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BN: And before we go back there, I want to go back and cover a couple things.

MT: Sure.

BN: Somewhere along the line, you got married, right?

MT: Yeah.

BN: That's after the army and after Pan Am.

MT: After the army and then...

BN: After Hawaii?

MT: No. I got married, and within the year, I was transferred to Hawaii. She said, "Hawaii?" [Laughs]

BN: This is, she's not a Hawaii, she's from here?

MT: Yeah, local girl here. El Cerrito girl, yeah.

BN: So, but then she went with you to Hawaii?

MT: Yeah, right.

BN: So you're there as a young married person.

MT: Yeah.

BN: And then other question I had, we talked a little bit about this before, was as a kotonk now, what was it like, what as different about living in Hawaii especially as a Japanese American?

MT: Yeah. I used to laugh, people asked me about that. It was almost as bad as when I came back from camp, getting chased home from school. I had a... you were in Hawaii, you remember the Hayashi family, Ben Hayashi? He built some of those hotels, the Miramar Hotel in Waikiki, the hotel. His son, Alan, went to Stanford, and I met Alan here. He was working part-time at the gas station, who was a good friend of mine, Leo Ikeda. And so I got to know Alan really well, so when I moved to Hawaii, I guess he heard I was coming over there, so he called me, looked me up, and he said, "Hey, Mas," he said, "I got married, and this is..." anyway, to make a long story short, he said, "I was there a couple of months," and he said, "It's Thanksgiving." He said, "It's your first Thanksgiving away from home, why don't you come over to my house? I have four of my best friends and their wives, and I always have their Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'd like you to be part of them." I said, "Okay, let's see what it is." So we went, my wife and I went up there, and typical Asian party, the girls in one place, and the men in the other place. So he brings Betty and I over to meet the ladies and brings us over to meet the guys. And one guy, they're Chinese Hawaiian, they're Hawaiian, Japanese Hawaiian. Father's a vice president of a bank, one's a superior judge, a superior court judge, big people, young guys, about the same age as me, I guess. And so as soon as Alan leaves with Betty, goes back there, they looked at me and they said, "What are you doing here?" "I was invited to dinner." "No," he said, "what are you doing in Hawaii?" And I said, "Well, I was sent here." And they said, "We don't need your kind." "What do you mean, 'my kind'?" And he said, "You're Japanese from the Mainland?" I said, "Yeah." "We don't need you. You saying we don't know how to run business here?" I mean, each one of them. We went round and around, and I'm thinking, "What is happening here?" I said, "Maybe you don't understand. Alan and I happen to be good friends." He said, "You be friends with Alan, you don't have to come here." Anyway, so I look over and I see how my wife is doing, and she's sitting on the couch by herself. So I walk over there and I said, "How are you doing?" "Same as you, I could hear you." [Laughs] "You too, huh?" She said, "Yeah, really bad." I said, "Well, I can't leave, let's have dinner. We could leave, we won't even have dessert, we'll just leave." So we had dinner and we left. So the next day, Alan called me and he says, "Hey, I heard what happened to you and your wife. I really apologize." I said, "Don't worry about it. I heard about the feelings some of the Hawaiians have against kotonks." But he said, "You're not a kotonk, you're my friend. This won't happen again, I guarantee you." He said, "Don't forget, I told you about Christmas. You come for Christmas dinner, too." Because it would be a lonesome Christmas without being home. I said, "Okay." Christmas comes, same thing, exactly the same. "You still here?" It was terrible.

