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The wisdom of Yosh Nakagawa

For a couple of years around the turn of the '80s, while I still in college, I was editor of the now-defunct Northwest Skier magazine. I started out as the typesetter, but inherited the editing chair when the incumbent disappeared, apparently to get his sexual identity sorted out, or maybe just because he ran out of money to go to college. I didn't ski, and was editor of the magazine for two summers and one winter during which it didn't snow. Ultimately I did the right thing and gave the job to my friend Scott North, who is now, I believe, an investigative reporter for the Everett Herald.

Northwest Skier was part of the late Ian F. Brown's small empire, which included radio and recorded ski reports and an annual ski show at the Seattle Center. I had the impression that it had once been a bigger empire, before I got there, and Northwest Skier folded soon enough after I left.

Ian's chief patron was a man named Yosh Nakagawa who had been interned during World War II and worked his way up from, I believe janitor, to become the CEO of Osborn & Ulland, one of a number of outdoor sporting enterprises (REI would be the best-known; O&U opened in 1941 with a loan from Eddie Bauer) which grew up around WWII and the troops trained to ski during that war. At its peak O&U had a half-dozen stores and ran a huge annual ski sale, SNIAGRAB (bargains spelled backwards; O&U had it trademarked, I believe).

Northwest Skier's typesetting shop, which still used the original cold type computerized Photon paper tape typesetting machine (each typeface was on a glass disc, one side of which -- I never really knew which -- would erase if you got it wet) did outside jobs, inevitably, and produced the SNIAGRAB annual newspaper. I remember Yosh himself coming by and telling me not to worry if it looked bad, it was SUPPOSED to look bad, and to quit trying to make it nice, people would believe it to be more of a bargain if I did the design work as sloppily as possible. Which I was able to oblige, more or less.

Mr. Nakagawa...he was called Yosh around the shop, but I am more comfortable remembering him as Mr. Nakagawa, and believe him to still be alive...was also somehow involved with the various pro sports franchises in Seattle at the time. It seems to me that the Mariners were new, and the Seahawks were pretty new, and the Sonics won the NBA title in 1979. In a previous job, back at the SeaGraphics mother ship, I had briefly brushed up against a couple of guys who were publishing something called Pro Sports West. They went out of business, perhaps because one of them got a real job on radio, maybe because the idea didn't work.

Anyhow. I was close to being out of college and needed a job, and somehow convinced Ian to get us a meeting with Mr. Nakagawa, because I had formed the idea that we could do a monthly tabloid covering pro and college sports in the Seattle area, and that his connections would make it possible, and that Osborn & Ulland's patronage would make it financially feasible. I liked Ski'n Ian, knew his business was shaky (I think a couple of us even looked at buying some of it from him, but memory fades), and thought maybe this bright idea would serve his and my needs by propping us both up.

And, anyway, I had no business writing about skiing. (How? you ask. Sit at the end of the bar and listen to the line the guys are giving the gals when they come down at the end of the day. Remember the good parts, divide by two, write your notes when you get back to the hotel room. My memory was better then. I think.)

I do not remember what Mr. Nakagawa looked like, save that he was small up against Ian's bulk. He did not seem, most of the time, to be an intimidating figure, and it was never clear to me why he seemed to go out of his way to help Ian's business. But he did, and he took the meeting. He had a tatami room built off his office at the O&U headquarters, and that may have been where we met. He looked at my idea, and listened, and it wasn't a long meeting, but I have carried his answer with me ever since, and been increasingly grateful for it.

"You should make a business to last a thousand years," he said to me.

At the time, I thought it a particularly Asian way of saying no, without getting into the details of why my plan wouldn't work.

Later I decided that he knew I was looking for a quick hand-hold on the career ladder, that he didn't really know me but knew Ian wasn't in a position to pull such a project off.

And then I came to believe it was both a very smart and a very moral thing to have shared with me, and I am grateful.

As I finished Big-Box Swindle, Mr. Nakagawa's words came back even more forcefully, for we, in our hurry to save a penny and make a dollar, are allowing our economy and our ecology and the ecology of our economy to be savaged. We are building structures to last fifteen or twenty years. We are destroying small businesses which might last for generations.

The last portion of Big-Box Swindle talks about strategies to keep such enormous stores from opening in your community. Alas, it offers no suggestions for those of us living in towns already decimated by these monsters.

And, of course, yesterday, I had to drive to the bloody Wal-Mart because it was the only place in town I could buy a ream of paper.

Yosh Nakagawa was a sharp and sharp-elbowed businessman. Ian came back one day after SNIAGRAB, having watched Yosh sit on the phone and call each of his suppliers, telling them he'd cut a check that day if they'd give him a two-percent discount. They all did, and he made thousands of dollars for O&U that morning. O&U, of course, didn't survive; near as I can tell online, their last store closed in 1999.

Posted by grant on May 22, 2007 9:12 PM | Permalink