Densho Digital Repository - A. Hirotoshi Nishikawa Interview

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

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

<Begin Segment 1>

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.

<Begin Segment 2>

LG: And could you talk a little bit about your parents? Their names, their personalities, what they did for work?

AN: Well, my mother and father had a sort of arranged marriage. My father had a need to go to Japan. He had, when he became an adult, he came back to California before the Depression started. And instead of being a farmworker like his parents, he decided to get into a profession that was more universal, I guess, is the word for it. He went to the Boston School of Cooking in San Francisco, and became a professional chef. So he could now put on banquets for a hundred people, put on fancy dinners for rich families and stuff like that. And he never had any problem finding a job, so that was a good choice. He had, his father joined him for a few years, back from Japan to California. And so his father lived with him for a couple years to make money. And unfortunately, he died of a stroke or something. And so in 1936 or so, he had his father's ashes and contacted the family back in Japan bringing the ashes for burial in a family plot in Japan in Yamaguchi-ken, and the village was Yanai. I've never been there, but those were the things that I learned from my parents. Anyway, so on this trip to Japan, taking the ashes back of his dad, the uncle and aunt heard that he was trying to visit. And he was, at that time, twenty-nine and almost thirty in age. And the uncle and aunts decided that he needs to get married, so they made all kinds of arrangements. What they did is they interviewed four families with eligible daughters and set that up. So when he went back to Japan with the ashes, which she deposited in the family plot, he also signed up, went to the city hall, and resigned his Japanese citizenship. Because at that time, his parents were Japanese immigrants to America, for example, and they were basically conferred a second citizenship, being Japanese. And for some reason, the U.S. government sort of acquiesced for that, even though they didn't promote dual citizenships.

Anyway, so my father went back, and after resigning his Japanese citizenship, which then made him ineligible for being drafted by the Japanese imperial army, which was raising hell in China, and the Rape of Nanking took place a couple of years before he went back, et cetera, et cetera. So there was a serious concern about that, especially if you were living in America and didn't want to get drafted by the Japanese army. Anyway, he met up with his uncle and aunt who arranged for a series of visits, literally interviews, for a potential spouse. Well, he ran across my mother, who was kind of young at that time, she was only seventeen or eighteen and very nice-looking, so I couldn't blame him. [Laughs] Anyway, he negotiated her as his preference for marrying. And my mother looked upon this opportunity as a way to easily get back to America. Because her father, who had died a couple years before, told her at his deathbed that maybe when an opportunity arises, for her to go back to America, and she should do so because she would be happier as a female adult because she didn't have to deal with a male chauvinist society. So my mother was a feminist way before her time, and she apparently took this opportunity to go back to California when my father made an offer, so they did, and the rest is history. It was not smooth, however, because she had, since she had been brought to Japan as a little kid, she did not have a passport. So one of her cousins from Watsonville, California, had emailed, I mean, mailed her a certified copy of her birth certificate in Watsonville, California, which proved to be the pivoting thing, so that she could reenter the United States. Because in 1924, there was a bill passed which banned immigration from Asia, Japan in particular.

So when she and my father, even though they were married in Japan, in the village, basically came as an unwed couple. They hid their wedding event in Japan, and came as two separate people back to California. Well, my father was let go from Angel Island and went to the apartment straight away, she was detained for two days of questioning. And then finally, when she showed the immigration authorities that she had this certified certificate, they kind of looked at it and then acquiesced through that as a reality and let her go. And so she was allowed to go into San Fran to join my father in his apartment. And they arranged a civil service, and civil ceremony at the city hall and got married in California again. [Laughs] So that's how it all became legal, as it were, and my mother was able to stay. Interestingly enough, I didn't realize this encounter with the immigration department until a couple years after she died. In 2006, I got an email from a historian who was tracking the outcome of various Japanese immigrants in the 20th century to the United States. She had run across my mother's name, but she had enough examples of other people, she had like sixty-eight different individuals for her book. But she, having gone through the trouble of finding this information, emailed me the link, and so that's how I learned about all this detail, yeah. That was a very interesting part of history that I was not aware of. Anyway, so that's how my mother and father got married. [Laughs]

LG: Did your mother do anything for work after they came to...

AN: Oh, she was not trained in anything. So a lot of the jobs that my father got as a live-in cook or day cook, involved affluent families who had other needs, housekeeping and cleaning and maintaining and so on. So my mother just kind of picked up on that and earned a living or added to the living by those kind of housework.

LG: As a child, did your father cook a lot of food for you and you and your siblings? Do you have memories of his cooking?

AN: Yes and no. I don't think he did anything special. My mother had to learn how to cook, because she had not had occasion to do a lot of that at home, since she was the only, well, she had a brother and mother and father did most of the stuff. And so my mother, she had to learn how to cook, and was clearly second in line in terms of skills and versatility and such.

<Begin Segment 3>

LG: So your grandparents, did they go back to Japan?

AN: Well, I never met either side grandparents. They had come, I think my father's mother and father came in 1900, and my father was born in 1906 in Watsonville, California. My mother's parents had migrated in 2010 or something like that, and my mother was born in 1920, and my uncle was born in 1922. And for different reasons, but mostly economic, my grandparents on both sides went back to Japan, especially after World War I, when there was a recession in the U.S., and farmworkers and stuff like that were very, hit hard. So on both sides, they migrated back to Japan and took my mother and my father as kids back to Japan to grow up and survive.

LG: And you mentioned Yamaguchi-ken, is that where they were?

