Biography:
Paul Takeo Nakadate was born August 18, 1914, in Montebello, California, to Yojiro and Kimi Nakadate. He had three brothers and a sister. The family moved to San Diego, where Nakadate attended school and graduated from San Diego State College. Nakadate married his wife Alice in Los Angeles and eventually sold insurance for his brother-in-law’s insurance agency in the city. Nakadate, his wife, and infant son were sent to the Pomona Assembly Center on May 15, 1942, and were on the first train to enter Heart Mountain, arriving on August 12, 1942. Nakadate’s mother and sister Sachiko were also sent to Heart Mountain, while his father was sent to two detention centers–Camp Livingston and Santa Fe–before he was sent to Heart Mountain in 1944.
Nakadate was considered a leader in camp and was granted leave clearance in 1943 to work on the railroad in Washington state. He also went to the Tule Lake camp in November 1943 to help harvest crops there when that camp’s incarcerees went on strike to protest conditions there. After the start of the military draft in early 1944, Nakadate became a leader of the Fair Play Committee. He was denied leave clearance from Heart Mountain on April 3, 1944, and ordered to be sent to Tule Lake. His wife and son left Heart Mountain that month for Denver, where Alice Nakadate’s family had relocated. Nakadate was arrested on July 20, 1944, and was tried and convicted with the other Fair Play Committee leaders in October 1944. He was sentenced to four years in the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. But the federal appeals court in Denver overturned the conviction on December 26, 1945, ruling that the judge had erred in making his instructions to the jury in the 1944 case. Paul Nakadate returned to Los Angeles after his imprisonment and worked as a grocery store manager. He died at age 49 in Los Angeles on April 14, 1964.