Rolling. Okay, clap for us. Thank you. Okay, so John please tell us your name, which class
you're at CA and where you live now. My name is John Gillespie. I was in the CA class of 1963
and I've been living in New York City since 1982. Okay, and tell us why your family was in Japan
and how long they were there for and why your family put you in CA. Yes, my family went to
Japan first in 1947. They were missionaries and I was a baby then and so I basically grew up in
Japan. They stayed for 30 years and I lived in Japan a total of about 16 years and I started
going to CA from the seventh grade. And where were you before seventh grade? Before that we lived
in Kokura which is now called Kitakyushu and my father was first work in Japan was teaching at
Senan Gakuin in Kokura and we were there for three years and then in 1950 we moved to Osaka. So I
lived the rest of my time in Japan in Osaka. Okay, great. And they just want to know like so you
attended from seventh grade and if you could mention that you were also a graduate of CA. Yes and I
graduated I did I was there seventh grade and I took the eighth grade in the United States. We spent
a year in the States then and then 9, 10, 11, 12 I was at CA and graduated in 1963. Perfect. Okay,
so I want to ask you what if you have to pick one most memorable experience at CA what would it be?
This is a difficult question because there were many but let's say one of the most memorable
experiences and I'll give you an academic example. I Latin was one of the main subjects at Canadian
Academy when I was there and I liked Latin of all things and I was pretty good student and I
remember once we had a final exam when I was a junior and the teacher of the class was Padre
Allen and he was had been a had come in in the middle of the year because the regular Latin
teacher had had an accident of some kind I think he broke his leg and was out. So Padre Allen came
in to take over and he was a British missionary in the missions to Seaman in Kobe and a really
sharp individual and he knew Latin certainly very well and we were translating and there was no more
grammar or anything we were translating Caesar, Cicero and things like that in the class and we
did this final exam and I thought you know I've done it perfectly and he puts a 95 with no other
red marks on the page and you know I'm a smug kid I think well what 95 why is it 100 so I go visit him
and I said Padre Allen I said how can I make this better you know it's 95 and you know
any mistakes here you know I want to know I want to know if I could improve something and
he sat back in his chair and he sort of put his hands across his stomach like this and he says
miss the Gillespie said you can always make it better this was my lesson you know and I've never
forgotten that moment it was a smug kid you know thinking he knew everything and and he kind of put
me in my place and I I never have forgotten that moment and by the way I deeply appreciate it too.
That's a great story um I guess that kind of leads into another question but maybe you can think
of a different moment like just some event or the effect that CA has had on you and like the greater
length of your life maybe your time in Japan or your time in CA. Well you know and there's two
effects and in general one is academic of course it was a very rigorous school and as a result I
came to the states to go to college and really had no trouble with academics at all in fact in many
cases we was I felt in advance of other students even as an 18 year old freshman or 19 year old
sophomore in college so that's one area the other area is really social and that may be more important
because um look we were a Canadian Academy it was like an island surrounded by land you know in in
in Japan with all these foreign students there were some Japanese students there as well but
all the classes were done either in English or the French classes were done in French and of
course the Japanese classes were taught in Japanese but um we got to know each other very well
and still to this day my best friends on the planet are people I met at CA and I still had
contact with them we get together every now and then you know here in New York City we have an
annual reunion dinner and these are the friends I count as you know I can count on them for anything
that kind that kind of thing and I went to college in the States and I still have some contact with
my college my classmates in the US but the closer relationships because of what we had in common
in Japan are the relationships that we forged at Canadian Academy and that's unforgettable you
know that's going to last a lifetime gosh yeah it's like the same with me although sure I've only
been out for 34 years but it's crazy because you've been out for 50 years right that's right
that's right that's right next year is 50 years gosh okay um in terms of your time in Japan just
maybe expanding out a little bit are there any more like what would how was your time in Japan
maybe like a moment or memory that of growing up in Japan um well I you know we were in Japan
shortly after the Second World War ended and one would have expected if you look at other countries
where there had been war and then there was an occupation of some kind one would have expected
