Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Hitoshi H. Kajihara Interview
Narrator: Hitoshi H. Kajihara
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Date: September 11, 1997
Densho ID: denshovh-khitoshi-01-0009

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Okay, let's move now to the LEC, and your willingness to head up the fundraising for that. Why don't you start talking about that, sort of the situation that you walked into, their need for cash and what you accomplished.

HK: Okay. It begins at the at the... this is once again at the Honolulu convention in 1980... This is '84, that's what it was. Yeah, '84. And the newly elected president, Sato, asked me to make a presentation to about four hundred delegates on the plan. And this is very important, that you need to communicate to the people, and I think that was partially the reason for success was there was four hundred delegates there who -- this is 1984 -- who saw the plan. The plan basically was to get a number of what we called, 'prime solicitors,' and that was to give two thousand dollars over a period of five years. And we were going to solicit a hundred and something, the total anyhow was three hundred thousand dollars per year. And we wanted personal contacts made, not letters, somebody had to go out. And so each of the chapters were assigned to identify a number of these prime solicitors. If you were a small chapter you identify, you know, six, and if your a large, thirty, and so on. And I think what we did was... so the whole structure, of about... the whole plan of who would go out and solicit money, and then the banking, and the depositing, and all the forms, and I came up a form, a form that they could mail if they wish, leave it with them, and so on. So it was the total ball of wax. [Laughs]

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.