Densho Digital Repository
JACL Philadelphia Oral History Collection
Title: A. Hirotoshi Nishikawa Interview
Narrator: A. Hirotoshi Nishikawa
Interviewer: Lauren Griffin
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Date: May 22, 2023
Densho ID: ddr-phljacl-1-25-15

[Correct spelling of certain names, words and terms used in this interview have not been verified.]

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In the meantime, I had applied, I got a notice from the draft board to, because of the Berlin crisis, Kennedy had called for ten thousand troops to be recruited. And since I was an undergrad at Berkeley, I had taken ROTC. And it was a question of whether I can pass a test and go to Officer Candidate School. So I took this test, surprisingly included an IQ test, which I didn't anticipate. But I finished it and sent it in. In the meantime, I thought well, maybe I should... I was working as a lab tech for one of my professors at Berkeley. I thought, well, maybe I should go to graduate school and do something real. So I applied to several graduate schools and that's how I got into contacting Oregon State in Corvallis, Oregon. So in the meantime, Sumi is back in Honolulu working with a sister, arranging for a wedding and all that. And comes August, she says, "Okay, it's all set up, get our airplane ticket, come by such and such date." So I did that, followed her instructions. End of August, I flew out from San Francisco to Honolulu and so on, and it was relatively straightforward. My parents had enough notice that they also flew in a few days after I did and so on, and so they were part of my event. Anyway, so a lot of stuff happened in 1961, and when I came back on Labor Day... so we got married on the 27th of August. So on September, whatever, Labor Day, I had flown back to California in anticipation of being drafted. Well, I had this, I was staying with my parents, and I found this green card in the mail with my name on it. And I was so clueless, on Tuesday I called the draft board and said, "I got this green card, what does that mean?" And the woman at the draft board said, "Oh, if you got one of those, we want you go to graduate school and don't have to go into the military." I said, "Oh, really?" So I called Sumi by phone and she got a ticket a few days later and flew back to California. And then we drove to Oregon with all our goodies packed away in the trunk and started our graduate training.

LG: So you got a, you also went on to get a PhD, is that right?

AN: No, I didn't work for a master's. I went right into a PhD program at Oregon State, and it took about three and a half, four years. On the other hand, Sumi was not a student, so she had a lab job in the microbiology department, and so that's how we survived. I had a stipend which was enough for one person, and so she, it was important for her to be working and having an income. Then when I was finished in '65, they had started their postdoc in another department, new biochemistry department that had been formed. And so I was going to stay there another two or three years. And during that time, Sumi's boss, who was running the lab, said, "Oh, if your husband is going to stick around for another two or three years, why don't you work on your PhD?" So that's what happened. So she worked on her PhD in microbiology and I post-docked in biochemistry. And because my degree in biochemistry was in the chemistry department, they made a distinction. Anyway, by '68 or '9, when she finished her PhD program, we were in a position to think about where we wanted to go, and I decided to look for a pharmaceutical job. And pharmaceutical companies were mostly in Jersey and New York and some in Pennsylvania at that time. So we decided to come east.

LG: So you came to the, did you go to Jersey or where exactly did you move to?

AN: Well, we moved initially, believe it or not, to New York, to Xerox corporation. Because at that time they were diversifying investments, and they were starting a clinical chemistry group in New York, and so I joined that. So Sumi was just a housekeeper, home keeper. Anyway, because we had, at that point, two kids. Anyway, after a year and a half or so there, I decided that I should work for a real pharmaceutical company, so then I got a job at Hoffmann-La Roche, which is based in Switzerland, and they had a huge operation in Nutley, New Jersey. So we moved on to Nutley area, and lived there for about a dozen years. So that's how we came east. And then while I was at Roche, I got recruited by GlaxoSmithKline, which is in Philadelphia. And GlaxoSmithKline turns out to be one of the oldest pharmaceutical companies in America, it was founded in 1834. And so it had gone through a number of mergers and acquisitions so it's transformed, but it's one of the few American-derived pharma companies in the U.S. It's now an Anglo-American company because it merged with Beecham in England, and so they have headquarters in England and London as well as Philadelphia.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.