AN: Yeah, Yamaguchi-ken, which is right next to Hiroshima-ken. So it's on the southern edge of Honshu, big island, and the village was only like a mile or so from the ocean. And so they used to see sea workers and sailors and stuff like that from Korea a lot. There were men there, and go to the village and eat and whatever. And so my mother used to share stories of encountering these visitors from Korea.

LG: Anything that you remember?

AN: Well, not specific. I mean, given the history of the relationship between Korea and Japan, Korea was a territory of Japan since 1905. And they were not treated very well, and so the antipathy that emerged over a few generations in Korea against Japanese has even in manifestations today, not as intense as before, but still there.

<Begin Segment 4>

LG: And both of your parents in your family was incarcerated, right?

AN: Well, okay, getting to that, by chance, my father was a professionally trained chef and working as such, was badgered, I guess, is the right word for it in English by my mother's brother or my uncle Chester, who was living with us in the same apartment in San Francisco. And he had, so they had a cousin living in Hollister who was into farming. And my uncle Chester wanted to get into farming, commercial farming. And so, but since he was not twenty-one, he couldn't get a bank loan for supplies and equipment and things like that. So he needed somebody who would sign bank loans, and that was my father, because my mother was still also not old enough. Anyway, after several months of badgering, he acquiesced and agreed to try farming for a few years in Hollister. So they agreed to move from San Fran to Hollister in something like August of that year, in 1941. But a few weeks later, Pearl Harbor gets bombed. The landlord, an Italian farmer who owned several different farms in Hollister, told my father and mother to not invest a lot of money in seeds or supplies or anything, "Because we don't know what's going to happen to you guys." Well, he had some kind of a special insight, but eight, nine weeks later, in February of 1942, executive order gets signed, orders going out to the Japanese American community being incarcerated. So that altered the course of our family, and my mother and father were given notices and there were published posters and all this kind of thing telling people where to show up, by when, and so on. And so we had to follow orders, otherwise the FBI would come after us, and they did later on with people who were not, quote, "complying" with federal orders. So we went to Salinas, which is not far from Hollister, and they had a temporary detention center set up in horse stalls. So we got there in end of February or March, and we sat in our, lived inside of these, stunk like hell. I remember a smell like that, indelible, and we stood there, we were there for, until, I think, May or June.

During that time, the government was building these camps, and these were technically called WRA camps, War Relocation Authority camps, which is different from internment camps. "Internment" had a Geneva Convention legal definition that the U.S. had signed into, which was after World War I, and that allowed signatory countries to detain foreign individuals, mostly non-citizens in camps, internment camps, for security reasons. And in that category, some three to five thousand Japanese immigrants were jailed in Crystal City, Texas, which was a main detention center for internment, along with five, six thousand Italian Americans, or Italians who were mostly immigrants, and roughly a comparable number of Germans, and they were rounded up from various parts of the United States and brought to Crystal City, Texas. So that was the internment facility.

Well, the government, U.S. government was into all kinds of euphemisms, and they used the term "internment" for those of us who were incarcerated in WRA camps, because the general public didn't know what the difference was. Even didn't know what "internment" was. So this is how they got away with that. And also, instead of incarcerating citizens, we were classified as "non-aliens," another euphemism from the federal government. But I was a non-alien for several years, not an American citizen, which is ridiculous, but it's what they did.

<Begin Segment 5>

LG: Going back a little bit, you were three years old?

AN: Three and a half or four.

LG: Do you have a lot of memories of this time? You're explaining things, but do you still have like a picture of these moments? Do you remember...

AN: Well, as a little kid like that, all you can remember are kid things. One of the things I remember is that I was either four and a half or so, and it was in the summer, I got chicken pox. It was horrible. In these barrack camp buildings, there was no air conditioning, it's hot as hell, the outside temperature in July and August was 115, 118 degrees, I was miserable. And my mother tried to comfort me with towels and things like that to cool me off. I was pusing, oozing, my skin all over the place was just, squeamish with excretions from the skin. And it was incredibly miserable; one can never forget that.

Another less intense memory was in 1945 in April, at school, the announcement that was broadcast for all the students to go to the flagpole in front of the school. What was all this about? It's early morning session. Anyway, we all gathered in front of the flagpole and said the Pledge of Allegiance, and then we were instructed to sing the national anthem, at the end of which, the principal said, "We are doing this to honor the death of Franklin Roosevelt, who died yesterday." So here we are, incarcerated students, honoring or respecting the dude that put us there in the first place. And none of this gelled until much later when I was outside of camp and so on, but I thought that was really kind of something, I won't say it in the right words, but to be instructed [coughs] -- excuse me -- to honor the guy that put us in the camp in the first place. Of course, as students, we didn't know who this guy was. President? So what? [Laughs]

<Begin Segment 6>

LG: So when Pearl Harbor happened, and moving into these camps, did you understand what was happening? Did your parents try to explain anything to you?

AN: No, they didn't even understand why Pearl Harbor got bombed, except what was in the news. And that was, in some ways, like 9/11, it just caught the public by surprise, and we could watch it on newsreels later on, there was no instant television or anything like that. And so for most of the communities, white or Asian, it was baffling. And there were some people who were much more knowledgeable about international events, just took in stride, okay, World War II is starting. So the average public, I think they were just dumbfounded, they didn't know what the hell was happening. And so when Executive Order 9066 got signed, it finally came down, and saying, "Okay, we're really in a war." And the government had decided that if you were an immigrant or descendant of an immigrant from Japan, you were under huge suspicion.

LG: Do you remember preparing to leave the assembly center at all?

