And if you could just give us a clap in front of the camera.
Louder.
Okay.
Thank you.
Okay.
So let's start off by giving me your name, which class you are at, CA, and where you live
now.
My name is David Moshe, I was in the class of 1968, and I live in New York City on the
Upper East Side.
Great.
Thank you.
This is a little bit about your background, you know, why your family was in Japan.
If you had moved before, maybe you were born there, the circumstances that led your family
to be there, and from which grade to which grade you were at CA for?
My father came to Japan in 1936, he was in the import-export business.
He stayed there during World War II.
After the war, he went back to Baghdad, he came from Iraq, he went back to Baghdad, got
married to my mother, and he came back to Japan to take care of his business affairs,
and she joined him in 1949.
I was born in 1950.
I went to St. Michael's, then I went to Marist Brothers, and I came to CA in 1964 and graduated
68.
Great.
And St. Michael's Marist was, I know, the school.
Okay, so let's dive into some of your memories from your times at CA.
Maybe you can give us one of your most memorable experiences or events from the time you were
attending CA.
Let's see.
I guess one of my most memorable events is actually not something so pleasant, but it's
memorable.
There were two, three of us in the class that weren't the best physical specimens of young
boys in their, in the 16 and 17-year-old.
And me and Hajime and Shim were always in a special group, and we had to work only on
a few things, if I remember correctly, it was push-ups and pull-ups, and Mr. Miller and
afterwards Mr. Ashcraft were very hard test drivers.
I mean, Bar Ashcraft turned out to be a friend later on when we got together here in the
U.S., but I remember PE was sheer hell, and although I was on the soccer team, and that
didn't seem to make much of a difference, but I remember PE was a mess, everywhere.
Gosh.
My memorable, yeah.
Okay, how about perhaps in the bigger scale of things, you know, you being in Japan as
a non-Japanese person, any memories of, you know, maybe within the CA community, but not
specifically at school, just living in Japan, and where were you living, and some of the
experiences and memories that you remember from that time?
Well, one thing I do remember about CA, there was always a difference between the kids who
adorned and the kids who lived in town, and we were in high school, and aside from knowing
each other personally, we really didn't know much about each other's families.
That only happened, I think, after I reconnected.
I don't know whether you know, but our class, through the efforts of Candy Weisshard, Cav,
initially she passed away a few years ago, stayed in touch for a long time.
She made every effort to get all the addresses and the current addresses of our graduating
class, and till today, every five years, we get together in Kent, Connecticut, at Joy
Brown's property, and it's quite an amazing thing when, I would say, even twenty-thirty
of us, well, more of us are in touch, and twenty-thirty of us get together on the East
Coast over a weekend in the summer, on the every-fifth year of our anniversary, and so
that's quite amazing, but I mean, I started the story because, but for the kids who adorned
kids and were missionary kids, we didn't interact very much, so my father, we lived in Kitanocho,
we lived at the top of Toll Road, near the Colby Club.
We used to get the bus in the morning right at Dr. Shane's office, and it would be, the
later years, junior and senior, it would be a few of us in our class, Lucilito and Gordon,
and we'd have fun on the ride to school.
It was pleasant, it was very different than Marist Brothers, because at Marist Brothers
we had to go down to Motomachi and take the train to Tsumon, so that was always fun.
Living growing up in Japan, we knew we were always different, as much as I was born there,
and at the time spoke very colloquial Japanese, because they didn't introduce Japanese language
until Mrs. Ono came, I think, and that was in, I would say around probably 1966, that
they actually started to formally teach Japanese in the high school.
So until then, we were basically being trained to get into schools, either in the U.S. or
well, rarely in Europe, or in the case of a few people, Sofia and Tokyo and so on.
But everybody was basically headed back to the U.S., the majority of kids.
So that's what we were being trained to, taught to prepare for.
What was your question again?
That's good, that's all, that's fancy.
But I wanted to ask specifically about the school on the mountain.
I went to the sea that is on the man-made island, so I've only heard about different
episodes of this location of the school, and maybe you can talk more about what you remember
about the physical location of the school and this mountain and how that affected your
experiences.
