mass merchandisers that it is today. They had the drug store on Fifth Avenue and a couple of other stores and that was it. And so the Columbia Boulevard Fruit and Vegetable Stands competed, and in order to compete, my father had to go to the market very early in the morning. So he'd tell us about that sometime at dinnertime or of upcoming events of a wedding or a judo tournament or the undoukai that's going to come up during the summer or maybe a movie that's playing. So talk around the neighborhood and what Mr. Yasui said and my mother would update him on how the hotel is going, whether there's any problem customers, something that needs maintenance.

And I have to admit that my father as I reflect back on it was extremely handy. No, he was not an electrician. He was not a plumber. But in a sense, he was all of that. He fixed everything, and he would tinker with radios and make them work again. He'd fix the steam heater, and he fixed the leaky pipes, and he would take down doors, and he learned to wallpaper. And really as I think about it now, the skills and talents that he had were really quite amazing because he didn't have the modern day tools to do all that. He had several tools that were uniquely Japanese and brought here from Japan, and he used those for multi-purposes. So he fixed a lot of things in the hotel. But our dinnertime conversation covered everything. And sometimes there were times that my parents would have to discipline us, and maybe we didn't learn the words then, but I think most of us in terms of learning and respecting our elders, learning discipline, learning right from wrong, I think came at a very early age and in my case came during our time and years in Nihonmachi in the hotel during dinnertime, studying katakana with my mother, doing things that we should be doing before is not continual recess, but there are really jobs and little responsibilities for even children. And so I think a lot of us learned at a fairly early age about certain things that are duties and things that we need to do and things that we should not do.