AN: Well, as a little kid, you just follow what your parents say, you know, pack your stuff and whatever, suitcases, pack your clothes and all that. You follow orders. After all, you're only a little kid. And my brothers were younger, so I think my brother Tom was barely wearing trousers and stuff like that. He was only one and a half or whatever. So memories of details are, various things, of that timeframe.

<Begin Segment 7>

LG: So which camp were you in?

AN: Okay. We were ordered to go to the assembly center in Salinas. I mentioned when we were living in horse stalls for three or four months, and then we got put onto a train where they had all the window shades down so we couldn't see where we were going, and we ended up in Parker, Arizona, which is near the Colorado River, yeah, on the edge of the Indian reservation. And the federal government had basically forced the construction of the Poston camp on the edges of the Indian reservation, much to the chagrin of the Indian tribes. They just said, the tribes complained about this incursion because the reservation had been established in 1965 by an act of Congress recognizing indigenous peoples. But anyway, so we were shipped to Parker, Arizona, by train, and then from there, they took us by busloads to camps. And Poston, Arizona, was one of the largest of the camps around, and it was built in three sections, each holding about six thousand internees or incarcerees. And when it was built from scratch, literally, by the government, a few months earlier, it was the second or the third largest municipality in the state of Arizona. [Laughs] All built for incarceration.

There was another one in Gila River which is south of Phoenix by twenty, thirty miles, and I visited that way later on a pilgrimage, so I know where it is. But anyway, in 2018, somebody had organized a pilgrimage to Poston, and so my daughter heard about it and she flew in from, into Phoenix from Chapel Hill, Raleigh, North Carolina, and told me to meet here there. And so we rented a car and drove from Phoenix all the way to Parker and Poston. And so we visited, in my pilgrimage, my daughter could see what it was like. Except that there were only a handful of buildings surviving. Part of my grade school building was still there, because they had been plaster and wood construction, but in the building that my residence was, it was all just crumbled foundations. They had a sign that was in, "This is Block such and such." And so ninety-eight percent of the place was destroyed by weather. Apparently, after camp was over, the local Indian tribes were allowed to use the facilities for some period of time, and I don't know how long. And it had a second purpose or use, but they had since abandoned that. And so what was left behind was just crumbling foundations and things like that. So it was very, there was an effort underway, and to reconstruct a few of the buildings and making them into museums, so that's apparently undergoing.

LG: Was that the first time you went back?

AN: Yeah, that 2018 pilgrimage was the first time in, I don't know, how many decades, I had occasion to go to Arizona, so that was two or three days.

LG: What did it feel like returning?

AN: Well, it's strange. I could not imagine being there as a kid, but nothing looked familiar, and most of the buildings were gone. Except for signs and stuff like that, markers that indicated where the barracks were. There was nothing that, in my head, I could put together, because everything had just changed.

LG: So the journey from the assembly center to Poston sounds pretty scary even as a child, but for an adult, being in a train with blackout curtains. Do you remember that journey? Did you have an expectation of what the destination was going to be like?

AN: No. Also, I want to say that after the war, when we returned back to California, and others had migrated east and whatever, there was a reaction in my parents' generation to not talk about it.

[Interruption]

AN: The prevailing sense or notion related to camp experience was one of rejection, or I don't know what's the best way to put it, but they didn't want to talk about it because it was an embarrassment. It turns out that in 1980, when those hundred Americans were incarcerated by the Iranians, and then they were released after some negotiation, when they were interviewed by the press, a lot of them in some ways talked like my parents' generation from camp, namely maybe we weren't doing things correctly or well, and that's why we ran into this bad luck. And that was some of the thinking and conversation within my parents' generation. The psychologists at that point came up with a phrase that made a lot of sense. It was "posttraumatic distress syndrome," and that described what happened to a lot of people in my parents' generation as a result of camp. And so the other way of discussing it, if there was any discussion at all, was that there was a notion called gaman, which in English, I guess, would be basically gutting it out, sticking it out, surviving. And it was this notion in Japanese culture that people in my parents' generation said, "This is what helped us survive," how to mentally contain it, because we had the ability to exercise gaman. So those were the two outcomes in terms of... and as kids, we hardly learned anything about camp life or anything. I had to reconstruct our family's experience. Much later after I finished Berkeley, I used to come home and visit my parents. My mother had an incredible memory of details, so in essence, I was interviewing her from time to time, and picking up bits and pieces of things that happened, et cetera, to her generation, and to the community at large. As kids growing up in California, the JACL was a core part of the Japanese American community. And so I involved, got involved with various social events, parties and graduation events and things like that, largely sponsored by the JACL chapter, this one in Gilroy, California. So that was helpful. But other than that, I had to dig it out as it were, on an individual basis to help myself get a picture of what was, what happened to the adults in my parents' generation.

<Begin Segment 8>

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.

<Begin Segment 9>

LG: But first, so you said that your family settled in Gilroy after the camp?

AN: Yeah, okay. So when I finally, my father finally decided to return back to California, it was practically, it was after the atomic bomb had been dropped. So it was that way in 1944, '5, even though the camps were technically closed on January 2, 1945, because of the Supreme Court decision in December of 1944. Anyway, when we returned back to California, we were temporarily billeted at the San Jose Buddhist Temple, which had been converted into a huge dorm, and they've taken out all the cubes and brought in cots, so some fifteen, twenty families could sleep there for whatever the number of days necessary. And we did that and ended up in the government providing temporary housing in a military camp in San Francisco. Because the war had ended, and so all the officers that were using these were gone. And so families were billeted there temporarily, and so we spent about ten months in San Francisco, and I went to second grade there. In the meantime, my father cashed some insurance papers, raised money, and through an old family friend in Gilroy who was a Japanese immigrant, found a restaurant which happened to be, guess what, a Chinese restaurant. It was called the Pacific Caf� Chop Suey House. And so my father decided that he wanted to try the restaurant business. So it was basically a mom and pop restaurant, and my father was the head chef, and my mother was the head waitress. And so we moved there and it was kind of primitive. The living quarters were in the back of the restaurant to barracks, nothing fancy about that. What can we do as kids? As we got older, we got roped into cleaning tables and washing dishes and all scutwork, to help the whole family survive in the business.

