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AI: Well, you know, as, as time went on, you, you and your husband were active in community activities, also. You started mentioning some of them. But at some point did you mention that he had been interested in starting a hospital or some kind of medical institution?

RI: Uh-huh. My husband was a idealist and he was always into thinking about something to do. And actually, he's the one who started this office building that we have. And so, along with another doctor we bought that, bought that property and built the nursing home -- I mean, the office building along with Dr. Toda, Larry, not Larry, the, Terrance Toda. And after a few years we bought them out so my husband and I were the sole owners. Then he started to think about maybe building a hospital or a nursing home. And he thought that, at first, that it should be adjacent to the office building in the back. So then we purchased property from the next door owner, I think there was a old house. So we purchased that. And by then he was collaborating with a pharmacist, a Chinese pharmacist, Mr. Wong. And so they started to talk about building a nursing home. And I don't know why he would think that, but I think it's sort of a Chinese feeling that a doctor in China has his own hospital. So that's what he thought he should have.

Then the two of 'em decided that that property wasn't big enough so they bought more property on Seventeenth between Yesler and Washington Street. They bought property there. And pretty soon they got another family to cooperate with them and we all started to talk about building a nursing home and applying for certificate of need. And by that time there was also interest among the Japanese population that there's a need for a nursing home specifically for Japanese patients. And you know, people like Tosh Okamoto and Tomio, they were very active in trying to get that kind of interest. And they heard that we had been trying to do the same thing. So anyway, the short of it is that we stopped our project and they eventually decided on the block where Keiro is now. And our property, one half belonged to me so I donated it to Keiro and then Keiro paid my husband for the other half of the property, and I don't know how much it was, maybe $17,000 or something like that. When I say Keiro, I mean like Issei Concerns or whatever that organization was called at that time. And so, we helped them through the process of getting a certificate of need, and that's not a very easy process, but we had been familiar with it so gradually the nursing home was built. Oh, but that was the second nursing home. The first one was down by Twenty-fourth near Massachusetts. But that, that one has a different history. So this is the second part of trying to build a bigger one.

DG: So what year or years are we talking about?

RI: It was more like 1975, around there.

AI: You know --

RI: Because we are celebrating twenty-five years or more, yeah.

<End Segment 46> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.