Well, there were two ways to get up, the really steep road that was near the cemetery, and
the one that came by the dam, and the bus would take the road by the dam, and when
you wanted to get down quickly to the bus stop, the public transportation, you took
the steep hill down, I forgot what the name was, but I remember the hills were very steep.
I remember the campus, especially after the Mont Street gym was built.
I remember Gordon and I would be playing basketball after school for hours on end, and then taking
public transportation back home.
I remember the dam and all the activities that went on over there, and it was constant.
That was an escape, I guess, at the time.
I was probably one of the more conservative students there, and I probably did not take
risks as much as other people did.
We brought our lunch, so we didn't eat in the cafeteria every day, so we brought our
lunch.
Therefore, there was always Hajime on myself, a few other people, just sitting, eating in
the classrooms or outside.
The year, I think a junior year or a senior and senior year, we had started having this
carnival.
It might have been before, but those are the years that I remember, and then we had obviously
the talent show every year that I, myself and Kenny Hamma, MCed one year or two years.
The campus, I remember, was really nice.
It was the very attractive Tudor-style building that was the main building, and then the additional
building that went up.
In my freshman and sophomore year, there was a prefab building that went up, and they taught
shop there, and John would know the names of some of these people.
There were a few students that were like pure American, you just saw them as American.
I love library, because I'd be able to go to, and that's where you read Sports Illustrated,
and that was my introduction to America, so I remember the football covers, the players
from UCLA and USC, and those were the wonderful things that we saw.
There was sophomore, junior year, a fellow John Enlo came into the class, he had an older
brother, Walter.
John and I became fast friends.
John got into trouble at school, and he was allowed to stay only on condition that he
lived at home, no longer in the dorm, and I tutored him in math, and we became very
close friends.
He was sort of my, he opened my eyes about America, the truth.
He lived in Princeton, he was here, Molly, his sister was cute and cool, so you got all
this information from your friends.
All right, so the point of that is that the American pharmacy on Toa Road and the international
shop in Nakayama where you bought all these candies and all these imported products, we're
talking about the late 50s, early and middle 60s, so it was not so long after World War
II.
A lot of things were just coming, you know, were just being imported, some of the things
were being imported for the first time.
You were always jealous of people like Lucille Ito and Candy who had access to the PX, and
they could get all American products any time they wanted.
What's PX?
Oh, PX was the base exchange.
So if there's an American base, and there was an American base, I think in Kobe, because
I think it stayed during the Korean War and a little bit thereafter.
So if there's an American base, there's a base exchange like a store, you know, not
only a grocery store, but probably, so you can get all American products that you want.
Cool.
Yes, very cool.
So if you were a Boy Scout and you went on Boy Scout trips to like Tachikawa Air Base
and then you got access to the base exchange, it was big bonuses.
Okay.
Okay, we need to cut and restart because every 12 minutes.
I mean, do you remember how to do it?
Okay.
Okay.
I'm going to let you.
All right.
Give us a clap.
Thank you.
Okay.
I want to ask you if you had a particular person or maybe a teacher or a staff member
or someone from CA who you particularly remember as, you know, learning from or being inspired
by during your time at CA?
I would have to say Bar Ashcraft.
Could you start that big, the person or someone I...
All right.
I'll say one of the people I was most, I would say most influenced by and was Bar Ashcraft
at the CA.
He taught history.
We had this huge world history book.
There were two, I remember our class was broken up in two.
I think we were the dumber class.
Mr. Fredericks thought the smart kids.
But I remember he was so wild.
Everything about him was so, you know, non-conventional and it was fascinating.
The Richard Bradshaw was my class and myself and others would get into long arguments.
I mean, some of them I don't even remember, but I remember one particularly about making
value judgments in history and writing history and so on and we would go on and he would
take one side and then when he felt it was convenient, he would start taking the other
side again.
So you would find yourself arguing against yourself, you know, in a very strange way.
He went on to become a photographer and went to Vietnam and came back and sold log cabins
in Massachusetts and passed away a few years ago.
We stayed in touch and what I remember he was very influential, gave a different picture
of what Americans were.
