Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

<Begin Segment 9>

MH: You talked about your grandparents being here. Can you tell us when they returned to Japan, why, and also how old was your dad when he first came here?

GN: When my father first left Okayama and it was a rural part of Okayama actually Kibi-gun, Ashimori-cho, which is really a farming community about forty-five minutes out of Okayama-shi, came over. He came over with his father, Kitano Nakata and his mother, and the grandparents only stayed for a relatively short period of time. My father was a teenager, eighteen or nineteen at the time, but he was just out of high school. And he came over as he told me later as looking for opportunities, looking for perhaps a new chapter in life that even as a teenager felt that remaining in Okayama, perhaps the opportunities were limited. The chances were a bit small, and so they came over. My grandfather and grandmother I think were comfortable with Portland, Oregon, and so they left back to Japan. But in the case of my grandfather, he came back over for a visit another time, and so I got acquainted with my grandfather at the age of five or six or seven when he stayed over for quite some months for a while. My grandmother remained always in Japan. My father first came over and then took a job on the railroad as many Isseis did at that time. I'm sure it was hard work. They had gangs at that time that worked for certain railroads, the SPNS. The Spokane/Seattle Pacific was one of the main hires of Japanese labor. But he knew one thing I believe and told me later that he did not want to do that too long, so he sought out other opportunities, and he felt that perhaps grocery store might be promising. He felt that operating a hotel, he can certainly do that. He can not only do that, but with a minimum of labor actually, so they took over the management of the Pomona Hotel after he went back to Japan, married my mother, then came over. My mother of course being eight or nine years younger than my father, she was very energetic. She gave up her career as a teacher, came over, and really as I reflect back on it, must have worked extremely hard to make all the beds and keep the hallways clean and things running. And oftentimes of course, my father, operating the fruit and vegetable stand had to come back, and work after he got home to fix a leaky faucet or do some repairs in and around the hotel. The hotel itself was not all that large, so it didn't have that many rooms, but my grandparents, at least my grandfather, was very comfortable of my parents running the hotel, running the fruit and vegetable stand, and so he then went back to Japan.

And fast forwarding it for the moment, when my wife Keiko and I went to Japan and visited Okayama a few years ago, we found a cousin that is now residing in the house that my father grew up in. And as I entered that house and we're having a little snack and tea and ocha and some manju or whatever, staying there for a number of hours, and my cousin telling me, "Yoshio, your father Shigeo grew up in this house," it really took me aback as I started to look around the room and looked at the walls and walked around the house and thought, "Gee, as a youngster as a teenager, my father lived in this very house." Now my cousin explained that since that time, they have fixed the house. They've added a room. They've expanded. They reroofed it. But essentially he says, "The house that you see is really basically the house that your father grew up in." So learning about the Kibi-gun and Ashimori-cho outside of Okayama and walking into the rooms that my father lived in really was quite an experience for me. I wasn't that close to my grandparents, but I met them both, and my grandfather I got to spend quite a bit of time. He stayed for a number of months, walked all the way through Japantown many, many times with him, many dinners that he was at our table, so I got well acquainted with him.

MH: You talked about most children having duties to do at home. Can you remember anything about those duties?

GN: The chores and responsibilities we had as youngsters weren't really huge jobs, but they were simply things that we should be doing and should be taking care of. And so in my case, my bedroom, you know, it should be neat. It wasn't always neat, but it was really my responsibility to clean up and put things away. And the few toys that Mary and I had, we don't leave them scattered. Sure, we can play with them probably anytime, but we had to put them away into our little toybox. And things that... like feeding the fish and later on, cleaning the canary cage and things of that sort, we did not have duties that had to do with cleaning rooms in the hotel or changing sheets or anything like that. No, I was quite young, born in 1934, and the war breaking out in '41. You can see that the years that I'm reflecting on would be more in four, six, seven, eight years old. So the jobs were in one sense not huge jobs, but I think later on as I think about it, it at least taught us something about, we have to do things ourselves. We can't depend on everybody else, rather that they're depending on us to put away our toys and keep our room tidy and go to school when we're supposed to go to school and learn things that really are for our good. And so those are some of the early lessons that I happened to learn.