Nagasaki woman who taught Ishiguro ecstatic

October 6, 2017

NAGASAKI- A woman who taught British author Kazuo Ishiguro at a kindergarten in Nagasaki, his birthplace, expressed joy on Friday over her former student winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature.

"I'm as delighted as I would be if it were about myself," Teruko Tanaka, 91, the former teacher, said in the southwestern Japan city the day after the Nobel Prize announcement.

Describing the young Ishiguro nearly six decades ago as "cute," she said, "He was a calm boy who read a lot of picture books."

According to Tanaka, Ishiguro, then 4, attended the Nagasaki municipal kindergarten, which closed in 2012, for a year until he moved to Britain.

"Unlike ordinary children, he did not run around, but rather would look at picture books, listen to music and play by himself," she said.

When Ishiguro visited Japan in 1989, Tanaka was reunited with him in Nagasaki.

He also paid a visit to his old kindergarten. Tanaka said Ishiguro looked nostalgic when he saw that the uniforms had not changed. Jiji Press