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-1-25-8

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

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LG: Do you remember at Poston, what it looked like, sounded like, where you lived? Do you have memories of Poston in your [inaudible]. You have that school memory, did you have any others that stood out to you from your time there?

AN: Well, I have, in my camp log, I have a slide which shows a picture of my class graduating -- not graduating, but it was taken by the school officials. I think the class was about twenty-two or twenty-four kids, and the teacher, Mrs. Gedding, who was a white woman who came in from the outside every day. But I don't remember any details from particular events in class. I mentioned this business honoring the passing of President Roosevelt, which is kind of striking because it was totally unexpected. But within the class itself, I don't remember anything special that we got from Mr. Gedding except we read, and we were being taught immigration and so on. Because of my parents' inclination to speak Japanese at home, I didn't realize that my English development was slowed down, if this is a way to put it. When we returned to California and we moved to Gilroy, I started the second or third grade, and I took home a note from my third grade teacher to my parents, which was telling them to practice talking to me in English at home, because my language development was behind that of my chronological peers. So I didn't realize how much influence that had. And so they just flipped in and decided to talk to me in English, and so I lost my proficiency in Japanese, although it was limited to kid language like how to get to the toilet and this kind of stuff. And so what that did, even though my parents spoke English with an accent, I began to concentrate on developing my English, and by the time I reached high school, I got so involved with that that I took journalism in addition to my English and became an editor of the school newspaper and yearbook. Yeah, so it really had an impact, this one note from my third-grade teacher.

LG: We'll definitely talk about the principal.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.