<Begin Segment 21>

TI: So you and Tomio went to the bar and talked about this, agreed something needed to happen, and then what did you guys do next?

TO: Well, then we thought we should at least see what the community feels about it. So we called two, we had two community meetings. And the first meeting, I think, was at the Nisei Vets', and we had a pretty good turnout, but we didn't get to do a lot of PR calling the meeting. But there was people that were interested. The second meeting was at the Nichiren Church, community meeting. And at that meeting, Dr. Ruby Inouye, she came and said, "Well, we're trying to build a nursing home, we're trying to put together a nursing home." "Oh, that's wonderful. We'll just support you and whatever we can do." And by then we had an informal organization, we decided we'd call ourselves Issei Concerns because we had to identify ourselves. And so we went to, the way the state works was they have to award nursing home beds, and they, she, I think she asked for eighty or a hundred beds or something like that. And they turned it down, they only would give her fifty beds. And she said, "Well, fifty beds financially is just not going to work out. You just can't survive with fifty beds," so she backed off. And so there was no nursing home. But it was shortly after that, one of the guys that was also interested in the nursing home was a guy named Glen Akai, and he was dabbling in real estate, and he ran across this old nursing up there on Twenty-fourth and Massachusetts, and he said, "Why don't you go take a look at it?" So we went and took a look at it, Tomio and I, and we didn't know anything about nursing home. But it just so happened that Edwin Hiroto, the CEO of the L.A. Keiro, came up here on vacation. And he walked through it and he said, "Oh, you better buy it." But it didn't meet the state standards or anything, so we got the, before we bought it we asked the state if we could go ahead and buy it and get the exceptions. And so they said okay, so that's how we got started in the nursing home. Then when we decided, well, we're going to buy it, I think by then we had about another half a dozen guys, people that were with us that was very much interested in getting started. Harry Kadoshima was one of the real active ones, Sally Kazama, she was also with us. I think we talked Ben Uyeno, Dr. Ben Uyeno, too, and that was another issue. He didn't want to join us, but once he got enthused about doing it, then we couldn't shut him off. [Laughs] He worked like the dickens.

But anyway, then we needed an organization to umbrella under to do this. And so the logical organization was the Japanese Community Service, the Nikkeijinkai, because they were already an organization. The other organizations, like churches, we couldn't go to them because that was religious connotations, as well as the JACL, their focus was on civil rights and that type of thing. So, but the Japanese Community Service there, the old timers there were kind of reluctant to -- first of all, they felt very uncomfortable, I'm sure, because they wouldn't give us an answer as to whether we could umbrella under them or not. So we finally decided, "Well, we better form our own organization, because we can't wait for them. The owner of that property isn't gonna wait forever." So that's how we started our own organization. But I think the, Richard Ishikawa, the judge, he was an attorney at that time, but we talked him into helping us write the bylaws and get all the state and federal government, the exemptions and the formal organization. And that's how, some of the people that were involved. Harry Kadoshima, since he was working for the IRS, and that was his specialty, I think, of a nonprofit organization, so he knew all the... so he practically wrote the things for Dick Ishikawa in a way. And Dick always kids and he says, "You took my job away from me." But anyway, I think even though you're an attorney, there's a lot of things you don't know. But between the two of them, that's how we got the organization, the formal organization registered and all that.

TI: And that was formed as Issei Concerns?

TO: Issei Concerns, yeah. And that was what we called ourselves informally before that. But I think the, the negotiation, I think the nursing home, we negotiated to the price of $350,000. And so but Edwin Hirota advised us, "You're gonna have a lot of startup costs, so you should go after, at least have a goal of $500,000," half a million dollars, which was a big, big chunk of money at that time for us. "How are we gonna do this?" But Edwin gave us some good advice. He says... we had no credibility, you know. Some people would kid us and say, "What the heck does a grocery store guy and a mechanic know about nursing homes?" [Laughs] Obviously we didn't know a damn thing. But anyway, by then we got Dr. Ruby Inouye and Ben Uyeno and there was a guy named Russ Akiyama that got interested because he was working for the state at that time. He was an inspector, nursing home inspector, and so he helped us get a lot of the state regulations straightened out so we can operate. And as far as the organization, to get some credibility, Edwin advised us to invite all the viable community organizations to have a seat on the board of Issei Concerns, which we did. And that was another big job, because they, the liabilities that we might be putting on these various churches, they were kind of reluctant to step right up. But finally they decided, well, something has to be done, so all of 'em joined. And then they, once we got going, they were very enthusiastic about supporting it. So that's how we got started. But in part of the study to present the state is the need, to get the Certificate of Need, so to speak. Reverend Ken Miyake, he was visiting nursing homes, and we asked him if he could give us a head count of how many Issei were in nursing homes around the area. And I think he came up with a figure of about 125. And the reason Keiro was only a sixty-four bed nursing home, so we thought, well, gee, that would be a good start anyway. Because Edwin says, "If you don't buy this old nursing home, you're never going to get started." He was right. In any event, we thought, well, we wouldn't have any problem. As soon as we opened a nursing home, Japanese nursing home, we'd be overwhelmed. But that wasn't the case.

TI: Well, and before we get to the operations, was raising that half a million dollars, was that hard to do?

TO: Very hard, very hard.

TI: And how did you do that?

TO: Well, we, I think we used the JACL mailing list to send the letters out, and I think... well, Edwin, they had just, Hiroto, in L.A., they had just purchased this old Jewish community center. That was a million dollar fundraising. They just had finished, and my daughter had worked on that project. They had hired a professional fundraiser, and Edwin said, "You don't have to hire one, we'll just give you all our papers on how to do it." And they'll send my daughter, Joyce, "to get you going." So that's how we got started. And of course, in any fundraising as you probably know better than I do, you gotta get the big deep pocket people to start with, which was a job because they were like anybody else, they didn't know what, we knew what we were doing, and how it was gonna survive, and they were willing to do it, but the concern was whether we can survive or not. But we did get enough people, big givers, so to speak, to get it, and then we went out into the community. And the money came in very slowly, and it was, for a while there, like I said earlier, the numbers of patients that were willing to come in, you have to be fully staffed before you can open, and so we were fully staffed, but we didn't get the patients and we were running out of money.

TI: And why didn't the patients come?

TO: Well, they were uncomfortable, the families that had their loved ones in nursing homes, they were somewhat reluctant to do that because they felt that, "Well, maybe, what if it doesn't, if it fails? Then what's gonna happen?" And just to move an elderly, that's another issue. That was another issue, and so those were the two issues. "And how much are we going to have to contribute?" And there was various reasons, but it didn't fill up right away, believe me. We were, almost went broke. We were even kidding each other, "What are we going to do if it goes broke? We gotta find another job out of town someplace." [Laughs] But in any event...

TI: And that was, like, you and Tomio having that conversation?

TO: Yeah, right. But any event, we did finally get enough money to, just barely. But it was, Harry Kadoshima kept saying, "Hey, we're gonna go broke, we're gonna go broke." But we did make it okay.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.