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LG: You mentioned you have children. What are their names?

AN: My daughter was born in '64. We gave her a Welsh name, her name is Bronwyn. She has a, kind of a Japanese middle name, Kei, K-E-I, Nishikawa. And she eventually -- I won't go into details -- but she got interested in science and went to Virginia Tech, got an undergrad degree, went to University of North Carolina in Durham and got a PhD in neurobiology. My son is four years younger, so he was born in '68. He was interested in and had skills in science and engineering, but he decided to go to Virginia Tech just like his sister did, and got a degree in biochemistry. However, in his case, in his senior year, he came home and told me that he wanted to change majors. I said, "What?" He said, "Well, I decided I don't," had had found him summer jobs in labs in and around Pennsylvania. Anyway, while he could do it, he didn't want to think about living a life inside of a lab for the rest of his life. And because he's a people person, he wanted to do something different, and so he decided to go into business. So in his senior year at Virginia Tech, he took some elective courses in business and then took a test to go to graduate school at Virginia Tech in business and spent another two years and got a degree, master's degree in business, so he got an MBA. And then after that, he went to work for a bank in North Carolina. Anyway, so even though he's knowledgeable and able to understand science a lot, he's much more comfortable, because he's actually a people person. Even as a little kid, people found him very easy to communicate with, and there was just something intrinsic about him, so he was a people person. Anyway, so those are my two kids. They married at different times. My daughter met her husband, believe it or not, in a martial arts club at Virginia Tech. They were both into karate and they got acquainted and were going to different tournaments and so on, and eventually they became a couple and got married. My son, on the other hand, went to work for a bank after his MBA, and then the bank transferred him to New York office. And in one of the business interactions he met this woman who eventually became very friendly with him and they eventually got married, and they still are. So it was one of those chancey happenings.

LG: What's your son's name?

AN: Oh, my son's name is Stanford Hirotoshi Nishikawa, so I gave him my middle name.

LG: Does he go...

AN: He doesn't use Hirotoshi, he goes by Stan or Stanford. So he was named after... oh, on that point. Since I'm a Berkeley alum, when I talked to former classmates and alumni from Berkeley, that I have a son named Stanford. They look at me with incredulous gesture and said, "You named your son what?" And I said, "Well, it's a little bit of a circumstance thing." When he was born, four years after my daughter, we had actually another girls name picked out, because we were expecting a second daughter. But when that didn't happen, the baby was unnamed for two or three days and the hospital was badgering my wife, "When are you going to name this kid?" "When are you going to name this kid?" And then I had come up with two or three lists, and each one of them, she went through them and said, "I knew somebody named Richard, he was a bum, scratch that." Knew somebody named this and that, "Scratch that." And finally I said, "What about Stanford?" And she didn't know anybody named Stanford. Well, I had met Stanford Moore, who was a Nobel Laureate in biochemistry. I had met this guy like a month before my son was born. So I said, "You know, being named after a famous guy." And my wife thought about it and said, "Okay." So he got named Stanford. By chance, I met Stanford Moore for real at an international biochemistry conference in Sweden about three or four years later. And we were on an afternoon cruise in the harbor, Stockholm, and I told him about naming my son, only son, Stanford, and he was tickled pink. Because he was never married, and by that time, he had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and so he was very famous. And so he was really appreciative of the fact that somebody got named after him.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.