Try as you might, you will never get Michael Nakasone to agree that he deserves the honor of having the Pearl City Cultural Center auditorium building renamed for him.
When asked how he feels about a dedication ceremony and tribute concert planned for Saturday at the center, the former bandmaster of the Royal Hawaiian Band, the Pearl City High School band program and other celebrated local music organizations only shakes his lowered head with an embarrassed laugh.
“It shouldn’t be me,” insists Nakasone, 77. The Michael D. Nakasone Performing Arts Center “should be named after many other people. A lot of people worked for this place. But especially the students — they were the ones who worked really hard for excellence. The students and the community.”
He allows a peek at a draft of his speech for the ceremony. Nothing in the text is about himself. The entire three-page, single-spaced length is a love letter of thanks to the thousands of students, parents, colleagues, band boosters, community members, lawmakers, family and friends who have supported the numerous programs he’s led over a career of five decades and still running.
The building renaming, Nakasone says, “honors me as a teacher, but it is actually meant to honor the efforts of others.”
Such self-effacement is typical for Nakasone, says Chadwick Kamei, a Nakasone protege as the current director of bands at Pearl City, and the catalyst behind the rededication. “He’s so unassuming,” Kamei says. “He doesn’t really realize all he’s done for people. He doesn’t realize how much it actually means to all of us.”
Nakasone has touched thousands of lives while working at the helm of the bands at three public schools, including almost three decades with Pearl City High School, the Royal Hawaiian Band, Hawaii Youth Symphony II and band programs at Punahou School, Kamehameha Schools and the University of Hawaii-West Oahu.
One sign of his wide impact: The roster of featured speakers and other performers also taking the stage Saturday to pay homage reads like a who’s who in Hawaii arts, education and politics. Among them: Gov. David Ige, former Gov. Ben Cayetano, former Gov. John Waihee, state Senate Vice President Michelle Kidani and state schools interim Superintendent Keith Hayashi. Also in the lineup is kumu hula Olana Ai of Halau Hula Olana and kumu hula Shelsea Lilia Ai with Halau Lilia Makanoe. On the conductor’s podium, more than a half-dozen decorated music and education colleagues will take turns with the baton.
A 100-member band that will be the centerpiece of the concert is made up of students and alumni from across the music organizations Nakasone has led, plus some family members: daughter, Shelley Kikuchi, on clarinet; son, Ken Nakasone, on alto saxophone, the instrument his dad also played; daughter-in-law, Laura Nakasone, on tenor saxophone; and grandsons Brody Nakasone on percussion and guitar, and Rylan Nakasone on bass.
The band’s weekly practices remained secret for a month and a half. When an astonished Nakasone finally entered the auditorium during a rehearsal one night last week for a surprise “big reveal,” band members burst into applause and cheers. He’s fondly nicknamed them “The Amazing Band.” Nakasone himself will conduct them for part of the finale, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Nakasone is widely said to have built the performing arts complex atop Waimano Home Road and taken Pearl City’s band program to great heights, but he won’t take credit for those either. He maintains that it was then-Pearl City Principal Gerald Suyama who first brainstormed the idea for the center one day when they were talking story around a school copy machine; and it was a long list of community leaders who scrounged up funding when money was tight, and got the complex opened in 1995.
Also, Nakasone will contend it was Highlands Intermediate School band teacher Boniface Leong who funneled nearly 100 strong musicians every year into Pearl City High’s band program, and decades of students, teachers, support staff and volunteers who produced excellent performances.
Still, it is Nakasone’s name that will grace the building, with its 670-seat auditorium, men’s and women’s dressing rooms, green room, costume shop and scene shop, all on a 40,000-square-foot footprint, surrounded by royal palms and shower trees. A portrait of Nakasone, conductor’s baton in hand, in white with a red and yellow cummerbund and kukui nut lei, a signature uniform for the Royal Hawaiian Band, is being hung in the center’s foyer.
“Getting that auditorium built was a monumental task,” Kamei said. Nakasone “had to bring together all the legislators and representatives and the governor. His can-do attitude and determination made all of this possible.”
Almost three decades in, the center remains a bustling hub of rehearsals and performances for music, dance and theater groups from around the island.
While Nakasone has received many awards and honors over the decades, he seems surprised by all the current attention. He says he simply has been in the right place at the right time each time, landing supportive communities and dedicated students. “I was just lucky,” he says again and again.
His students and colleagues say different.