that there would be a great deal of resentment toward the people who are occupying the country
and the Allied forces led mainly by the US were occupying Japan from the end of the war up until
about early somewhere in 1953 I think was the final date of the so-called occupation and
but we never experienced that I'm sure there were a few Japanese who resented the all these you
know big guy gene walking around and and with especially the military guys with a certain
swagger with which they would walk and so on but you almost never saw any evidence of that
um the Japanese were um just realized that that that was over the war was over and this was a new
phase and they accepted uh they accepted us and you know I actually lived at my Canadian
academies in Kobe we lived in Osaka not many foreigners in Osaka in those days in the early
1950s and yet uh our family made friends um we felt accepted we there were we were never in any
danger of thinking we were like Japanese that would never happen but um it was like living a
safe life you could be on the streets late at night as a little kid and nobody's going to
touch you or attack you and I mean Japan then and even now is safer than you know most big
cities in the world for people walking the streets alone at night just for example so
that's something that one would not forget and I've you know it's been with me all my life too
great um is this someone from your time at CA maybe a classmate or maybe some of the teachers
like someone that like you know who is really really inspired you're really you remember this
one person in the CA community sure listen all of our teachers were good you know there was George
Samuel there was Madame Sata teaching French Al Flynn Tom Gale teaching history and so on these
were really wonderful human beings and teachers if I'm going to single out one that really inspired
me it was Gilbert Konishi and he was a Japanese American who really had spent most of his life
growing up in New York City here and he'd gotten a degree I think from the new school for social
research in the village and he ended up in Japan I think he was kind of trying to find his own roots
but he taught a class called speech and it was less a speech class we had to do that kind of
thing too but it was less a speech class than it was how to think class and um I mean he would
ask you sometimes he'd say uh you know take out a piece of paper and just start writing
that sort of thing and you you'd have to you'd have to come up with something
which made you think and other times we would read essays and he would ask very pointed questions
you know Mr. Gillespie what is the meaning of this what does this say to you that kind of thing
and you'd have to it wasn't something you could memorize you had to be thinking in order to come
up with it and the kinds of questions he asked me I found that when I was a college student
and later on I became a university professor I was asking the same kinds of questions that
Gilbert Gilbert Konishi was asking us and I began to realize the depth of the influence that that
gentleman had on my learning and on my life I never forgot gosh okay um yeah
can I just pick up a small amount of like high pitched interference okay cut the sound and then
we do another yeah just it's not it's not too bad just to see it go show let's cut sound just
cut camera okay let's roll audio yeah okay let's do the clap again thank you um I think
I've already covered this just is it any other thing you like to say about how that your time
as CA has had like a bigger impact like but I think about it unless you there's another story
you want to tell well there's you know I could just keep going on and on there are so many things
about the the experience there that were positive and you know here's one example there were people
there from all different backgrounds ethnicities religions a lot of Jewish people there the
Christian in my case there were Muslims there was Baha'i people there were Japanese who you know
presumably would be Buddhist or Shinto or both in their practice and yet we didn't really care much
about that or we didn't really explore that as students with each other we just liked each other
because we liked each other that we were people and I found that a really positive thing too so
you'd be really difficult to get out of Canadian Academy and be a racist because we loved everybody
and we liked everybody we got along with everybody you know obviously somebody would have
work and be a little strange or something but that's something I really valued you know we
were all human beings and probably the the teacher that we had that that might have best exemplified
that was George Samuel who was from South India and he came to Japan to teach there when he was
just in his 20s and he stayed there his whole career brought his wife there you know after he'd
been there for a year and raised his family there George Samuel was one of the most magnified is
still today living in California one of the most magnanimous individuals anybody will ever meet
and uh you know here's an academic thing you'd be taking a test in one of his classes
and he'd be walking around and he'd look at your paper and you'd be shuddering what's he looking at
