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LG: My name is Lauren Griffin, I will be the interviewer, and we are here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 22, 2023. So for the tape, could you introduce yourself and tell us when and where you were born?

AN: I'm Hiro Nishikawa. Actually, my formal name is Alfred Hirotoshi Nishikawa, that's on my birth certificate and driver's license. I was born in San Francisco in 1938, and I'm a Sansei, third generation American of Japanese descent. My grandparents, one set of grandparents came in 1900, so I tell my friends that Nishikawa, which translates to "west river," "nishi" is "west" and "kawa" is "river," is an "old American name." And when people raised their eyebrows, I said, "Well, it's been here 120 years, and that makes it an old American name." And most people just nodded their head and said, "Okay, I get it." [Laughs]

LG: Have you always gone by Hiro?

AN: Well, that was the name that my mother and father preferred. Because they were bicultural and bilingual, having grown up in Japan and then returning back to the States. And so during camp, for example, we were not supposed to speak in Japanese, but in the home and the barracks, who's going to monitor you, right? Nobody. So as little kids, our mother and father talked to us in Japanese all the time. But that was the last time I heard, coming out on a twenty-four-seven basis, Japanese. So my vocabulary was limited to that of little kids. Like, "I want to go to the toilet," or, "Where do I go brush my teeth?" and odds and ends like that, or, "I want this and that food," all kid talk. Anyway, where do you want me to go from here?

LG: Do you have any siblings?

AN: Yeah, I have two siblings that were born in San Francisco. I'm the oldest, and my next young brother is named Yukio, and he never got an English name. I don't know why my father was very inconsistent. And my next younger brother, Tom, his Japanese middle name is Nobumasa, father gave him a Japanese name. My youngest brother was born in camp, so there was a couple years' gap. Anyway, for reasons I can never understand, my father gave him only a Japanese name. So his name is Katsuhito, which literally translated into English as "winner" or "victor." "Katsu" means to win, and "hito" is a person, a "winning person." And I thought, over the years, that this was very ironic, because here he was the only person in the family born in a prison, in a camp. And for some reason, my father was, maybe anticipating whatever, and gave him a name like Katsuhito. So he goes by Kats, which everybody shortened, easier to say it. Anyway, so I have three brothers.

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