Many places claim to be the capital of some product. For example, Fairview, Montana (which is also partly Fairview, North Dakota) claims to be the sugar beet capital of Montana and North Dakota. Enshi, a city in central China, has been called the "selenium capital" though it’s not clear whether that’s of the province, the nation, or the world (page 4 of this pdf from the Selenium-Tellurium Development Association, a Belgian enterprise).
A business problem recalled to me that Dalton, Georgia, in Whitfield County near the northwest corner of the state, claims to be the carpet capital of the world, and rightly so. Whitfield County has more than 150 carpet factories and more than 1000 carpet outlet stores. More than 30,000 people are employed in Whitfield County in making and selling carpets. This is an astounding figure: the county has only 90,000 residents. To put it on scale, it’s as if more than 200,000 people in Multnomah County were employed in the same industry.
But as I read about Whitfield County, my eye was caught by a typo in the civic boosters’ description of the carpet industry. "Dalton," the site says, "is truly a mica for for the technology that keeps the carpet world moving ahead."
Mica? Not "Mecca"? I can’t decide if this is an inadvertent substitution of words — maybe "mica" and "Mecca" sound the same in a deep Southern accent — or if someone, intent on avoiding any reference to Arabic culture, substituted "mica" to avoid using "Mecca," along the lines of those who showed their displeasure with France by renaming their snack potatoes "freedom fries." Portlanders haven’t been immune from that sort of xenophobia; for example, during one of our two disagreements with Germany in the last century, NW Germantown Road was renamed "Liberty Road," but we haven’t as a rule deliberately mangled the name of any place except California.
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Back in my old stomping grounds on the east side of Newark, N.J., there was a street called Berlin Street — until WWI, that is. It was renamed Rome Street, the name it has borne ever since.
For all the years of his childhood, we took our haircuts from Mr. Funai, a dear lifelong friend and fellow soldier of WWP’s stepfather. Mr. Funai’s simple barbershop was located not far from our east Bellevue home, in the then quite unfashionable “Eastgate” district. [Some of us might sacrifice a close relative to live there now, but we digress…]
Mr. Funai’s shop never offered the off-color magazines that other barbershops, like the one in nearby “Lake Hills,” were so prone to to offer. [Not that WWP would have cared.]
Mr. Funai never advertised his barbershop in his name. That would have been unfashionable, un-Japanese, and, sadly, race-inappropriate for his time. “Eastgate Barbershop” it was; that’s all.
WWP admires his stepfather for his lifelong admiration our common barber.
Our barber’s name was George Funai.
As it turns out, Mr. Funai came home with more than a few medals [once he was released for service from his prison camp in Idaho] in the European theater, and to be specific, Italy in 1944. Mr. Funai never talked about any of this, unless goaded into it by the stepfather. He was, in every way, the gracious, self-effacing man of his time and place.
Back to your post: Though we grew up in a place generously populated by those from Japan and their next generation, it never seemed a matter to worry about. Part of the reason is that, well, it’s “so Seattle.” [Seattle just might be the most Asian-integrated place in white America, even outpacing San Francisco. It’s been that way for a very, very long time — despite no one noticing.]
We’d like to think that Mr. Funai today might rename his humble barbershop. Might the tidal shifts of time suggest that today he’d call it … Funai’s Barbershop?
Wouldn’t that be just one more triumph in George’s life?