you know and then he'd see something and he wanted to give you a hint he just wanted the students to
succeed so he'd look over your paper look over your shoulder and he'd say something like think man
like that and you knew oh I gotta go back and look at this one again he wouldn't give you the answer
but you knew you need something was wrong there and you needed to improve it in some way and
that's the kind of thing that you just it's positive it's like human it's like a Canadian
Academy was a place like you felt you could be long you could you know you could be part of the
fabric of a family there something like that and uh that's pretty valuable when you're just a number
of a small number of gaijin you know foreigners in this huge country uh you know Japan is uh
basically you could almost say ethnically pure you know 99.9 percent of Japanese are Japanese
and the United States for example or Canada very different with huge diversity of ethnicities and
religions and so on and um so um that kind of experience that you have at a Canadian Academy
was just valuable and some of my friends whom I've still kept in contact with all these years
it's only in later years after you're out of Canadian Academy for 20 years 30 years you start
talking oh your family was was Jewish oh right how did you get to Japan and you found many of them
were trying to escape some kind of uh you know discrimination in their home country in in Europe
or some place or the Middle East and they ended up in a place like India or in China and then
somehow got to Japan uh and that also gives another overlay of interest to all of those
human relationships you had earlier now you can expand them and make them even deeper
I just wanted to ask one more question about the Mayasan like for yeah for you might be one of the
this is probably people who went to like the school I went to in the school you went to
but that's right just the fact that CA was on your your impressions of the location and how
it meant to you yeah that's right you know you you you were in the new school down in Noko Island
and I think that's now been in the 20 plus over two over 20 years ago it moved
uh that location up on the hill was marvelous you could actually see out of your school window
and you can see the whole city of Kobe down below you and you know Kobe itself was just a
little tiny fishing village in the middle of the 19th century and once Japan got opened up uh you
know the official opening date was January 1st 1868 with the Meiji Restoration and once that
happened a lot of foreigners from Europe and North America started going to Japan for maybe for
business purposes trade import export and so on and there were two centers uh where they lived
and worked one was Yokohama and one was Kobe and so Kobe has a kind of stamp on it as a as a foreign
inspired city in a way and I saw an exhibition last year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art called
Kobe Window on the World something like that and there were some photographs or some actually maybe
drawings back in the middle of the 19th century of how Kobe looked and there were there were images
from up on Mayasan or Roko down and you could see no buildings just trees and a couple little
small fishing boats out in the port so in a mirror let's call it a century and a half Kobe
went from a little fishing village to a major metropolis uh not only in Japan but in the world
and one of the reasons is not just because the Japanese began to move in there but because the
Europeans and North Americans moved there to do trade import and export and so that makes Kobe
kind of like a a TCK you know a third culture kid Kobe itself is not purely Japanese nor is it purely
western it's kind of a mix and I guess that becomes an unforgettable experience also
and finally it's maybe the hardest question we're all trying to get from everybody
if you could describe CA in one word or one phrase just your your experience there one one word
or one phrase for Canadian Academy yeah that's a challenge I would say I would say something like
unique unforgettable I'm going to say unforgettable positive in a positive sense
CA is positively unforgettable how's that great that's good um I think we're good let's cut
let's cut both audio and camera camera's rolling
okay and just continue what you were doing yeah well what I was thinking about Canadian Academy
is that uh you know when you're a student there you have a good time and everything but you take
a lot of things for granted and as I've gotten a little older and gotten away from Canadian Academy
and continue to interact with some of my classmates and then many other uh people who graduated even
you know 45 or 50 years after I did you find that it's more important for you and you begin to reflect
in almost in an existential way how meaningful Canadian Academy was to your own existence
I think that's something that and only time only time can tell that kind of thing because
you don't notice in your 18 year old kid you probably itching to get out of there and move on
with your life but looking back on it you could really appreciate the value of the experience
that you had there great thank you I'm glad we got that let's cut now