One interesting event during that time was a Black man came in one day with kind of a polite manner, and went to my mother and said, "Do you serve colored people?" And my mother was sort of struck by this question, and she said, "Of course we do." And then he turned around, went out, brought his family of four or five people, and they had lunch and so on, and they enjoyed it and then went. That was the first time I had heard, overheard any kind of a conversation between an Asian family people and a Black family. And at that time, this is after World War II, there was still a number of Blacks migrating from southern states in the U.S. to north and to the west. And so this fellow was one of those Black immigrants coming from the South because had an accent. And it was the first time I ran into one. There weren't that many Blacks in California at that time, not in a place like Gilroy. And so that was, to me, unusual. But to overhear this conversation, I thought, "Wow." And that kind of stuck in my head because I didn't expect it, my mother didn't expect it, and it was for real. And there were people caught in this situation, and I didn't run across a Black person until I went to Berkeley a number of years later. Because then I ran into students from all over, because Berkeley is a big international campus. And so I got to know a few students who happened to be Black, but they were from elsewhere.

LG: Do you have any other memories of sort of growing up in the restaurants? Were there other workers there?

AN: Time to time, depending on the day of the week and so on, and the volume of customers, they would, my parents would hire somebody as a supplement to the waitress staff, and/or taking care of dishwashing and that kind of stuff. But the mostly it was run by Mother and Father, and as we got older, we got roped into doing some of the chores.

LG: So your father was preparing Chinese dishes?

AN: Yep. He learned how to stir fry, it took him all of one morning to learn how to do that, because he could cook anything. And stir frying was pretty easy for him, no sweat.

<Begin Segment 10>

LG: So you mentioned that you came back and started third grade and had to focus on your English skills. What was your school experience, your grade school experience like? Do you have any memories of classmates, what you did for fun?

AN: Hmm, I can't remember very much. In terms of interaction with schoolmates, for a couple years, but following that, I had, along with my brothers, was getting racial attacks, getting beat up on the way to school and that kind of stuff. So we developed a path going by the town library, and that became our transient refuge when we saw a group of guys coming to beat us up, we would dig into, get into the library to avoid them. So I remember that happening in third grade, fourth grade. The other one was that, I don't remember the details, but a girl that I met as a classmate whose mother was a teacher and father eventually became a principal in the same school district, and I kept in contract all these years. Except that I haven't been able to get, talk with her for the last two years, because she moved to Florida and retired there. She was a physician. She and I went to Berkeley at the same time in high school, after high school, then from there, she went to McGill University medical school and got a degree in medicine. Whereas I went to graduate school in Oregon and got a PhD. So we remained friends and kept in contact, except for the last three years, I haven't been able to reach her. Her phone doesn't work or goes into a voicemail thing which is overloaded, et cetera. So my worry is that she expired someplace. When I last had talked to her about four years ago, she had COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, because she used to be a smoker. And unfortunately, even though she quit like thirty or forty years ago, she was one of those unlucky people that came down with lung problems, and so she had that happen. And then when I last talked with her, she had, was complaining about having, I guess technically it would be called cognitive decline, she was beginning to lose her short term memory and things like that. And I haven't been able to reach her ever since, so I'm only surmising, but given all those conditions, that she's probably not around anymore. But I haven't been able to find other classmates who might help me get in touch with her. She was last living in Florida. Anyway, so that's the only other connection to my early school grades, that just happened. Because we happened to be, they used to have groupings of students, A B and C, which was based on academic performance. But this was all the way through high school, so we were in the same A group all along, and we took chemistry and physics and math and all that, same classes.

LG: What was the racial and ethnic makeup of your grade school?

AN: Yeah, there were, I had classmates, and maybe out of a hundred, eight or ten were like myself, Japanese American. The largest ethnicity was Hispanic, probably twenty-five percent of the class. And the rest were a mix, many whites were basically of Italian descent, because a lot of the Italian families in Gilroy, they ran vineyards and things like that, which had been in the family line for multiple generations. They came from Italy, running vineyards, and so they did the same thing in Gilroy. Then they took over for the, it was the garlic business, and Gilroy eventually became the garlic capital of the world, growing more garlic than anybody. So anyway, I guess the generic white population was roughly half, and so there was quite a mix. There were no Blacks that I can remember, students. So Asians and then also among the Asians of the world, Chinese Americans, so I have friends from those days, one that I'm still in touch with, who lives in Walnut Creek, he's essentially a third generation Chinese American just like I am. And who else? So that would be kind of the makeup of the, growing up in Gilroy.

LG: Did your family stay connected to anyone from the camps? Did anyone settle near you?

AN: I don't recall per se. Of course, many of the families that we interacted with had been in other camps. But I don't recall I ever specifically, somebody else that had been in Poston, let alone Camp I, Poston. Later on, I met a few people at a JACL meeting or something like that, who during conversations revealed that he may have been in Poston, but these were just kind of random occurrences. We didn't know them intimately while we were in camp.

