The Port Townsend writer visits Bainbridge to reflect on life, times.
When Carl Nomura took a personality test, “love of adventure” was among his outstanding traits.
That capacity to savor the unexpected and exciting – and tolerate the corollary dangers – may have been precisely the quality he needed to enjoy the wild ride that has been his lot.
The author will discuss his life Jan. 29 in a reading from his memoir, “Sleeping on Potatoes: A Lumpy Adventure from Manzanar to the Corporate Tower.”
Born in a boxcar rolling through Montana in 1922, Nomura emerged from the Manzanar camp at which he and other West Coast Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, to earn a doctorate in physics and found Honeywell Corporation’s solid-state electronics division. H e retired as the company’s senior vice-president.
“I decided a long time ago that life is short and to let bygones be bygones,” he said. “And life has been good to me.”
When he retired, Nomura turned his hand to writing, but, unlike many first-time fiction writers, avoided using himself as a subject. He penned stories about others until a friend nudged him toward autobiography.
“(Friend) Gwen Moore insisted that the writing be a memoir,” he said, “because all the stories didn’t connect. She said ‘I’ll do all the work for you, I’ll edit, I’ll type.’ Those weren’t the most interesting stories, but it’s a subject I knew well.”
Nomura’s early life was not easy. His father was disinclined to serious work, leaving his mother to hold the family together.
The family settled at last in California, saving enough to buy a store in 1929. There, they weathered the Depression years.
Nomura graduated from Van Nuys High School in June of 1941. Six months later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and, a few months after that, Nomura’s family was interned. He describes his sojourn in the camp as “a time of disappointment.”
“There were all kinds of physical hardships,” he said. “That was bad. But worse was to be rejected by the country I loved, to have my country say I’m a traitor.”
The hurt cut deep with many; although army recruiters later came to the camp, Nomura says, the enlistees who filled the Japanese regiments were largely volunteers from Hawaii who had not been interned.
After the war, Nomura watched as the oldest internees were summarily dumped where they had been scooped up four years earlier.
He took it all in, but arrived at conclusions that reflected his own ability to find a positive path from the debris.
“That’s when I formulated my life’s mission,” Normura said. “I decided to help the underdog. To really work for the cause of the persecuted and the poor.”
Characteristically, he didn’t offer help only to fellow Japanese Americans. Over the years, Nomura and his wife, Louise, took in people in need, once housing a family of five for half a year.
When the United States and Iran were at odds in the 1970s, he helped Iranians who were persecuted here.
Nomura himself experienced racial profiling after 9-11, when he was pulled out of an airport line for a “random spot check,” along with every other person of color.
The war on terror is one factor that has encouraged him, he says, to work to elect a new administration. To Arab and Muslim Americans who experience racial prejudice he suggests “standing on the shoulders of experience.
“The Japanese American group has been working the problem for 60 years,” he said.
Although Nomura encounters prejudice less in his adopted home of Port Townsend, he still runs into bias from out-of-town visitors.
“Some say ‘welcome to my country,’” he said. “They don’t think I live here, they assume I’m going home. If I think they should know better, I straighten them out. If I decide they are a lost cause, I just let it go.
“But my children are different. If anyone gives them a hard time, they fight back.”
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The Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community and Eagle Harbor Book Co. present an evening with Carl Nomura, author of “Sleeping on Potatoes: A Lumpy Adventure from Manzanar to the Corporate Tower” and Tetsuden Kashima, author of “Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II,” at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 29 at the bookstore. The event is free. Call 842-5332.
