This story appeared in the Chicago Times in 1986
"A Survivor In Graphics As In Life"
August 11, 1986
By Matt O`Connor
Noby Yamakoshi is the embodiment of the American dream. At 17 and with only $150, he followed a friend to Chicago in 1944 to study commercial art at the Academy of Fine Arts. He paid for school by working nights at the Drake Hotel. After graduation, Yamakoshi went to work for an advertising agency for $22 a week. Figuring that he could do better on his own, he started a business 1 1/2 years later with his wife working as a receptionist-illustrator. Years of 80-hour work weeks later, he has built Nobart Inc., his print graphics firm, into an operation with 325 employees and $22 million in sales last year serving such clients as Sears, Roebuck & Co. and J.C. Penney Co. Inc.
These days, Yamakoshi lives in an opulent suburban home with six Japanese gardens in its 10,000-square-foot compound.
Not surprisingly then, Yamakoshi, a California native of Japanese descent, says he considers the United States "the greatest country in the world. There`s more opportunity here."
He speaks without a trace of bitterness for the two years he spent in World War II in a Japanese-American internment camp (Poston camp III) in the Arizona desert.
It is one of those experiences of life that can make or break a person.
"It was a shock," he said of the forced evacuation of his family and thousands of other Japanese-Americans to camps in the Southwest and Midwest.
"I thought I was a loyal American citizen like anybody else." His family, which lived on a farm, was given a week to sell its belongings, including a new tractor that fetched a mere $50. Family members took to the camp only what they could carry.
Yamakoshi remembers temperatures of up to 135 degrees Fahrenheit, sentries armed with machine guns, scorpions, rattlesnakes and sandstorms. After a storm, he would find two inches of sand in the tar paper barracks. Food was so sparse the first year, Yamakoshi said, that "we had to eat grass" until vegetables could be grown the next summer.
He graduated from a camp high school whose teachers were internees with college degrees.
"There`s nothing you can do about it," Yamakoshi said. "It's something that happens. . . . You come out and try to make the best of it." (He favors a national monument instead of reparation payments for internment survivors.)
Camp life toughened Yamakoshi, gave him discipline, a burning desire to succeed in America and exposure to a wide range of professions that he couldn`t have gotten on a farm.
Source: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-08-11/business/8602270918_1_tar-paper-barracks-internment-college-degrees
Hard work pays off as Asian firms thrive here
Chicago Sun-Times, August 2, 1991
by Greg Burns
To Noby Yamakoshi, the stereotype of studious, hardworking Asian immigrants rapidly achieving business success in the United States tells only part of the story.
"Necessity's the mother of invention," said Yamakoshi, an American of Japanese descent who heads Chicago's Nobart graphic arts company. "If you can't speak English and you're trying to make a living, you can't take things for granted. You're worried, so you work hard."
