Lady on the Bridge

This is a story of a Nisei growing up during the Great Depression who finds he is living in two worlds. Sometimes these two worlds are at odds with each other. Threading through this story is Okaasan: She is the glue that holds the family together. She bears, nurtures, and dotes on her offspring. She holds fast to her culture, for there is no other recourse for her. She resists the demise of a culture.

Tadashi Kishi, a Nisei (second generation Japanese American) was born in Culver City, California, December 11, 1921. He spent most of his childhood in Santa Monica, California and graduated from Samohi, Santa Monica High School in 1939. He was attending UCLA majoring in Physics when the war broke out. After President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, he was uprooted and interned at Manzanar, California with other Japanese in the Santa Monica area. While interned at Manzanar, he took 24 units of Educational courses at night under the University of California’s Extension School in order to qualify to teach high school physics at the Manzanar High School. After teaching one year op Physics, he applied to teach conversational Japanese at the University of Minnesota as an opportunity to seek freedom from internment. Later, he was inducted in the US Army, trained in Military Japanese at the Presidio of Monterey, California, and served in Occupied Japan as a soldier and interpreter for MIS/ATIS assigned to General Macarthur’s GHQ. After his discharge from the Army, he continued his college education at UC Berkeley and graduated with a MA degree in Math. He began his career at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) and transferred to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) at Livermore, California. He was a Math/Programmer, System designer, and supervisor for large-scale scientific computers: IBM 700 series, LARC, and CDC 6600. He was the project manager for the LLNL’s commitment to utilize the ARPA ILLIAC IV for scientific application. He returned from the ARPA assignment and was a staff member of the Computation Department investigating special system for large-scale scientific applications. His last assignment was the Division Leader for programmers and technicians for scientific applications, small computer systems for the Magnetic Fusion Test Facility (MFTF), and the Laser Project. He has written several technical papers, given seminars at universities and won the best technical paper at the IEEE Computer Conference in San Francisco, California.