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TI: And tell me a little bit about MPI. So this was a private boarding school. Who were the students at MPI?

JN: Mostly they were people from the countryside. In those days, now, Wahiawa, Waipahu, that was so far away, they had to board for them to come to Mid-Pacific. Or they were from the other islands, so they were sent over from wherever, Maui, Big Island, even Lanai, one guy was from Lanai. MPI was a private school. In those days, I think it had only from ninth grade on. It's a private school, all boarding. You had to board there. Our graduating class was, of '51 was seventy-five, I think, in that area. So it was a small school, half were girls, half were boys. But at least we started to learn, we started studying, which, Kaimuki, which was a public school, I didn't even bother bringing my books home. My father had third grade Japanese education, couldn't speak or read English. So he didn't know what we were doing. So I know when I went to Kaimuki, we had books but we never took it home. We just left it, hid it somewhere so we could find it when we got back. It was really bad. I'm sure if I had stayed there, if my mother-in-law didn't throw us out of the house to MPI, I'm sure I'll be a truck driver. I wouldn't have gone to college. No thought of going to college. But going there and then having the teachers and everything take interest in you, small school, then I went to UH because everybody else did. Just drifted into UH, got there two years. And by this time, I'm living with my sister Sumi, who was, like I said, head of the family now. And as I said, Jiro, she was married to Jiro Akashi.

And again by luck, after two years, I was kind of not -- I wasn't going to classes at UH, I was a straight C-minus student, wasn't doing anything. Wasn't interested, I didn't know what the hell I was going to do. By luck, my brother, my brother-in-law, Jiro, decided, well, he's going to go get his MBA from University of Chicago. Went to Chicago, I had no place to go. I had nobody here, my dad had gone back to Japan and took my kid sister with him. So I had no family here, I had to go with them. And boy, that was the best thing that happened to me, again, being thrown into MPI, now I'm forced to go to Chicago, to Illinois. And I think for the first time in my life, when I went to Illinois, I started studying. I started studying. I decided I'm going to start studying and I started to get good grades after that through Illinois law school, became relatively -- I had to work hard, though, actually, because of my lack of high school education.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright ©2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.