<Begin Segment 11>

LG: Were you or your family involved in any, did they practice any Japanese cultural traditions growing up, whether it be cooking, holidays, anything like that?

AN: Well, because my mother and father having grown up in Japan, they were inclined to have Japanese New Year's celebration. In many Asian cultures, New Year's is a big deal, largely expressed through food. So yeah, we had all kinds of Japanese cuisine, especially for New Year's. So we were taught, you want to eat these beans because they mean this and this, and eat this chard because of this and this and so on, and I've forgotten all the connections from a health standpoint, but they were largely conveyed that way. For health reasons it was good for you, but some of them, the names of the food items related to New Year's in certain ways, and so we were taught that. I can't remember all of them, but there was that. Unfortunately, I was not able to remember all of this. My wife, who grew up in Hawaii and who is also Japanese American, went through, except that the food items were different in Hawaii, but the ideas were very similar. And so she tried to foster that while we were having kids and so on, but I think we have lapsed, I guess is the right word for it, and our kids, who are fourth generation, my daughter has had some interest in it, but my son totally off, beyond him, he doesn't pay any attention, he didn't pay any attention.

The other thing, of course, is that the impact was that my daughter and son both married non-Japanese, so that had an impact on their outlook, I guess is the right word for it, in terms of family practices and traditions and so on, customs, et cetera. My daughter has some interest in it from a historical standpoint. And so she tries to follow certain things and track it. My son could care less, so he's totally gone, another generation.

LG: Did your family go, were a religious [inaudible]?

AN: Well, my father was not regular church attendee, my mother was a Buddhist. And so I grew up under her influence as a Buddhist. And I was a Buddhist until I finished my PhD. In Oregon, the nearest Buddhist temple to Corvallis, Oregon, was seventy miles away in Portland, and that was a bit of a stretch to do on a Sunday morning or any time. So I was basically unchurched for a number of years while I was a graduate student. And then I became a Unitarian by chance due to a fellow graduate student, when I finished my PhD, who was going to a Unitarian fellowship in Corvallis, Oregon, and he just kind of said, "Why don't you come with me and see what it's like?" I'd never been to a Unitarian church before. And so I just kind of, okay, went along, and found that there were a lot of things that I could agree with and so on, and from a theological standpoint, or more philosophical standpoint, I didn't have to reject anything that was Buddhist on attending a Unitarian church. And then comes 2020, and I run across, I'd been to, here in Devon, PA, was a Unitarian church that I belong to, and I've been going there since 1986. And the last minister, couple ministers that we've had, oddly enough, have incorporated stories and so on, literature from Buddhism into their sermons on Sundays. Who would have expected that, I don't know, but it's happened a number of times, and some of them, of course, will meld some ideas and principles into a more secular language, but I know that it's coming from Buddhism, the idea, anyway. And in talking with the ministers, they just kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, "Yeah, so?" It just happens. Got a certain, they do a lot of reading and they run across this, that idea or that idea, and where it works, then they accept certain phrases and so on, and incorporated it into the sermon. So that was totally unexpected, but it's happened.

LG: So would you still consider yourself a Buddhist?

AN: Essentially I have to refer to myself as a nonpracticing Buddhist. If I go to a temple, close my eyes and walk in, like when my mother used to go, I know exactly where I am. From the sound, the ringing of the bells at certain points in the service and all that kind of stuff. I can close my eyes and I can tell, I know exactly where I am.

LG: I'm curious, did your parents or the family, growing up, did you make any trips to Japan?

AN: No, we did not. One, it was pretty expensive, so my father, to put it milder, was a, watched the dollar signs and his savings account and so on. And I don't recall any conversations about going or not going, but in fact, we didn't go, not as a family. Later on, my brother, Tom, who got some kind of a virus called Traveling Virus, he does a lot of traveling. Europe, Asia, et cetera. In fact, he just came back from a river cruise in Germany about a week ago, and he lives in California. And then he's now, oh yeah, as of yesterday, he's in Japan on a temple tour. So he's an avid practicing Buddhist, and there's a church group that he's part of in San Luis Obispo, California. And they are right now on a temple tour visiting eight or nine different temples in Japan. So he does a lot of traveling, more than the rest of us put together. I don't know where he got that bug, but he's into it. Other than that -- because he didn't get it from his parents. So I was kind of in between. I've taken a few interesting trips like to Egypt to visit old ruins, I've been to the pyramids and so on and so on. I've been to France once or twice because of my wife trying to practice French and so on. But I haven't gotten the bug like my brother Tom, he really traveled a lot. And he's also driven across the U.S. a number of times. And I've never driven across the U.S., because I don't want to go three thousand miles by car, and he doesn't blink an eye. He's been to Grand Canyon and Utah and Texas and all this, all by car from California. So we're very different.

LG: So did you ever visit Japan?

AN: I've only been in Japan, believe it or not, four days or five days of my life on a business trip. The company I was working for in Jersey, where I was for about fifteen years, had a drug project with Ikeda Industries, which is a huge drug company in Osaka. And so we had a team meeting, this is back in the '80s, early '80s. Anyway, that was the one and only time I've been in Japan, unfortunately. I wanted to go a few times, but things just didn't come about. So I'm looking at the clock now and thinking, I'm wondering if the clock has already passed me. Because as you get older, traveling can become a challenge.

<Begin Segment 12>

LG: So what was high school like for you? We talked about it a little bit, but did you play in sports or what subjects you...

