Remembering Kevin

Kevin Katsuya Nakashima (1954 – 2020)

Kevin, the only son of George and Marion Nakashima, lost his month-long battle with congestive heart failure and aspiration pneumonia shortly after midnight on November 7th, 2020 at the same hospital where he was born nearly 66 years ago in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Born December 18, 1954, the long-awaited male heir was my Christmas present that year, and after a short stint as the “built-in baby-sitter” I went off to college, so we were both brought up as “only children,” as he was closer in age to my children than he was to me.

After a near-drowning experience at the age of three, Kevin attended Buckingham Friends School, then Solebury School, earned a black belt in Tae Kwan Do Karate, and after graduation spent a semester at Sophia University in Tokyo studying Far Eastern History and Japanese, and Kyojiya (shoji-making) in Takamatsu, Japan. Aside from worldwide travels with his parents and my husband Jonathan and me, he lived his entire life in the same house and never married.

As soon as he could talk, my parents dubbed him the PR person at the Nakashima Studios, where he later helped my mother with bookkeeping chores and was her travel companion and chauffeur after our father died in 1990. After our mother died in 2004, he became Vice President of Nakashima Woodworkers and was best known as the Saturday Open House greeter who enjoyed sharing stories and memories of his parents, and practicing his French and Japanese linguistic skills when we had visitors from those countries.

A longtime Board Member of the Nakashima Foundation for Peace, Kevin helped support  Foundation activities, including placing Peace Altars in New York, Russia, and India. Kevin embraced the role of the Foundation in perpetuating the Nakashima legacy, including preserving the iconic Nakashima buildings and their contents on the New Hope property for future generations. In a lasting gesture of his support, Kevin left a sizeable gift and generated many donations that will allow the Foundation to work towards realizing these goals.