Eddie and brother-in-law
Takashi “Teek” Kondo
From: Funeral Program at Funeral Service for Peter Nakahara
Date: December 7, 2003
PETER MINORU NAKAHARA
May 19, 1921 – November 28, 2003
By Elizabeth Nakahara
Peter, how hath we known thee? Let us count the ways.
CHILDHOOD
On May 19, 1921, Peter tumbled into the world half askew, a breech birth, whose legs broke as doctors pulled him from the birth canal. Unlike mangled Peter, twin sister Mary Yuriko glided into the world. As a twin, Peter was the quieter one. As the younger brother of Arthur, Peter was the noisier one.
Favorite pastime: Riding his bicycle and chauffeuring his twin sister, who sat straddled on a tandem over the rear wheel.
Memory of father, Seiichi Nakahara: Peter liked caddying for Seiichi, a golf enthusiast, who was taciturn because of health problems.
Memory of mother, Tsuyako Nakahara: Peter enjoyed helping Tsuyako serve food at dinner parties in the dining room of their Spanish style house in San Pedro.
Memorable event: Around 1925, when the twins were 3 and brother Art was 6, the Nakahara family visited relatives in Japan. While playing rambunctiously, Art ran into a pregnant aunt, who toppled to the ground. The fall killed the unborn baby. Tsuyako desperately wanted to console her heartbroken sister-in-law, so she offered the woman 3-year-old Peter as a replacement for the stillborn baby. Several years later, Tsuyako explained to Peter, “I offered to give you away, not because I loved you any less, but because I love you with all my heart. I wanted to give my sister-in-law that which I loved most to show her how deeply sorry I felt.”
YOUTH
Peter developed a passion for the written and spoken word. He studied International Relations, as well as Debate, at Compton Junior College, then transferred to University of California at Berkeley.
Favorite pastime: Amassing an extensive collection of quotations, which he divided into categories, such as humor, inspiration, friendship, patriotism, etc. The anthology was a labor of love and his most prized possession. When an attractive, popular coed asked to borrow it, Peter reluctantly obliged. He was too nice to say no. The young woman never returned it.
Favorite pursuit: Debating and public speaking. At Compton Junior College, Peter entered a public speaking contest. A classmate recalls Peter opened by saying, “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Laugh and you laugh alone.” The audience gasped, because the quotation sounded butchered. Then Peter continued, “The first quotation is when the teacher tells a joke; the second quotation applies when you tell a joke.” Finally, the audience laughed, and Peter delivered an eloquent speech. He also won first prize.
Good friends: Jim Nakano, Yuriko Yoshihara, Mo Oana Miya, Nan Carlson, Donald Hurley, Terry Croskrey.
YOUNG ADULTHOOD
Of kindness and hatred: While a 20-year-old college student at U.C. Berkeley, Peter heard the news that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. When he walked on the street, strangers sometimes yelled, “You goddam Jap!” As Peter sat in a café with two Japanese-American friends, three passersby glared and one growled, “If I had a gun, there’d be three dead Japs!”
Wary of violence, officials at U.C. Berkeley announced to the student population: “All you Japanese Americans should leave campus immediately and go home any way you can.”
Peter tried to buy a bus ticket to San Pedro, but the ticket agent refused to sell him a ticket. He tried to walk across the Bay Bridge to buy a train ticket in San Francisco, but toll takers refused him access to the bridge. In desperation, Peter tried to hitchhike even though police were arresting Japanese Americans bold enough to roam the streets.
A white, male student, who was driving by, stopped to pick up Peter before police could snatch him. This kindhearted student drove Peter 600 miles south to San Pedro. Because this student risked arrest, Peter told his family that he had hitchhiked from Berkeley to San Pedro.
Still I Rise: Peter arrived in San Pedro eager to enlist in the American military. He loved the country that gave him a happy childhood, a good education, and a compatriot brave enough to defy police and drive him home. Peter tried in vain to enlist in the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. Deflated but not defeated, Peter went to a small recruitment facility, Fort MacArthur, in San Pedro. There, the Army recruiter refused Peter’s application because he was under 21. So Peter went home, secured a consent letter from his mother, and returned to For MacArthur, where the Army accepted him as a draftee, not a volunteer.