AN: I learned to play tennis because my father was a tennis player. I don't know how the heck he picked it up, but I got on, I was just barely good enough to make the bottom ladder of the team, so I got onto the tennis team in high school. That was my only sport of a competitive nature I got into. And the rest of the time, as I alluded to, I got into writing and reporting and photography. So between those three things, I was rather occupied. And one of the ironies of it is that in high school reunions, I was part of a organizing committee because I knew everybody. Not that they were all buddies or anything. Because of my functioning as a newspaper reporter and yearbook writer, I got to encounter almost everybody in the class, whether they were close friends or not didn't matter. And so that was an unexpected outcome of the things that I pursued, focused on in high school.

LG: I'm curious those instances that you mentioned as a child of people attacking you and your brothers, did those continue on to high school? Did you ever feel...

AN: Well, one can only surmise that one of the things after the '50s, because of the Korean War, a lot of mixed marriages took place when it was American military personnel doing R&R in Japan while the war was going on in Korea. And this resulted in a surprising number of mixed marriages, people coming back to California and the West Coast. And that had, in retrospect, an impact on ameliorating or, anyway, making it more acceptable to have Asians and Japanese Americans, et cetera, intermeshing culturally with the larger white population on the West Coast. And so that effect had a, was positive in that it diminished the hostility with Japanese Americans and the rest of the population on the West Coast and the United States.

LG: Any other memories from grade school or high school that you want to share [inaudible].

AN: Something unusual or different? Nothing comes to mind just like that, I'll have to think about it.

LG: It could be something mundane, too, if it meant something to you.

AN: No, I'll have to come back to that.

<Begin Segment 13>

LG: Well, let's talk about college then. So where did you go to college?

AN: Well, because of my interest in chemistry, my chemistry high school teacher encouraged me to go to Berkeley, and I did. My mother and father, because of the life circumstances, didn't even finish high school. So going to Berkeley was something totally out of their sphere of influence. Likewise, studying chemistry, studying science was something totally foreign to them. So my high school chemistry teacher became my first mentor de facto in giving me the encouragement and so on. And I went to Berkeley. Going from a high school of only 120 students in the graduating class to a Berkeley undergraduate class like forty five hundred, five thousand students, was an incredible shift. It was daunting. Also, Berkeley had a lot of smart students. Even though in the state of California, you can go from high school to the California university campus, based on your grade school record, then they didn't have any SATs or anything like that. Well, what I discovered was that the high schools in California varied all over the map in terms of how stringent their academic requirements were. And there were lots of smart kids that I ran into; it was daunting. But I managed to survive. I learned, after being there, that Berkeley was such that about forty percent of the incoming freshmen didn't make it to sophomore year. You've got a high attrition rate, very daunting. Mainly because of the academic standards varied all over the map, and the different high schools. So it was really very challenging to survive. The other thing about it was, at that time, there was essentially self-segregation. So if you were Asian, you didn't date anybody, even casually, who was not Asian and so on. So there were the Hillel club for Jewish students and the Japanese, there was an Asian something student club and so on. And everybody on a social basis self-segregated, even though there was no ruling about it. This is in the mid- to late-'50s. It was sort of the pattern of acceptance, certainly in California.

<Begin Segment 14>

So in that way, it was kind of a chance event that I met my wife. She was a year ahead of me because she had gotten a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati in microbiology, and she was working towards a master's at Berkeley. And at that time, people in the biological sciences that involved lab were now mandated to take biochemistry, and it happened that there was only one biochemistry course in the fourth year. And it was both for majors, like I was, chemistry major, versus students from other disciplines that had to take chemistry. So I met my wife, believe it or not, at a biochemistry lab. She happened to have a lab bench in her room separate from mine, because we were all separated by alphabet. And there was a guy named John Tashiro who was next to her who was Japanese American, and we were sort of casual friends. But I began to visit him so I could overlook and see who this other person was, and I discovered to my surprise and relief that they were not dating or anything, they were just labmates because of the alphabet. So I began to develop the courage to socialize with her, and a couple things fell into place. One was that she was the first Asian female that I ran across on a social basis who was a scientist already. But most of the females that I ran into up until that point were history majors and sociology majors and English majors and so on, all in the humanities. So this woman was the first female scientist with a degree already, so that caught my attention. And then as we got acquainted with each other, I found out that, I don't know how it came out, but she was interested in the stock market, which was also unusual. And because I had gotten the bug from my father who decided at some point when we were growing up in Gilroy that he needed to increase the assets of the family, and so began to invest in the stock market. So I got, in fact, I was still in high school when I bought my first shares of a company called Ford Motor. They had gone public in the mid-'50s, and so I bought, I think, ten shares of Ford Motor with my name on it, even. Although my father had to countersign it because I was a minor. Anyway, so that was an experience that I anticipated.

And so there were two things that kind of rang a bell with this woman. None of them was interested in classical music. I had not run across male or female Asians who were that knowledgeable in classical music. And the reason for that was that when Sumi, my wife, was a student in Cincinnati, she lived with an older sister who was a piano major at the music school in Cincinnati. And living in a house like this, every day, somebody's practicing this or that or this or that, and so over time, she acquired a rather elaborate, I guess is the right word for it, knowledge of piano sonatas and classical music. And just by chance, when I was in middle school, I got an interest in classical music even though I never studied music, I can't read music or anything, because I was listening to my mother's LP recordings of classical music. So I got interested in that, and through high school, I listened to radio and or recordings. And so when I discovered that with Sumi, I thought, wow. So those three things have stuck with us as long as we've been married, which is over sixty-one years. Because right now, we've been subscribers to the Philadelphia orchestra for over thirty years since we've been in Philly. And so it was one of those things that just kind of happened.

