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Interviews

(b.1926) Democratic politician and three-term Governor of Hawai'i
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Teacher who helped with lisp

In the 8th grade, I had a very bad lisping. And I realized…I began to feel that I could not hope to become a lawyer unless I could overcome my lisping. I was very fortunate in having a teacher, Mrs. Hamada, who was my core (?) studies teacher—two periods a day—and she was my teacher for three years. And she understood what my frustrations were.

And she had me come over, and she told me, “Can you come over and help me this weekend? I want to do some things around the classroom.” And she would ask me to come with the pretext that I was going to go there to help her, and instead she wanted to spend time and have me read to her. And I don’t know how many books I read aloud to her. And she encouraged me to enter orator contests. She had me appointed as a defense attorney for our student court. And she really helped me to overcome some of the speech difficulty that I had.

Even after I left the Central Intermediate school, she encouraged me to continue to do speech. And when I represented my high school in Oahu finals, she would come and listen, and she would tell me, “Oh, I can’t imagine that I’m listening to the same George Ariyoshi.”

education teachers teaching

Date: December 15, 2003

Location: Hawai`i, US

Interviewer: Art Hansen

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum.

Interviewee Bio

George Ariyoshi was born in Honolulu in 1926. He overcame a childhood speech defect to enter the Military Intelligence Service language school after World War II and served the United States in Tokyo’s ruins. Returning home from occupied Japan, he moved to Michigan where he received undergraduate and law degrees.

He married Jean Hayashi in Hawai`i and, between 1954 and 1986, held elective offices there as a Democrat. He served three terms as Hawai`i’s governor, the first Japanese American nationwide to govern a state. By his own definition, Governor Ariyoshi was “a social liberal and a fiscal conservative.” The title of his 1997 memoir, With Obligation to All, summed up his personal and political philosophies. (December 2003)

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