Mizuho Ishida

Dr. Ishida, what was your childhood like?

With Professor Kanamori in his office at the California Institute of Technology Seismological Laboratory (1994).

I was born in 1943 in Iida, a small castle town in southern Nagano Prefecture. Since my parents were both teachers, I grew up with the vague notion that I would also like to teach at a junior high school or high school in my hometown. I went to Iida High School, which was considered a college-preparatory school. At that time only 5 percent of the students were female, and less than 10 percent of those went on to a four-year university. I was a pretty laid-back student. It wasn't in my nature to sacrifice sleep to my studies. I would go to bed before 11:00 p.m. and usually had to rush to get to school on time each morning.

What made you decide to study science in college?

All through junior high school and high school I had enjoyed mathematics and physics the most, so I decided to major in physics at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, with a specialty in hydrodynamics. To some degree, I may have been rebelling against the assumption on everyone's part that a woman would naturally want to major in the humanities.

In my fourth year in college, I was thinking of teaching high school somewhere near home after I graduated. But in Nagano Prefecture, the system required every new teacher to start out at a school far from his or her hometown. The idea of going to work alone in some cold mountain village far from home was so discouraging to me that I gave up the idea of teaching and instead became a lab assistant in the physics department at Meiji University.

After a year, I decided I wanted to continue my studies, so I took the entrance examination for the geophysics department of the University of Tokyo graduate school. Geophysics covers a wide range of topics, including earthquakes and volcanoes, the oceans, the weather, the earth's electromagnetic field, and other planets. I took the test without first settling on a specialty. During the oral part of my entrance exam, Associate Professor Hiroo Kanamori asked me if I was interested in specializing in seismology, and without thinking, I answered, "Yes." And that's how the matter was decided. Professor Kanamori, as it turned out, was a world authority on earthquakes who was later to become director of the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.