It’s a small metal tackle box. It belonged to a man named Mitsuo Iwata, who died the day after Father’s Day. His family wants the tackle box back.

“I am finding that the pain of losing someone can be momentarily softened by an encounter with something they left behind,” Nathanael (Nat) Iwata, Mitsuo’s son, wrote in an e-mail. “In my family’s case, one such item of great importance and sentiment was my father’s tackle box. My father carried this item, full of his favorite lures and tools, from before he and my mother were married. It belonged to his father and to him, and he would have wanted it passed on to his children.”

The box never should have been sold, according to Nat, but in the emotion and bustle of hauling out, displaying and selling off a lifetime’s worth of things from the home where Mitsuo Iwata had lived for the last 15 years of his life, the box walked.

“My mom was really devastated,” Nat said. “There were actually two boxes, a little shiny silver one inside a bigger one, and we really didn’t want to sell either one. But the little one is the most important. My mom said she’d be willing to reimburse the man if he’ll bring it back and give him a reward, too.”

Quiet man

The tackle box is vital to the family because fishing was the best way of connecting with a man who “wasn’t a very talkative person,” Nat said.

“He was a man of few words. He came from a traditional Japanese family, and I guess that’s how it is.

“He didn’t have a lot of hobbies and he wasn’t into sports. After work or on weekends, his favorite place was Klineline Pond. He had a 12-foot aluminum boat, and if he could do anything with you, he liked to take you fishing.”

Mitsuo Itawa, who went by “Mits,” was born in a Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona on Aug. 25, 1943. He spent his first years of life there, until World War II ended and his family relocated — first to New Mexico and finally to Los Angeles.

“He grew up poor. He was always a minority — his school was mostly Mexican and the neighborhood was black,” Nat said. “His family managed a hotel for a while. He told me stories about shooting cockroaches with a BB gun.”

Mitsuo met Donna Whiston at a wedding. He became a computer programmer and worked in the aerospace industry and then, after the couple moved to Clark County, for Freightliner.

He and Donna had five children and six grandchildren.

“He was a really good man. He had lots of integrity. He was a strong Christian,” Nat said. Mitsuo and Donna belonged to Lighthouse Christian Church at Five Corners, and before that MacArthur Boulevard Christian Church in the Heights.

A Web site Nat’s brother created in Matsuo’s memory underscores how beloved he was by fellow churchgoers, family members — and by neighborhood kids.

In his last couple of years, he had thyroid cancer — Nat thinks it was nuclear testing in the Arizona desert that caused it — and began to open up, talking and writing about his life, before he died at age 64.

The box

On the weekend of June 28, the Iwata family held a garage sale at Mitsuo and Donna’s home at the corner of Northeast 86th Street and 152nd Avenue, in the Sifton neighborhood.

During the morning Donna stayed inside, away from the sale, but later on she emerged just in time to see a man carry off, and drive away with, the tackle box.

“We’re pretty sure he was local,” Nat said. “But we don’t know his name and he paid in cash.”

So, Nat contacted The Columbian, and now we’re spreading the word. If you are the man, or know the man, who bought the tackle box that contains the family’s cherished memories of Mitsuo Iwata, call Nat at 503-708-1317.

“I have a son and all my siblings except one have kids,” Nat said. “We left my dad’s boat and his fishing poles and stuff at my folks’ house, and we hoped to take it all out to the lake and keep fishing. And stay connected with him.”