Now, you know, it's been a few years since you were at SCA and so this question has to
do with now maybe reflecting on the time you're at SCA, you know, it's been a while, so maybe
you have, you know, what are some of the things that have stuck with you, you know, lingered
throughout your life after SCA or some experiences that you really look back now and realize
how unique they were or special they were or anything.
I think one of the unique things is obviously the number of different cultures that the
students came from.
So you had a chance to interact with Fawad Katiaray, who was the president of the Student
Council in my senior year.
Fawad was, you know, was from Persia, from Iran, but he was of the Baha'i faith.
So then, of course, all the Americans and at least for me, and I don't know, maybe for
some other people as well, you know, the American students were very, very, were special because
they represented what, who you were going to, who you were going to join in effect.
We all knew, or at least I knew I was going to go to university in the United States and
probably make my life there, my older sister and my older brother had already left in 1966,
so I knew that we were settling in.
And I think for me to learn more about America, learning more about the American way of life,
the way things were, the way they dressed, we're still talking about Japan in the 60s,
because not everything looked like America yet, or, you know, we didn't have McDonald's
yet and it hadn't transformed itself.
So there were still a lot of little alleyways and, you know, you could cross the street
anywhere, anytime, cars would stop, you know, you were, I reached my current height when
I was 13 years old.
And I remember it was a joke that I would, you know, stand on my toes in the bus and
the top of my head would touch the roof, you know, and that was, but that's, you know,
you felt, you felt different.
And, you know, even though you were, in my case, born and raised and interacted very
often with Japanese in the community, in your neighborhood, in many different ways,
you were different and you, and my father, I have always used to say, you know, he could
be there 50 years or 100 years, but you'll never be Japanese, so you have to, you know,
just recognize that, don't, you know, in a certain way, it's helped me a lot in business
to remember that.
Right?
Okay, so this is one of the harder questions, I think, we're trying to get everyone to describe
your experience at CA in a word or a short phrase and tell us why that phrase is significant.
Fun.
I had a, I had fun at school.
I really, I wasn't a great student.
I didn't like to study.
And I came from Marist Brothers, so I had already done, you know, geometry in, you know,
sixth grade and algebra in the seventh grade, I mean, it was much more difficult than Marist
Brothers, so I remember I was taking senior math in tenth grade and I had already, at
Marist Brothers, you were studying French from third grade, so I had already, I took
French with Evelyn Yamashita and we gave her a lot of grief.
I remember at school it was just a lot of fun, I mean, I didn't take it very seriously.
I knew I was going to go to school wherever my older brother and my sister went to school.
We took Test of English as a foreign language, I don't know, you know, we didn't take SATs
or whatever the equivalent standardized test is now, and we scored well, obviously, because
we all were fluent English speakers.
And I don't remember that anything that happened at school was very, you know, it was difficult.
I remember I was vice president of the student council a senior and then before I had left
the night, I took over as president and we were going to put in a student court.
I mean, everything we did was like, you know, just fun stuff, you know, played in the gym
all the time, you know, except for PE.
How was it to then leave that and go on to, I guess, you came to the states and how was
it, what did you feel when you were leaving that fun community that you got used to?
I think it was more difficult just leaving the family than it was leaving school.
But I don't think I was scared of what I was going to experience.
I know it was coming to New York.
I don't think I was scared of what I was going to experience, I think, but it was a shock
for me because the school I went to, the University is located in Washington Heights, Washington
Heights today is a lot better than it was then.
So you can't imagine how bad it was then.
That was a real shock for me.
New York was a huge shock.
Also, I think I had this glamorized image of America because whatever movies we watched
were all Carrie Grant and whatever scenes we saw were Park Avenue, so I thought that's
what I was going to see and you quickly realize in New York it's not all Park Avenue.
But that was a huge shock for me and some of my early experiences with camp and what
to do during the summer and so on were all strange.
In Japan, we didn't go away to camp for the summer.
We went to the Kobe Club and played every day and then came home at night, ate dinner
and went to sleep or whatever or went out or it was a long walk to downtown, to Motomachi,
to Pinocchio, to this or that.
And I had friends both at Marist Brothers and at CA, so there weren't lots of things
to do.
We had lots of freedom.
It was a very safe place to be and to grow up at that time, something to be jealous about
today.
Great, that's it, that's good, that was great, thank you so much.
