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TI: After the war, you got involved with -- and you mentioned earlier -- Honda, American Honda. Can you tell me how you got involved with...

CS: Well, I was working, I've always wanted to work for a Japanese company. After the war, they started to come. I go for an interview, the pay was so low that I stayed at this Chinese company for twenty-five years. And a friend of mine, we were classmates at UCLA, he became an attorney for Honda. So every time there was an opening, he would let me know. And I'd go for an interview and once I hear the pay, I couldn't accept it, it was so low in those days. And then one day he called me and he said, "Hey, there's another opening. They'll meet your pay, so just go for an interview." So I went, and didn't talk pay at all. As I left that day (they said), "I'm overqualified for this particular job." So I went home and then there was a phone call there, "Come to work tomorrow." [Laughs] So I thought, "Wait a minute, I've got to give a notice," you know. So after two weeks, I joined Honda.

TI: So when you tell me this story, it's almost like someone high up wanted to hire you, and it was already arranged? Or it's kind of like, it was almost like the personnel person didn't know to hire you?

TI: Well, when I went for the interviews on a Saturday, the general manager and another executive -- there was one person, I never... 'til then, my friend was at Honda and I used to play golf in a golf tournament, and I knew most of the executives at Honda. So there was one strange man there, I didn't know who he was. He did most of the questioning. After I was hired, it turned out to be Mr. Awanohara, who was the founder of the Bank of Tokyo in the United States. And he happened to be in Chicago at that time. And when Honda had big financial problems one time, Bank of California refused to fund it. So Mr. Awanohara just started Bank of (Tokyo), gave Honda all the money they want. So when he was retirement age, this Mr. Kawashima of Honda, in gratitude, pulled him out and brought him into Honda. And (...) he came down from Chicago to be part of that interview team, and I didn't know who he (was) -- I thought he was an executive that I'd never met before. So once we got hired, I was hired, he was my boss. That's when I found out we both entered Honda at the same time. [Laughs]

TI: Oh, that's interesting. And so his, almost his first task or job at Honda was to hire you?

CS: Yeah. I thought I was going to be a warehouse manager, so I was prepared for that. And then they said, "No, we're growing so fast in the southern California area, we have six warehouses. So we want you to consolidate them, find the property, build the warehouse and consolidate it." I don't know anything about real estate or anything, but somehow I managed to get a big warehouse made. And we were ready to operate when Honda got worried because the company that was operating it before were all unionized. And they were afraid if we, even under a different name, operated it, there was a danger of all of Honda becoming unionized. So they said, "Hey, let's let the old company run that warehouse." So I was out of a job. And then, what happened was, in preparing for that job, I made a system, how to operate it. And they liked that system because Honda had a problem then. They had inventory problems, the computer had one inventory, the warehouse had one inventory, and the accounting department had another inventory. They couldn't get the three working together. Under my system, it would consolidate it. So I spent the next year going all over the country to the warehouses and introducing the system and then we had a great big meeting of all the warehouses, showing the new system, how it operates. And they were operating that 'til just about a few years ago. Then when that was done, I was out of a job again. [Laughs]

TI: Well, you're the best type of worker, you're supposed to work yourself out of jobs, right? You're supposed to be so good.

CS: And then at that time, there was a big trade deficit going on. So the U.S. Congress passed a law that the companies that export would get tax credit. So Honda made a new company called Honda International Trading Company, whose sole purpose was to export. So Mr. Awanohara, being the president, put me in charge. So we started from zero and became a pretty big company in a few years.

TI: Oh, so you would export cars to other countries?

CS: Oh, no. Cars would be handled by another department. Our job was like, for instance, Honda's automotive carriers would come to the States and dump the cars. Well, we'd load 'em up with stuff, feed grain, corn and milo, thirty thousand tons, all our ships. So we became the biggest exporter of feed grain. Then another container ships would bring the motorcycles and power products, and we'll fill them up. In fact, there weren't enough containers, so we started using other containers to fill our own agricultural products and aluminum, and waste paper. We were at one time shipping between five hundred to a thousand containers a month, and we became the biggest exporters of those. And then two of our ships, we were flying cattle to Japan along with the other trading companies. Well, Honda put cattle pens on two of the vessels, so now we could put loads of cattle in there. So we became the number one shipper of live cattle to Japan. So they were a pretty big factor.

TI: Oh, so you were taking advantage of, essentially, the empty containers that had to go back to Japan.

CS: Even the cattle was accidental. Honda was going to start breeding cattle, so they bought a mountaintop, flattened that out, put a feedlot and everything, and working with the farmers below. And they wanted to get Black Angus and try to breed cattle to make it like the Japanese wagyu, you know. So that was the plan. And so my first job was to get sixty breeding cattle. So I don't know anything about cattle, but I finally found sixty breeding cattle. And they had to be quarantined before they go back to Japan, they had to have a sixty-day quarantine. Well, in the meantime, they caught a disease they call "blue tongue," and we couldn't export it. And in the meantime we had already leased one of the Flying Tigers, a huge plane costing us a hundred thousand dollars or something, which we would have to pay even though it goes back empty. So we were panicking and read the rules and regulations and found that fat (beef) requires only thirty-day quarantine. So we just went and bought thirty fat cattle. Now, people in Japan were all ready for the breeding cattle, they don't know anything about fat cattle. "What do we do with it?" you know. But we had to do it to save the (air fare) money. So the cattle man that I was working with, we shipped it and he went with him and took care of it. And then these fat cattle are sold at auction. So we made a killing on it. So they said, "Forget the breeding, let's go into importing fat cattle." So that's why we kept going at it.

TI: Oh, and that's why, later on, having some of the containers with a pen, so you could do a lot more.

CS: Yeah, we were flying in. Then after that, when they decided it was a profitable business, Honda put these cattle pens on the boats, and we became the largest, we shipped about sixteen thousand cattle.

TI: It's funny, I'd never heard this before, but it makes sense that they would do that.

CS: And (in) Japan they were panicking for a while, "Hey, what do we do?" So on the job training, and then, you know, they became experts at it. [Laughs]

TI: So you took advantage of lots of things. So there was a, not only the empty containers, but you would find products that would sell well in Japan, but there was also incentives from the U.S. government to export. So you were taking...

CS: So Honda was getting a lot of tax breaks, we became so big.

TI: So it sounds like you made a lot of money for Honda. [Laughs] Okay, that's fascinating.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.