How did we get married? Well, I had a decision, I made a decision to make a big date in San Francisco in spring of 1961. And bought tickets et cetera, we went to the concert, and we came back to her apartment and visited for a while before I went back home. I was living with my parents at the time in Santa Clara, so she had an apartment in San Francisco. Anyway, during our conversations back in her apartment, there was a pause, and she said, "So, are we getting married?" And I was dumbfounded by the question because that was the last thing in my mind. And after a pause, I said, "I guess so," and then she said, "Okay. Well, what I�m going to do is" --she was working temporarily at that time as a culture manager for beer brewery because she was a microbiologist, and beer has yeast and all that. Anyway, so she was working there, and she said, "Well, I'm going to quit my job in a few weeks and then go back to Hawaii and plan our wedding." I said, "Okay." [Laughs] And time comes, she had things set up.

<Begin Segment 15>

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.

<Begin Segment 16>

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.

<Begin Segment 17>

LG: Shifting a little bit, I want to talk about your involvement with the JACL. So when did you first get involved with this organization?

AN: Well, I was only peripherally involved through the reparations process, which took place in the late '80s, early '90s. I was aware of, was supportive in terms of being a member and paying dues, but not active. And then I got this letter in 1989 or '90, from this commission, and telling me to submit it so that I would get reparations. So that's when it caught my attention, being involved in JACL was more than just name. Anyway, and so I followed that and then I got a check for twenty thousand dollars and all this stuff in 1990, '91. And then in 1997, there was a JACL national convention in Philadelphia. And at that point, I had gotten acquainted with a number of people who were active within the chapter of Philadelphia. And so they sucked me into doing some odd jobs at the convention, taking pictures of this and that and doing odd jobs. So I got involved and I thought, "Okay," and it just coincided with a retirement process, I guess, is the way to put it, in which my employer decided that I needed to be reassigned. And the reassignment boiled down to being given a job which was kind of a desk job, up until the time I was doing management, R&D. And so I figured they want me out of here. And so I negotiated the retirement with compensation for various things, and took it. And people that had, I encountered in the JACL heard about it, they said, "Oh, you've got much more time. Here's a committee, here's a this," and I started to get involved with the JACL. So it mushroomed, literally. And with my grandson, when he heard that I got involved with all this, he used to joke with me and said, "Oppa, I thought you retired. You sound like you got a new job." [Laughs] And I said "Yeah, sort of." Anyway, it's been that way since, and it started with this convention. And I got to know a number of people like the Uyeharas and so on who were, of course, one of the founders of the Philadelphia JACL chapter. And so that's been, that was a great experience.

I also got to know Judge Bill Marutani. And I found out about his involvement in a, what's the case before the Supreme Court? Loving v. Virginia, are you familiar with that? Yeah. He was asked by the NAACP to make an oral testimony before the Supreme Court. About two years ago, I accidentally found a website link to a recording, and I could hear his voice in front of the judges of the Supreme Court arguing to do away with anti-miscegenation laws. Total surprise. Anyway, at the time I knew him, of course, that had already passed, that was in '67 or so, when the Supreme Court decision was being made. And so when I met him, he was basically retired also as a judge. And anyway, it was interesting to know somebody like that.

So I did what I could, and before I could say yes or no, things were just piling up. Do this, do that, do that, join this committee, join that committee. And eventually it extended into the district and to national groups and committees and commissions and so on, lost track of all these things.

LG: Were you involved in any other Japanese American groups or organizations in the area?

AN: Well, sort of off and on, I forgot how I got exposed to the JAGP, the Japanese Association of Greater Philadelphia, which is basically not an American organization, it's an organization of immigrants, mostly. The non-Japanese members are usually spouses, white spouses largely, of Japanese immigrants. And so it's a different kind of environment, I guess, is a way to put it. And I got involved back in the early 2000s, and then I faded away and then about three years ago, I got, I forgot who I ran into, they arranged for me to join the board again. So I've been involved with them, and my rationale for participating is to, on occasion, work with the idea of bringing in a... what's the word? A Nisei or Sansei point of view into the cultural environment of the JAGP. They don't realize that they have a certain limitation, whatever, culturally. For example, there's an ingrained xenophobia in the Japanese culture about certain things, and as an American, third-generation, I can see what the limitations and the impact it has on the wider culture in the States. And so I haven't had too many occasions to touch on that, but that's what's keeping me going. Otherwise, I have less of a motivation to be part of it, because there are so many things that... for example, in their board meetings, a number of them lapsed into side conversations all in Japanese. So I'd have to raise my hand on zoom and say, "Please switch to English only." But the other members who are especially immigrants just unconsciously diverged into Japanese. I find that very awkward because I don't understand adult language in Japanese. Anyway, I haven't had too many occasions yet where I would basically utter or pronounce or push a different viewpoint on an issue which is more Japanese American than Japanese. But that's the only thing that's keeping me connected so far.

LG: Earlier you mentioned reparations. Were you directly involved in the redress movement?

AN: No, that all went by, except for applying. Because as a victim, I had to follow a formal, there was a whole standard questionnaire and so on. I was aware of it happening, but other than that, I was not directly involved at that point, because I was more focused on my working career.

LG: What did it mean for you to get the check and the apology?

AN: Well, I sort of took it in stride. What I've done since then, believe it or not, is donate a lot of the money to the JACL. So for the last twenty years, I think I've been averaging about a thousand dollars a year in membership dues, and I've gone through almost twenty thousand dollars, all donated to the JACL. There were a few people that I know that donated it correctly when they got it, but I didn't know what to do, so I just started to donate once a year, and I've been doing that for twenty years.

