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RB: All right. Can you start by stating your full name for the record and also today's date?

MN: I'm Masaru Edmond Nakawatase. Today is May 8, 2023.

RB: Great, thank you very much. Can you tell us when and where you were born?

MN: I was born in Poston, Arizona, on September 29, 1943. Poston being one of the ten internment camps set up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor for Japanese incarcerees.

RB: And what generation are you?

MN: Good question. I'm sort of a tweener in the sense that my father was an Issei. He was born in Japan, and was in Southern California at the time of the war. My mother was born in California, she was Nisei. So I'm somewhere between those two, but in cultural terms, it'd probably be accurate to say I'm more a Sansei than anything else.

RB: Great, thanks. And do you have any siblings?

MN: Well, I have a younger sister, Hisako Wurtzel, who still lives in the Bridgeton area, and I have a late sister, Reiko Nakawatase, who lived in Philadelphia, and both of them have been teachers. And my sister Hisako just retired maybe seven or eight years ago and stayed in administrative posts even after teaching.

RB: Can you describe Reiko a little bit? What was she like as a person?

MN: Well, Reiko was a short, very dynamic person full of energy. Lots of ideas. So very enthusiastic, and I suspect a very good teacher. She taught for many years at what was then the Civic Center in West Philadelphia, and they had a... she was sort of a -- I'm not sure what the concept was -- sort of like a master teacher. In other words, course classes would come to her and they would deal with, you know, various countries and cultures, so that was like her specialty. So she saw students from all over the city. She had initially started as a teacher at the elementary school level in West Philadelphia. And I'm not exactly sure when the shift took place in terms of her position. She was forced to retire because of cancer, bout with cancer, and this was around 1990. And she passed in 2011.

RB: Can you talk a little bit about Reiko's personality?

MN: Sure. She was, as I was saying, energetic, she could she could also be exasperating. We had our struggles. But she was very generous to the core, generous about everything, you know, money, food, opinions. I mean, you name it, she would give it away. [Laughs] And she was always concerned about me. I mean, during the years of the Vietnam War, she was afraid, for example, that I had burned my draft card or done some other crazy thing like that. She was correct. I did burn my draft card later, but that's another issue. But she had a lot of energy for her kids and for teaching. And, you know, I knew for example, like other teachers, she would pay for supplies out of her own pocket. And she would be very enthusiastic about everything she did until whatever the next enthusiasm would be. And we, I think over time, our sharpest differences came over politics. She was a moderate conservative, she was a Republican. She went to American University and graduated in 1963. I went to her commencement. And just coincidentally, I mean, for the record, it was the address was given by President Kennedy. And what I thought... I mean, even then, I thought that it was probably one of the best speeches he ever made. It was about the imperative of a nuclear test ban treaty. and it was a break rhetorically and politically from the Cold War. I mean, because the speech was very much about the mutual danger posed by nuclear weapons and nuclear fallout. And it was the kind of language. Once less than the usual belligerent, bellicose stuff you'd hear on the tube. But anyway, that was my sister's commencement, and I remember in that way, plus, it must have been one of the hottest days of the year, but then this was Washington in June. But she threw herself into everything, and then often tired and exhausted, I think, but in many ways, probably fulfilled. And as I said, we disagreed politically, so it wasn't as sharp as I think some families would be. In other words, we still spoke to each other. [Laughs] And so it was, we were a family for all of that. And I don't think we ever felt that we didn't love each other, and that was important. She was a very enthusiastic supporter of this place, and accordingly, she threw herself into this very enthusiastically and was very engaged in its governance and publicity about it. And I'm sure sometimes was probably a pain, but it was very much to showcase this place as a center of Japanese culture.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.