Most devastating experience: The FBI surreptitiously spied on Peter’s father because the elder Nakahara was a Japanese immigrant denied citizenship by American law; because he owned a short-wave radio; because he traded in fish and knew the Pacific waters; because he entertained Japanese captains whose steamliners docked in San Pedro Bay; and because Japanese Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura declined a dinner invitation by sending this telegram: “Sorry I cannot enjoy ‘Samma’ with you.” (Samma is a fish.) The FBI presumed “Samma” was code for a secret operation.
Two FBI agents grabbed Seiichi on December 7, 1941, about 11 a.m. while bombs were falling on Pearl Harbor. They chose the moment of least resistance – when Seiichi, just released from hospital, lay in bed and when Mary Yuriko was the only other person at home. The two agents pulled Seiichi from his bed, told him to put on a robe and slippers, then escorted him to a waiting car without offering any explanation to a stunned Mary Yuriko. Within a few days, the family lawyer located Seiichi at the Terminal Island penitentiary. Peter, by now wearing a U.S. Army uniform, visited his father, weak from unmedicated diabetes, asthma and stomach ulcers.
When Peter walked into the holding room, he saw an emaciated Seiichi, who stared blankly and quivered with fear. Peter said, “Dad, it’s your son Peter.” Seiichi replied in Japanese, “You are not my son; you’re an interrogator impersonating my son.” Taken aback, Peter tried to explain that the newly acquired uniform was a source of pride and that he was indeed the second-born son. But he failed to convince a near-delirious Seiichi.
Relatives later learned that FBI agents deprived Seiichi of sleep and diabetes medication, interrogated him under bright lights at all hours and repeatedly yelled, “What is Samma?” to which the bewildered Seiichi always replied, “It’s a fish!”
On January 13, 1942, five weeks after detention, the family visited Seiichi in a packed hospital ward, where agents had transferred him when his health dramatically declined and where agents had segregated him by posting the sign, “Prisoner of War.” On January 20, 1942, the FBI released Seiichi, who died at home 12 hours later.
Favorite comeback: After applying for Officers’ Training School, Peter submitted to a 3-member panel of interviewers. Officers questioned Peter about his patriotism and his father’s “suspicious” associations. When a panel member became inexcusably derogatory, Peter recited this quotation: “He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not allow him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flags and their fatherland.” Peter’s literary finesse angered the three panel members, who must have realized their interviewee was not intimidated by them and was probably smarter than they. One officer yelled, “Pfc. Nakahara, you are dismissed! Get out of here!”
Eventually, Peter’s fluency in Japanese elevated him to intelligence service. He trained at Camp Savage in Minnesota. Shipped overseas, Peter landed in New Guinea, then went to Australia, and later ended up in the Philippines where the U.S. Army assigned him to the Australian 6th Division.
Good friends: Victor Abe, George Shimizu, Bill Toriumi, Hatch Kita, George (Gremlin) Nakamura, Harry Fukuhara, Peter Yamazaki, Sam and Rose Nieda.
POST-WAR YEARS
When WWII ended in September 1945, the Army asked Peter to interpret at General Tomoyuki Yamashita’s war-crimes trial in Manila. Peter declined because he wanted to travel homeward with his battalion. While en route to America, Peter stopped over in Tokyo. He saw burned, disfigured and maimed survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most Japanese feared the debilitating radiation sickness and felt overwhelmed by their own poverty, so they ignored the atomic bomb survivors. Whenever he could, Peter went to the PX to buy food for hibakushas, who had become street people.
After returning to California, Peter learned Tokyo would host a second round of war crimes trials. Peter accepted the government’s offer to interpret and returned to Japan.
Most touching memory: During the war-crimes trial of 12 commanding officers, one defendant leaned forward and asked, “Is your father Seiichi Nakahara?” “Yes,” Peter replied, “Seiichi passed away at the beginning of the war.” The Japanese defendant said, “I knew your father well in Japan.”
Saddest memory: Peter empathized with the Japanese defendants, who executed tasks just like American commanders and who didn’t always control the actions of enlisted men. Mostly, they were found guilty and sentenced to die by hanging. Because Peter announced the Japanese translation of the harsh verdicts, the defendants’ families all glared at him.
Personal memories: In 1949, during his 4-year stint as court interpreter, Peter met and married Aiko Umino, a beautiful, long-haired stenographer from Seattle. In Tokyo, they married in an American building that was off-limits to the Japanese relatives.