<Begin Segment 18>

LG: So you mentioned you were able to go on a pilgrimage with your daughter.

AN: Uh-huh.

LG: How much have you shared with your children as they've grown up about your experiences and the experiences of your parents? How did you explain to them what had happened to you?

AN: I don't believe that I had a conversation focused that way. My daughter is an avid history buff, so she took notes and all that, but that's her. My son never raised interest or curiosity or anything so I've never discussed it with him. My granddaughters on my son's, my son has two daughters, they could care less. So on the other hand, my grandson, my daughter's son, has an interest in Nikkei history. So he's picked up on a number of things from his mother because of her direct experience. And over the, since he was a teenager, we used to have weekend phone calls, FaceTime, and a lot of times we would talk about various books I've read or he's read involving Nikkei history. So that has connected me to him over the years, and he has an ongoing interest in Japanese American history.

LG: So right now we are here at Shofuso, the Japanese House and Garden. I'm curious, living in Philadelphia over the decades, when did you first become aware of this site?

AN: I don't remember. I think I learned about it from people in JACL, and I frankly don't remember when I first came here.

LG: Were you ever involved in the group that operated the space? There was some overlap with the JACL and the Friends group here.

AN: I don't recall directly being involved. Because I'm not into gardening. My wife is, because she's into ikebana. But I don't think she has been physically involved here either. She's had some contact with Longwood Gardens, but not here.

<Begin Segment 19>

LG: Can we shift into some reflection questions? So you kind of talked a little bit about this at the very beginning, but broad question, how do you think your wartime experiences and the experiences of your family impacted you all, whether psychologically, physically, even through the generations? Do you see that impact sort of lingering?

AN: Can you repeat that?

LG: Sure, yeah. So there's this idea of sort of intergenerational trauma from the experiences that people went through in incarceration. So I'm curious if you can see that impact psychologically, physically, in your parents, in your siblings, in yourself, from what you went through?

AN: Well, I can't say anything about my parents, they're long gone. And like I said earlier, in that generation, they didn't like to talk about it and so if you didn't talk about it, that means you were not thinking about it. In terms of people who are alive and well today, my son, the last thing in the world is to talk about World War II. Indicated that my grandson was interested in the history, and so he's much more conscious. And I haven't had a conversation, very recent, in terms of ramifications of impact on the future, but -- [coughs] -- excuse me. That's something I could touch on, impact on now... now is not the way to put it. The interaction between Japanese American community and Black American community, there have been ups and downs over the last fifty years, and I ran across archival pictures, for example, which I didn't realize existed. The 1963 March on Washington in August, the JACL was there, and I didn't realize that until about four or five years ago. In '63, Martin Luther King had invited the JACL to join -- that was in June of '63 -- to join the March on Washington. And at that point, the JACL community was divided on whether demonstration publicly is the way to go about expressing the inequities and injustices of the large white community. And so there was a convention apparently in July of that year, JACL convention in which this was discussed. And there was actually a split vote on whether JACL should join the NAACP people or not. However, a group of progressive leadership within the JACL convinced the rest of the convention that they should join. And so they ended up accepting Martin Luther King's invitation and joined the March on Washington. And then I had found, related to that, a number of photographs involving the officers, national officers of the JACL, et cetera, taken in front of the Washington Monument and so on. And you can tell from the banners and so on that this is all part of the MLK movement. But I didn't realize such a thing existed.

And so then I found out in my research that when the executive order was signed back in '41, '42, it caught the attention of the NAACP. And they were worried that, because if it could happen to a small group like Japanese Americans who were only a few hundred thousand, "It could happen to us." So they were concerned, but before they could act, the government had made moves to move people et cetera, et cetera. So the involvement of the NAACP was minimal at that point. And, of course, the shooting war and everything caught the attention of the larger public. But the point is that the interaction between the Nikkei community and the Black American community have been there, it's just that due to circumstances and so on, not too much happened. And so when the Loving v Virginia took place, that was significant. And Marutani was asked to testify, he was asked by the NAACP to do that. So the connections were there. Not big time, but no less there.

So now, in 2023, the issues of support, and one in particular is reparations. Having generated and developed reparations for Japanese Americans, which involved the participation and support of the Black American community in Congress, the question is, what can the Japanese American community do reciprocally, because the circumstances are very different. Dealing with issues of multigenerational maltreatment over slavery, et cetera, and the size of the, magnitude of the number of people involved, was humongous compared to the Japanese American population And so the things I'm aware of is that somebody has proposed a study process, putting a document together to elaborate on or define what is to be included in reparations or not, et cetera, let alone what the reparation is going to be, is it money for individual families, money for community activities, how hard you want to do it, all that's up on the air because Black American history is a lot more complicated. And while the JACL and the Japanese American community wanted to be supportive, how to do it, all that is not very clear.

LG: So you mentioned that instance where you were a child, but did you ever feel you were treated differently by anyone in a positive or negative way because you are Japanese American?

AN: Well, I mentioned a few years after we returned to California and going to school and getting beat up, it was clear that we were being beat up by bullies because we were Japanese American. After that period, I don't recall any specific instances through middle school or high school when I got involved with the yearbook or the newspaper or things like that, things that really turned around. Because relatively speaking, the Japanese population in California was visible, I guess, is the way to put it. And a lot of the businesses started coming back. My father finally abandoned his mom and pop restaurant and went to work for a Japanese high end restaurant in Mountain View where he switched over and was a head chef there, and basically retired there when he was seventy-something. So the climate had changed profoundly in ten, fifteen year time, and I don't recall particular instances through high school or even into college where I was subject to specific ethnic threatening.