Nisei Week’s Inspiration Award Honorees: Steve and Patty Nagano, Bill Watanabe

The Nisei Week Foundation is pleased to honor three special individuals with the 2022 Nisei Week Inspiration Award, which recognizes individuals who exemplify the spirit of Nisei Week by going above and beyond to volunteer their time and/or service or whose contributions have promoted the Japanese and Japanese American community and/or culture.

This year, community leaders Patty and Steve Nagano and Bill Watanabe will receive this award at the Nisei Week Awards Dinner to be held Monday, Aug. 15, at the Double Tree by Hilton, 120 S. Los Angeles St. in Little Tokyo, starting at 6 p.m. Individual tickets are $125 and tables of 10 are $1,250.

Also recognized at the Awards Dinner will be this year’s Frances K. Hashimoto Community Service Award honoree, Fugetsu-Do. For tickets or information, call the Nisei Week Foundation at (213) 687-7193 or email info@niseiweek.org.

Patty and Steve Nagano

The Naganos have been residents of Little Tokyo since 2011. Since the move, their involvement has increased with organizations in Little Tokyo, including Visual Communications (VC), Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress (NCRR), Little Tokyo Historical Society, Nikkei Progressives and many others.

Patty (Ito) was born at the Japanese Hospital and grew up in Pasadena. She is a retired elementary school teacher who taught for over 32 years. Steve was born in Boyle Heights and formerly taught at Roosevelt High School.

They worked on the VC/NCRR production of the film “Stand Up for Justice,” the Ralph Lazo Story. Patty worked with the Japanese American National Museum and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center’s co-production video narrating the story of “The Bracelet” by Yoshiko Uchida. She conducted many workshops for teachers on the implementation of both, to educate about the Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

Patty assisted with FandangObon and was an organizer of Folding for Peace: Remembering Sadako Sasaki, commemorating the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She also worked with Sustainable Little Tokyo and helped organize Little Tokyo Service Center’s Big Budokan Bash in 2016.

During the COVID pandemic she worked with five Little Tokyo restaurants to have meals delivered to Teramachi residents for 70 weeks. It helped sustain these restaurants through the pandemic while feeding the residents.

Steve has been involved with the Visual Communications Digital Histories since 2011 and shown his film shorts in the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival yearly and at various community events and universities. He recently directed the project that made accessible the 23+ hours of testimonies (13 DVDs) before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in Los Angeles in 1981, where 150-plus people testified about their experiences.

Annually Steve has volunteered many days/hours for the Tanabata Festival to set up the structure to hang the kazari. For the last seven years, he spearheaded the Little Tokyo Sparkle community-wide cleanup, where more than 400 volunteers swept, raked, scraped gum, removed graffiti, washed windows and “sparkled” Little Tokyo from Los Angeles Street to Vignes Street. He has represented Little Tokyo on the Neighborhood Council since 2011.

In addition, the Naganos attend and support various camp pilgrimages and events about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The unjust experiences of their parents and grandparents is one thread that binds all Japanese Americans and has a large impact upon who they are and what they stand for. Consequently, to learn and to educate against injustice plays a very large part of their lives.

They enjoy time with family and friends and look forward to traveling, especially to Japan. They volunteered to assist in Tohoku in 2011 after the great tsunami and feel lucky to live the life they are living in Little Tokyo.

They have been working to build the Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund, which seeks investors to help preserve Little Tokyo as a Japanese American enclave to ensure it will be a place for future Nikkei to enjoy.

Bill Watanabe

Watanabe was born in 1944 at the Manzanar concentration camp and transferred a few months later with his family to the Tule Lake concentration camp near California’s border with Oregon.

He is the son of an Issei father, Rokuro, and a Kibei Nisei mother, Katsuye, from Fukushima, who settled in the San Fernando Valley during the 1930s to grow and sell flowers.

With a bachelor’s degree in engineering that he earned from CSU Northridge in 1966, Watanabe worked a year-and-a-half at Lockheed Missiles in Sunnyvale. From September 1967, he spent a year at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo.

Studying in Japan was one of the best years of his life, it was fun, and he enjoyed traveling around the country. Watanabe visited some relatives he had never met before in Fukushima. And he learned to speak Japanese fairly well, or as much as he could learn in nine months. He was 23 years old and had a great time.

Returning home, he worked two years as an engineer for the City of Los Angeles, and then earned his master’s degree in social work at UCLA in 1972. Following stints with Agape Fellowship (an urban Asian American Christian commune) and Japanese Community Pioneer Center, Watanabe founded Little Tokyo Service Center in 1980 and served as its executive director for 32 years. LTSC was established to offer a comprehensive program of bilingual social services in the Little Tokyo area to Japanese and Japanese American residents.

During that time he guided its growth, in conjunction with the Board of Directors, from a one-person staff to a multi-faceted social services and community development program with 150 paid staff, many of whom are bilingual in any of eight Asian Pacific languages and Spanish. LTSC has renovated or constructed a number of projects that have helped to strengthen the Little Tokyo community, including projects such as Casa Heiwa, the Union Center for the Arts, the renovation of the Far East building and the newly constructed Terasaki Budokan. Watanabe retired from LTSC in June 2012.

While at LTSC, he helped to establish a number of important service organizations in the Asian American community such as the Asian Pacific Community Fund, the Asian/Pacific Counseling & Treatment Center, and the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking. In Little Tokyo, Watanabe founded or co-founded some key organizations that have had major impact in the historic ethnic neighborhood such as the Little Tokyo Community Council and the Little Tokyo Historical Society.

Watanabe has an MSW from UCLA, is married and lives in Silver Lake near Downtown Los Angeles. While formally retired, he is currently the president of a new project called the Little Tokyo Community Impact Fund, a community-based real estate investment fund aimed to help heritage small businesses in Little Tokyo that may be threatened by the impact of gentrification.

The 2022 Nisei Week Japanese Festival is a nine-day event first held in 1934 and is recognized today as one of the longest-running ethnic festivals in the U.S. This event will take place in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district from Aug. 13-21. For a calendar of events, log on to http://NiseiWeek.org, call the Nisei Week Foundation office at (213) 687-7193 or email info@niseiweek.org. The Nisei Week office is located at the JACCC, 244 S. San Pedro St., Suite 303, Los Angeles, CA 90012.