<Begin Segment 24>

RP: So how was your, how was your academic life at Manzanar? How did you do?

HN: Well, I got all A's. School was too easy.

RP: Compared to what you...

HN: But when I got to UCLA it was a whole new reality set in. [Laughs] It got tough. School got hard. They didn't teach us enough at Manzanar. What they didn't really teach us is how to study and read and study and how to study and, you know. So when you get to UCLA, when you had to read and put in the time, otherwise you never passed. That's the one thing that was bad about school, I think. In Manzanar I got all A's and I was helping other people get past their P-chem, I mean, their physical chemistry class and their physics class, math classes and... in fact, one girl comes up to me now and says, "You know what? Hank, if you didn't help me through the physics class I would have never gotten through there." Grace Nakamura. Did you interview Grace?

RP: I haven't but somebody else has.

HN: Yeah.

RP: And that's what you kind of gravitated towards in school was the science classes?

HN: What's that?

RP: Chemistry, physics...

HN: Yeah. And math.

RP: There's that famous line the movie that we show, saying, you know, they're showing the classroom with people and saying, "Imagine this is a Bunsen burner." Because they didn't have very much in the way of lab equipment.

HN: Uh-huh.

RP: Did that change later? Do you remember having lab equipment in your classes? And, or lack of...

HN: God, I don't remember having chemistry lab equipment. Not that I know of. No, just books.

RP: Were there other teachers that kind of sparked your enthusiasm for learning other than Louie?

HN: Well, Greenley did, the blind teacher. Yeah. He kind of was a very unique individual.

RP: In what way?

HN: I really liked him. He was a very... besides his handicap... he was very good in bringing it out, your personality. He was very good at that even though he was blind. He'd tend to say, "How now brown cow?" You know. So, he was very good in trying to teach us enunciation and speaking.

RP: There was another teacher, a Miss Kramer.

HN: Yeah, that's the Latin teacher. She was very good. I liked her very much. Got good grades in Latin.

RP: Did she encourage you to go to college?

HN: Yes. She did.

KP: Can I ask a question? 'Cause it's, it's really interesting that you brought it up that you felt that, you say on the one hand that the teachers were very good but they didn't prepare you for college. There's kind of a paradox there. Do you think it was part of the expected curriculum that just wasn't up to college par or, how do you...

HN: I think that's what it was. It wasn't hard enough. It was too easy for me. I almost didn't have to study and I was gettin' A's. You know, read it once and then, and he'd, they'd teach it. I remembered everything they taught. And then to reproduce what they taught was easy to do for me. But, when it got difficult, when it took a lot of reading and calculations of things and studying to really understand it, they never pushed that on us to do. To go beyond what we should have done. And so when I got to college, you know, you're not supposed to learn twenty, thirty percent of the subject, you got to know eighty or ninety percent of the subject. And you never got there unless you studied beyond what they, lectures in class.

KP: So would you say the curriculum at Manzanar wasn't really focused on college prep?

HN: No, it wasn't focused for college prep. It was not, right.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.