89 SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK George Yoshio Nakata GEORGE YOSHIO NAKATA was born in Portland before World War II and grew up in the “Japantown” section of northwest Portland. His family leased and operated a small hotel on Northwest Second Avenue and his father owned and operated two fruit/ vegetable markets on North Columbia Boulevard. Nakata remembers an overall happy childhood playing alongside his sister, Mary, where the children were shielded from much of the existing anti-Japanese sentiment along the West Coast. Japantown was a comfortable environment for a number of Portlandarea Japanese families. On December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor started World War II, and an imposed curfew required people of Japanese descent to remain in their homes between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., essentially closing down Japantown at the outset of the war. With the signing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, eight-year-old Nakata and his family were imprisoned in the Portland Assembly Center for the summer of 1942. In September of 1942 the Nakata family was transferred to the Minidoka War Relocation Camp, where they spent the duration of the war in the Idaho desert. The Minidoka Camp held some 9,600 Japanese behind barbed wire fences and guard towers, in uninsulated tar-papered barracks, stripped of their freedom and constitutional rights. An indelible stretch for those imprisoned Japanese that were given a ‘family number’ and treated as ‘enemy aliens.’ Once the concentration camps closed in 1945, Nakata and his family returned to Portland, where they picked berries and beans for their survival. They regained their footing and Nakata graduated from Lincoln High School and later from Lewis & Clark College, where he earned his degree in business administration with honors in 1957. He served in the U.S. Army, with top-secret clearance at Seventh Army Headquarters in Germany (1954–55) and became a successful international business executive with Japanese companies and with the Port of Portland, where he established Far East offices for the Port. In recent years, Nakata has worked as an international trade consultant and has become a trusted storyteller, sharing his life experiences of incarceration. He has an ongoing desire to have the American public better understand the racial injustices and the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese during those World War II days. A story of a people, a story which few Americans have heard, understand or even believe happened. COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS
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