Friday from the Archives: “Getting By and Through the ’40s” by I.S. Nakata in NCLR 2023
NCLR staff, as we start to assemble the material for our Winter 2026 digital issue, the first with our “Saluting Military Writing” feature, have been contemplating how both wartime and peacetime military service impacted North Carolina literature, arts, and residents.
Black Mountain College, which we featured in our 1995 issue, had its heyday during the 1940’s. World War II impacted the college both positively (new professors arrived fleeing the anti-intellectual and -artistic Nazis) and negatively (students drafted or volunteering and leaving campus). Then there was the stateside internment of Japanese Americans, which writer I.S. Nakata avoided by first going to BMC and then being drafted into the Army.
“I had first heard of Black Mountain College when, in early 1940, a Honolulu paper devoted a back page to this small college in western North Carolina. There was a picture of students playing chess on a sundeck. The accompanying story of an educational experiment intrigued me; and the idea of community living, working, and studying appealed to my instinctive needs. Perhaps I was looking for a substitute family, if only in idealized form. After much correspondence, I was accepted in late summer, and that acceptance was my
passport to another world.”
Nakata, having been born and raised in Hawaii, writes about feeling like an outsider to both the Black and white community of the South, how he was able to use his status as someone not immediately placeable to make other minorities feel at ease. He served in the Army for his draft stint of ’41-’42, and then, “In the early spring of ’43, the secretary of war announced the formation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team expressly for Japanese born in America (and Hawaii) whose patriotism had to be proved. I volunteered. The FBI office in Asheville processed my case history – I filed, in triplicate, all substantive data regarding myself, my immediate family, relatives, funds or relatives in Japan, organizations, jobs, birthdates, married-in-laws’ names and occupations, etc. From Ft. Bragg, I was sent to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, that summer
for basic training in the infantry. After service in Italy and France, I did not get out of the army until the end. Surviving whole from the war – not being a hero, dead or alive – had been my intention. I had gotten only a small shrapnel wound that could have been crippling. My family seemed relieved to see me. My father credited my survival on a Buddhist talisman he’d sent me.”
BMC would decline (first slowly, then all at once) over the next decade before closing in 1957. Did the Korean War play into the lack of students during the 1950s? Would BMC have closed sooner without the Albers and other influential refugees from Europe? It’s impossible to detail the impact refugees, veterans, and the wars had on Black Mountain College.
Read Nakata’s essay on Gale Cengage. Add the 1995 issue to your collection today!
