He served the church in Hawaii for 40 years with a confidence in the abilities of young people, an eagerness to try new things and a love for his cultural and religious heritage

By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

Norman M.U. Nakamoto, whose 40 years of imaginative service to the Catholic Church in Hawaii left a bright and lasting legacy, died peacefully in his Waipahu home on Sept. 8 after a long struggle with cancer. He was 69.

His funeral was Sept. 20 at Star of the Sea Church in Waialae-Kahala, the parish where he first fell in love with the Catholic faith as a third grader in the parish school.

Nakamoto was the executive director of the Diocese of Honolulu’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), an agency he served for more than 20 years, and then development and parish relations director for Catholic Charities Hawaii. He retired from diocesan employment in 2003.

In the 1960s and 1970s, he transformed CYO from an after-school elementary sports league to an Oahu-wide summer fun and camping program that employed dozens of young counselors and served hundreds of children, many of whom came from poor and low-income families.

At Catholic Charities he served as a link between the agency and the broader Catholic community, raising awareness and support for social services organization through innovative programs and projects.

His success lay in his eye for talent, a solid confidence in the abilities of young people, his willingness to try new things, a dogged self-assurance, and his love for his cultural and religious heritage.

It could also be found in the positive posture he summoned when faced with adversity, in particular the cancer he beat back, again and again, for 20 years.

Star of the Sea School

Norman Masao Umihulu- makaokalani Nakamoto was born on June 25, 1938, in Lahaina, Maui, the son of the late Masaru Nakamoto and Charlotee Kuuleiolele Ontai.

He moved to Honolulu as a child with his family. In 1946, his Protestant mother enrolled him, over the objections of his Buddhist father, in the very first kindergarten class of Star of the Sea School in Waialae-Kahala.

The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who ran the school, made a profound impact on the mind and heart of the young student. By the third grade, Norman was aching to become a Catholic. His parents made him wait until grade seven to be baptized.

“I owe my Catholic religion to these sisters,” Nakamoto said in a 2003 interview with the Hawaii Catholic Herald. “They made great sacrifices. They were models for me, examples of real religious commitment.”

He remained close to the Notre Dame Sisters for the rest of his life, visiting them in Boston every year, including this year.

Nakamoto’s youthful zeal continued at St. Louis High School where a writing assignment about religious orders led him to discover the Carmelites. The more he inquired about the order, the more it appealed to him. He signed up at age 17.

For eight years, through temporary and solemn vows, he lived the strict life of a semi-contemplative brother in monasteries in Ohio and Massachusetts.

But homesickness can be a powerful force and he left monastic life and moved back to Hawaii.

Wanted: assistant recreation director

Nakamoto had been home for a few months working as a clerk at Kuakini Hospital when he answered an ad seeking an assistant recreation director for the Catholic Youth Organization. He was 26.

He applied, negotiated a $15 pay increase over his $265-a-month Kuakini salary, and began officiating at grade school volleyball and basketball games. Soon he was anxious to do more.

At the time, CYO had a small summer fun program for about 20 children at Cathedral School in Nuuanu. Nakamoto took it over, recruiting children from the community and counselors from St. Stephen Seminary. In a short time he had 200 kids.

It wasn’t long before he was running summer programs at Maryknoll, St. Elizabeth, Holy Trinity and St. Anthony, Kailua.

Other projects emerged from Nakamoto’s creative energy during the 1960s and 1970s — a Diocesan Congress of Catholic Youth, a youth club at Our Lady of the Mount Parish, karate classes at Holy Trinity, a diocesan youth dance at the Aloha Tower passenger terminal, a parish sports league, a Keiki Fun summer program for children 4-6, annual Na Mele O Hauula music festivals, a childcare center in Hauula, and the biggest program of all — camping.

The diocese had never had youth camping. Nakamoto had never gone to camp as a child much less operated one. Nevertheless, in 1968, when he eyed the newly vacant Sacred Hearts Seminary sitting on four-and-a-half acres of prime Hauula beachfront, he saw possibilities.

So did Bishop John J. Scanlan, who leased the land from the Sacred Hearts Fathers and turned it over to the CYO. Camp Hauula opened in 1969 and ran for 18 years.

Each summer, grade-school kids of poor families arrived in buses for eight week-long sessions — tuition-free. Parishes recruited the children and paid their way. Some kids came from housing projects on Oahu.

The camp provided more than fun under the country sun. For many it was a new and enlightening experience of independence and friendship.

“You can do so much in one week,” Nakamoto recalled, from easing campers through the first days of homesickness to offering them an experience of companionship and bonding.

“By the end of the week, they were all crying because they didn’t want to go home,” he said.

At its peak, CYO camping expanded to include two additional weeks of paid camp at Hauula, plus summer, winter and spring excursion camps to the neighbor islands and group trips to Disneyland.

Nakamoto first recruited counselors from St. Stephen’s high school and college seminary and Catholic high schools. When word got out that CYO was a fun place to work, applicants came on their own.