Then I opened an office, and what happened was I was with Airborne. So the vice president in the Pacific region, my job was to come over thirty days earlier, find a place to live, find office space, hire staff. "Do that, and that's your job for thirty days," my boss tells me. I come over and they put me in a hotel. When I get off the airplane, the vice president says, "You're not going to the hotel, you're staying at my house." I said, "No, I have reservations, I got a car." "We got an extra car, you can use my car, you stay at my house." "Okay." The whole family's there, the three kids are there, and they give me a lei. You know, the pictures with the leis like that? You know, take a picture, they sent it back to headquarters. He's reporting to me. God, terrible. Right off the bat with him, too. But anyway, forgot where I was going with that. So I had a staff, and so he said, "I got to go." In the morning I get up and he said, "What are you going to do?" I said, "I've got to look for office space." "I got the office space." "Got the office space?" yeah, I got a nice place, brand new place right in Waikiki, right on Kalakaua Avenue, you'll like it. I said, "I got to get staff." He said, "I hired a manager, and she'll hire staff. She'll know." I said, "Oh, that will make it easier. Okay, as long as she knows what I want." So I go to the office, I get in the borrowed car and I go down to look at the office, see where the office is. I got a key and walked in. And here's the manager sitting there, it's his wife. [Laughs] "Edith, what are you doing here?" She says, "I'm the manager. I'm going to start hiring your staff." And I'm thinking, I'm in deep trouble here, they're very close.

Anyway, I had a staff of... Edith, I had Elaine, Coney, Trudy, Drew, and another guy, so got six people on the staff. Edith talks to me, of course, but the other five people, they don't say anything, they don't even talk to me. I mean, I'd say, "Good morning," they say, "Good morning." "You have a good weekend?" "Yeah, it was okay." "What did you do over the weekend?" "Oh, nothing." Nothing. I have a staff meeting Monday morning, go over everything we went to the week before. They do their work, good workers, they did everything I asked. Six months later, they called me and they said, "Could we have a long lunch today?" I said, "Sure, whatever you want, no problem." Edith's not there, I think, "Take a long lunch." "We want you there, too. Could you close the office?" I said, "Yeah, we can." So I'm thinking they're all going to quit or I'm going to fire 'em, one or the other. I'm up to here with this. So at the end of lunch, I said, "You guys called the lunch, what do you want?" And they said, "We want to apologize to you." And I said, "Why? Because I'm going to fire you, I think." They went, "Oh." I said, "You don't talk to me. You do your work, don't misunderstand me, you guys are great workers, but we don't have, we're not a team at all. I tell you what to do, you do it. You don't tell me, 'We should be doing this, you might want to do this,' we're not a team, it's just me on the top telling you guys what to do. It's not working." So anyway, they want to apologize, and I said, "Why?" And they said, "Because we didn't know what a kotonk was." "I'm no different than your neighbor, for crying out loud." "Well, so what do you think about kotonks?" "Well," they said, "you're really nice and you're kind and generous, and we really feel bad about this." And I said, "So you're going to quit?" And they said, "No, we would like to stay here." And I said, "Okay. We get into a team, you can stay here." Next day it was page turned. Ten years later, I was getting flowers from them. I was not with the company anymore, they were sending me flowers every Fourth of July, for some reason, Fourth of July. Nice people.

BN: But it took a while.

MT: Took a while, yeah.

BN: Like how long did it take for this?

MT: Nine months.

BN: Wow.

MT: Nine months and I was up to here. When they said they were going to have dinner, I thought this would be a good time. If they don't quit, I'm going to fire 'em. I just had it. Because now I know what kind of people I want. But anyway...

BN: But after three or four years or whatever...

MT: Yeah, three years there, they were great.

BN: You had no desire to stay longer?

MT: No, I had no desire to stay there. Too small. But I came back as Hawaiian Airlines. So that wasn't so bad, I think I could have... I didn't want to, it was too small. But if I were with an airline, I could get on an airplane and go back and forth all the time, you know. But when you're not in the airline business, gee, it's tough. You get rock hugger, you know, rock happy, I guess.

BN: Yeah, "island fever" they call it.

MT: Island fever there. In fact, when the big companies, the Big Four over there, when they used to hire people from the Mainland, in the contract that they signed, the executives, they had to go back to the Mainland for two weeks every year. It was a must.

BN: Yeah, I know how that is. [Laughs]

MT: Tough.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.