Densho Digital Archive - Ko Nishimura Interview (denshovh-nko-01-0022)

<Begin Segment 22>

KL: I cut you off, you were starting to tell about Shimpei, too.

KN: Yeah. And Shimpei, I'm not sure if he ever got citizenship, I don't know. He might have, we never talk about it.

KL: You mentioned he went to U of I and that he eventually came back to California to care for his mother. Can you tell us details about his life?

KN: Yeah. What happened was he was at Cal Tech with Professor Emerson. And when Professor Emerson got better funding at Illinois for his research work, he went there. He asked Shimpei to come with him, so he went.

KL: Did Shimpei get back into the field of physics, or what was he doing?

KN: No, he was doing photosynthesis. I know because I went there to help him do some experiments with red lights. And I stayed up at nights running the experiments, so you got to be on Shimpei's schedule. And I ran some experiments for him. And when Grandma got sick, he just came home, took care of Grandma until she passed away.

KL: Are there other big academic milestones in his life that we should be aware of?

KN: Yeah. After a while, he became quite an expert on geriatrics. Being a scientist, see, everything is an experiment. Well, it turns out that my grandfather got prostate cancer.

So he started looking to how to irrigate his bladder to keep him alive and not have the cancer grow. So he had this little... he had a notebook full of data, he was taking every day. "What are you doing?" He says, "Oh, I'm keeping Grandpa alive." I said, god dang, he's not a damn laboratory. He said, "No, no, he's okay," and he was, he was comfortable. And I'm sit there and I get a call from a doctor in Pasadena who's handling an elderly patient, he's asking how to take care of the bladder. Well, Shimpei, he knew more about it. The other thing he became very knowledgeable was biometrics. I don't know if you know what that is. Biometrics is a multivaried statistics of studying the human body's bone statistics. And from that, you make inferences of correlating to other places. This is before you could do it with genes. So Shimpei got really interested in where Japanese people came from. So he went and did this thing and he said, and he started becoming an expert in multivaried statistics. And he started corresponding with this guy Rao in India, who was the expert on multivaried statistics. At the beginning, Shimpei was asking questions, toward the end the guy was asking him questions. My friends would say, they would often see him on the campus at UCLA with books, going to the library, looking up this stuff. And one day I talked to him and I said, "How close are you?" "I think," he says, "one set of Japanese came through the Korean peninsula, and the other one came through China through the south. They have very different (...) statistics. And he said, "If I lived in Japan before the Second World War and I said that, they would have beheaded me." Because the Japanese theory is you came from one place, not true.

KL: And it's probably not Korea or China. [Laughs]

KN: Of all places, you know. But that's what he found. Of course, now that's been validated, right? Because you could do it through genetics.

KL: Interesting.

KN: So he's a scientist, I guess.

KL: And then he outlived your grandmother? You said he cared for her until...

KN: Yeah, and then he took care of Grandpa, then he passed away. He probably passed away in the late '80s. So that's Shimpei.

KL: Did he work for any other universities besides Illinois?

KN: No, he came home and he just got old and he just wanted to do his own thing.

KL: How do you think he, did he ever speak about how he kind of fit the Manzanar guayule project into his contributions? Do you know what kind of a role it held for him in his mind?

KN: He never talked himself. He always talked about others, what they did and what their contribution... he's typical Japanese, he's self-effacing, he'll never talk about himself.