For many of these counselors, CYO was much more than a paid job. It was a social club, a career launcher, a meeting place for future spouses.

“CYO provided the environment where a lot of these kids could develop spiritually, emotionally, physically,” Nakamoto said. “It was character formation.”

One former counselor, Stephanie Jardine of Aiea, is forever grateful for the experience.

“He valued you and you felt valued,” she said of Nakamoto.

She called CYO her first serious job, one which later would lead to a teaching career.

“For me it was job that took my brains and abilities into account,” Jardine said. “Norman challenged me to do things I never would have done.”

If not for Nakamoto, instead of roughing it on Lanai, riding on the back of cattle trucks, finding herself at the summit of Haleakala at sunrise, and taking a boat from Molokai to Oahu, she would probably be home sewing, she said with a laugh.

Nakamoto’s former counselors are now in their 50s. They include priests, educators, entertainers, law enforcement officials, business professionals, lawyers, health care worker and journalists.

Nakamoto also recruited a number of religious sisters and brothers for his summer programs.

“He had a certain trust in us,” said former volunteer Sacred Hearts Sister Regina Mary Jenkins. “He just felt we could do it, even though we had no experience.”

“Norman was a person who trusted people and drew from them their best,” she said.

Much of that was because of his own positive attitude, Sister Regina Mary said.

“He always smiled,” she said. “He really knew how to enjoy life. He tended to minimize his pilikia.”

Through the Hui O Hawaii, a hula and musical troupe Nakamoto formed with his counselor corps, CYO was a pioneer in introducing Hawaiian music and dance into the Catholic liturgy.

A major outlet for its talent was the summer Hawaiian Masses celebrated outdoors at sunset at Fort DeRussy in Waikiki, hosted by the U.S. Army chaplaincy.

The combination of Nakamoto as serious student of Hawaiian culture and former monk resulted in a Hawaiian liturgy that was authentic, reverent and dignified. It became a model for other inculturation efforts.

Move to Catholic Charities

The Catholic Youth Organization closed in 1987, a victim of changing attitudes, new approaches, shifting priorities and rising costs.

Bishop Joseph A. Ferrario offered Nakamoto a position at Catholic Charities as “community relations director,” which Nakamoto had described as “picking up a lot of loose ends that nobody was doing.”

But soon he was tackling projects like the Aloha United Way campaign, the agency newsletter, fund-raising drives and annual reports.

Within a few years, the agency’s annual reports were winning awards from the Hawaii chapter of the National Society of Fundraising Executives.

Nakamoto helped turn a casual suggestion into the Catholic Charities Island Treasures celebration, an annual banquet honoring exemplary parish volunteers that gathers more than 1,200 celebrants every year at the Sheraton Waikiki.

Other Catholic Charities projects he helped get started were the Catholic Charities Sunday parish collection, a golf tournament, used car donations, a t-shirt distribution program and the cultivation of a special class of donors called Friends of Catholic Charities.

Bishop Ferrario once described Nakamoto’s diocesan work as a “calling, a vocation.”

“In all of his assignments, one distinguishing thing about Norman is that he shows a great love for the church and the work of the church,” the bishop said when Nakamoto retired.

“He has certainly made a great contribution to the local church,” Bishop Ferrario said.

Outside the church, Nakamoto was actively engaged in his Hawaiian cultural heritage. He learned ancient chant and hula from the masters, and was a friend of many island musicians and singers. Nakamoto was an 8th degree Alii in the Royal Order of Kamehameha I, Hawaii Chapter I, and a member of Hale O Na Ali‘i, Ahahui Po and of the Pearl Harbor Hawaiian Civic Club.

He was also a eucharistic minister at his parish, St. Joseph in Waipahu.

Norman was first diagnosed with throat cancer in 1987. A grueling series of treatment that included surgery, chemotherapy and radiation seemed to do the trick and, by the time he retired in 2003, he was cancer-free.

But a few years ago, the disease was back. Nevertheless, he refused to let it deter him from getting on with his life.

In May of 2005, three months after an “unsuccessful” operation, Nakamoto was standing in the front right row of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome participating in the beatification ceremony of Mother Marianne Cope.

Radiation damage to his throat required him to consume only liquids for the last two and a half years of his life, most of that time through a tube inserted into his stomach. Still, he proceeded to enclose, renovate and furnish his patio so he could entertain numerous gatherings of friends, usually preparing meals he could not eat.

In his last year of life he also planned and organized an extended family reunion.

He continued to travel, spending time with people close to him in favorite places like Boston. He came home from his final trip, a week of fishing with family and friends in Alaska, just 18 days before he died.

Nakamoto never wasted a moment. He embraced life, enjoying it immensely, riding through its rough spots, while always striving to do something worthwhile and good. He seemed to follow the dictum from Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to be born and a time to die.”

He is survived by his brothers Calvin Toshi, Albert Jiro and Mark Nakamoto, a hanai son Ioteva Kirikava, three hanai grandsons Ioteva Kirikava Jr. Filifili Larkins Maoate and Atai Kirikava, and a large extended family of relatives and friends.