While traveling by train through Japan, Peter and Aiko sat side-by-side. A group of big, burly Australian soldiers boarded and could not find empty seats. They saw Peter sitting beside Aiko and presumed they could intimidate Peter into vacating his seat. When one Australian soldier looked poised to push Peter off his seat, Aiko flung herself across Peter and clung to his shoulders, thus preventing a showdown. When Peter and Aiko came to their stop, they stood and exited in a most dignified way, until Aiko turned around and stuck her tongue out at the soldiers.
Aiko’s memory: Peter would telephone me in Tokyo and say, ‘I’m coming by train from Yokohama, and I can visit you for only 30 minutes.’ He’d come and talk, then look at his wristwatch and say, ‘It’s been half-an-hour; I must go now.’ He’d go back to the station and take the train all the way back to Yokohama.
In 1950, Peter and Aiko’s first child, Elizabeth, was born in Osaka, Japan.
THE LATE-BLOOMER FINALLY BLOSSOMS
To Peter, the war crimes trials represented an inferior brand of American due process. But still he became hooked on law. Heeding the American legal team’s advice, he applied to Harvard and Stanford law schools. Accepted by both, Peter chose Stanford, because Palo Alto was 3,000 miles closer to Japan than Cambridge.
Fond memories: In 1951, Peter and Aiko settled into married students’ housing. Peter and his Stanford law buddies studied together and became close friends. The wives bonded as well, sometimes trading babysitting duty and household chores. Aiko remembers this period as the happiest time of their lives, because of the camaraderie, the lively discussions, the lack of pretense and the absence of bigotry.
Good friends: Ted and Susan Finman, Victor Goehring, Bill Norris, Bob Berryman, Leo Beigenzan.
THE PROFESSIONAL YEARS
After graduating from law school in 1954 and passing the bar exam, Peter opened a practice near San Jose’s Japantown. Law firms didn’t recruit Japanese-American lawyers during the mid 1950s. But Aiko thought Peter would succeed anyway. He just seemed invincible, Aiko recalls. He was self-assured, always well-prepared, aggressive and totally unintimidated by white people. Peter’s first clients were minority people: Japanese-American farmers, Japanese restaurant workers and immigrants of both Asian and Hispanic backgrounds.
A colleague, Judge John McInerny, admired Peter’s “wonderful ability to work within the system in order to make it work for him and accomplish what he wanted to do.” When the state of California built Highway 17 near Los Gatos, the new highway cut through a farmer’s property thus dividing it. Peter convinced the state to build a tunnel under Highway 17, so the farmer could drive his tractor from one severed property to the other and easily cultivate all his crops.
Aiko’s memory: Japanese-American brothers hired Peter to represent them during the sale of their farmland. Peter and his clients met with a white real estate agent, who offered a preposterously low bid for highly valuable land. Peter firmly told the agent the offer was insulting and escorted his clients out of the building. The agent chased after Peter and offered to renegotiate the amount.
During his 40-year career, Peter enjoyed numerous courtroom successes and criminal trial victories. He immensely appreciated his hardworking, loyal secretaries and partner. As a 1950s-style workaholic father, he raised daughter Elizabeth and three sons, William, Robert and David, who saw the huge demands of lawyering and decided not to become lawyers.
As many longtime friends know, Peter had his share of quirks:
1) He habitually fretted about time and exhorted others to hurry.
2) He totally lacked mechanical ability. He once tried to assemble a bicycle and unwittingly created conceptual art.
3) He told off-color jokes that made people cringe.
4) He was trusting to a fault and occasionally fell victim to con artists.
5) He didn’t verbalize his feelings or demonstrate his emotions.
But he had wonderful qualities as well:
1) He had integrity. He followed his heart into the least lucrative segments of law.
2) He was generous. He often picked up the tab at restaurants and accepted clients’ gifts in lieu of payments for legal services.
3) He was intelligent, well-read, well-spoken, fair-minded, optimistic, principled, polite, honest and open-minded.
4) He was funny if you liked bizarre humor.
5) He was fun-loving. He danced even though he lacked rhythm, sang even though he lacked an ear, hosted parties even though he cooked only chow mein.
Peter could be exasperatingly stubborn (“I won’t go to the doctor”), prone to denial (“There’s nothing wrong with me”) and vain to a fault (“I won’t wear a hearing aid”). But he had ten times as many virtues, which more than made up for his shortcomings. Everyone close to him agrees: To know him was to love him. To remember is to smile.