Clarke Bright, who succeeded Nakasone as bandmaster of the Royal Hawaiian Band, says Nakasone deserves to have the namesake in his honor because he has been a unique force playing a key role in shaping Hawaii’s music landscape.
The dazzling halftime shows for which the Pearl City High School marching band became famous for during Nakasone’s tenure, for instance, are just one example of his knack for coaxing the best in both musicianship and showmanship from his charges, Bright and other supporters say.
Nakasone “has definitively changed, and had an impact on, music in Hawaii, but also bands as well, from great pageantry with his halftime shows, to really strong musical concert bands, because he understood the importance of raising students up properly,” with a solid foundation of fundamental musical skills, Bright said.
Lesser known, Nakasone’s supporters say, is his behind-the-scenes leadership — the untold, unpaid hours that school band directors sacrifice, the pep talks and the connection-building to make sure his musicians and programs shine. His tough decision-making, even powering through some tumultuous periods at the Royal Hawaiian Band, are evidence of his grit, Bright said. He calls Nakasone a “very special person. He’s just great with people, great with the community, great with schools, so very encouraging.”
Brandon Marc Higa, who was principal clarinetist at Pearl City under Nakasone’s baton in the 1990s and also played for him with the Royal Hawaiian Band, said the bandmaster “just has this way of bringing out the best in musicians.”
“Not only did he push us to perform hard repertoire, and have the discipline to show up at rehearsals, but he understood production, showmanship, and what it takes to have so many people behind a program,” said Higa, who works as director of resource development at Kapiolani Community College and “came out of retirement” to join the Nakasone tribute band.
Higa noted that Nakasone’s vision led the band to routinely perform and draw honors on the mainland and abroad, and share the performance field at halftime with hula halau, Drill Team Hawaii and musical superstars such as Janet Jackson and ’N Sync. “It just became a normal thing,” Higa said.
Nakasone contends that he’s the one who’s been blessed.
He says all he’s ever really wanted to do is help his young charges understand the rewards and happiness that come with working hard and striving for perfection.
He has always wanted to pass on the joy he felt as a child back in Hilo when, as a third-generation son of an Okinawan immigrant family who worked in the cane fields, he learned to play piano and performed in a 180-member ukulele band in elementary school. Those early musical experiences sparked a thrill in him, stirred his soul, shaped his character, he says.
So the main goal when he started teaching in 1968 continues to this day: While he’s tried to build strong musicians, “the most important thing was for them to become really good people,” he says.
That evolution comes via the work, he says. “When you work so hard on a piece of music and the students perform it, and they know they performed it well, and when they finish and you look at the students’ faces, they are so happy! You can’t beat that feeling.”
Five decades of that have passed in a blink, says the energetic Nakasone, who still conducts bands at UH West Oahu and Kamehameha. He still walks rapidly and laughs often, and is clearly in his element when he makes his rounds at the performing arts center, stopping every few minutes to greet a colleague or praise a student.
“The best occupation in the world is to be a band director,” Nakasone says with a grin. “You get to work with such wonderful people, who all support the children. I could do this another 50 years.”
PROFILE
Michael Nakasone
Age: 77 (“and a half,” he notes)
Position: University of Hawaii-West Oahu, band director, 2016 to present
Positions held:
>> Kamehameha Schools Performing Arts Center, band director, 1995 to present
>> Punahou Academy, director of bands, 2012-2016
>> Royal Hawaiian Band, bandmaster, 2005-2010
>> Pearl City High School Learning Center, director, 1992–2004
>> Hawaii Youth Symphony II, conductor, 1989-2010
>> Pearl City High School, director of bands, 1977-2004
>> Mililani High School, director of bands, 1973-1977
>> Wahiawa Intermediate School, band director, 1968-1973
Honors include:
>> 2020 National Band Association Hall of Fame of Distinguished Conductors inductee
>> 2015 Oahu High School Marching Band Festival Lifetime Achievement Award
>> 2013 Living Treasures of Hawaii award, Honpa Hongwanji
>> 2012 High School Band Directors National Association Hall of Fame inductee
>> 2005 Governor’s Fine Arts Award
>> 1998 Hawaii Music Award Lifetime Achievement Award
>> 1996 State Teacher of the Year, Hawaii Department of Education
>> 1995 John Philip Sousa Foundation Legion of Honor inductee
Background: Hilo born and raised; Hilo High School; University of Hawaii at Manoa Bachelor of Education in music, Master of Arts in music education
Family: Married 52 years to his wife, Brenda; son, Ken Nakasone (wife, Laura); daughter, Shelley Kikuchi (husband, Sean); four grandchildren
