Piled against a wall in a tiny office in Mount Vista Family Dental is the evidence, even if Eugene Sakai isn’t ready to make a ruling yet.
Boxes of coats. Bags of coats. Coats from current patients. Coats from former patients. All 175 coats against the wall, blocking a doorway in the Salmon Creek office, ready to be donated to the Vancouver homeless shelter, Share House.
The coats are evidence that Eugene Sakai, who retired from a 47-year career in Clark County dentistry on Dec. 20, left his profession a better place than he found it — a motto that he tries to live by, but is too modest to give himself credit for.
“Did I do the right things? Did I do enough? That hangs around me,” Sakai, 75, said.
Instead of having a retirement dinner or party, Mount Vista Family Dental hosted a coat drive in mid-December to commemorate Sakai’s retirement.
“If we had a dinner, what does that do? It’s a waste of time. I get up and go, ‘Oh, I’m so great,'” Sakai said. “You see more and more homeless people, and that’s difficult. This doesn’t cure it, of course, but I thought it would be far better than having a dinner.”
Sakai, a Spokane native, had a curtain call for dentistry that aligns with how he has lived. After completing undergraduate studies at Washington State University in the mid-1960s, Sakai joined the Army and was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, during the Vietnam War. He said it was an interesting time to be stationed in Okinawa as it made the transition from American sovereignty to Japanese sovereignty.
“Sometimes America isn’t always right,” Sakai said, “yet we had the ability to help others, which I thought was really good.”
Back in the states, Sakai started his first dental practice in Orchards in 1973. His practice would bounce to Five Corners next before settling in Salmon Creek. He sold his practice in 2017 and joined Mount Vista, where he worked part-time with the owner, dentist Joshua Hiller.
“The way he cares so much about the patients, they’re almost like family,” Hiller said. “It’s been neat to see how loved he is, and the way it extends through families and generations.”
Outside of professional dentistry, Sakai has committed himself to providing charity care to the New Day Dental Care clinic and the Free Clinic of Southwest Washington, as well as doing volunteer trail maintenance in the Columbia River Gorge.
“He’s really committed to the community and public service,” said friend and Clark County Public Health Officer Dr. Alan Melnick. “Dentists are really busy in their practice, and work a lot of hours, but he’s really given a lot back to the community.”
To Sakai, his volunteer work is unremarkable. It’s what dentists should do, he said. Volunteerism ties into his belief of leaving a place better than you found it — something his parents and his family’s Japanese heritage instilled in him, he said.
“What you’re raised with is how you view things,” Sakai said.
Sakai acknowledged he’s anxious about retirement. In fairness, so are his patients. For many patients, he’s the only dentist they’ve known. They’ve developed trust in him. Some even like to make him feel guilty about retiring, he joked. He said he understands his patient’s nervousness, since his urologist is considering retirement next year.
“You trust some person’s judgements and you get used to how they operate,” Sakai said. “I’m concerned about the fact I might have to start out with a new practitioner.”
In the middle of Sakai’s interview with The Columbian, a young patient dropped off a thank you. Sakai said he isn’t counting the cards he received, because that makes “you start thinking you’re too important.”
“I just appreciate getting them,” he added.
In his retirement, Sakai wants to do more trail maintenance and provide dental services to the county’s free clinics. He said doctors and dentists can hold themselves in too high regard.
Patients have, in part, helped Sakai avoid that. A long-time patient, who likes to rib Sakai, once told him, “You were really full of yourself when you were young.”
“One needs to always be reminded of your humanity,” Sakai said.
“What you do is important, but you, yourself, are not that significant,” he continued. “Because if you think you’re more important than your message, then you lessen the message and the important thing is the message. Isn’t it?”
