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MN: So I'm gonna step back a few years again, while you and Kiyo are still in business, and then in 1956 Taul Watanabe called you up and said he wanted some help, and he had just built the Kyoto Plaza. And so what did you do?

BK: Which plaza?

MN: Kyoto Plaza. I guess it became Town & Country.

BK: Town & Country, yeah. Well, it was a piece of land that was being used by Harvey Chapman, who was a golf pro, and he was using that as a place where people could hit golf balls, a driving range. And it was located on Western Avenue near Compton Boulevard, and so he didn't own the land, but we saw it as an opportunity to buy it and develop a shopping center. I didn't have the foresight for that. Taul Watanabe did. He was a, he had a lot of, I would say, ideas of how to make money, and one of 'em was building the shopping for the Japanese American community, and so he bought the land and got... the local people in Gardena had several service clubs, and the service clubs that were the most popular were the Lions Club International and the Kiwanis Club, and there was also some others, but those were the two main, main ones. And so the Lions Club was the largest, and so with the Lions Club he had a lot of connections and he thought that maybe we could interest some of the people in town to invest, but they weren't interested in development. We then organized a home state investment company, a corporation to raise money, to buy the land and to develop it, so it took a little while, but we were able successfully to get local people to invest money. We built a shopping center and it had a market, it had an Oriental gift shop, a restaurant, Kyoto Sukiyaki upstairs, a cleaners, a baker, appliance store, a liquor store and a supermarket and some other stores in between. But the fellows that operated the supermarkets, Taul was able to talk to people in Sacramento that were operating a market and asked them, "Are you interested in opening a market in Gardena?" And so they had several brothers, Kunibe brothers, and so they came down and looked at the site and they thought, since there was a good community of Japanese Americans, that this would be a good site, so they opened a Town & Country market. What was the name? I forget the name of the market they opened up, but they staffed it, brought the Kunibe brothers down. Henry came down and Tom came down and George (Orite) also, a partner, came down, and they brought a butcher down and opened a meat department, and a older brother who was a pharmacist opened up the drugstore. So between the Kunibes and Taul Watanabe and his connections, we opened up a shopping center that had all the, all the stores were filled up when we opened up. People were interested in getting into business. We were successful in managing the Town & Country, which I wound up managing the shopping center and the corporation kept it and operated it and declared dividends every year until we decided to sell it, which we did to some investors from Los Angeles.

MN: Now, when you went to this, to help Taul with this, what happened with you and Kiyo, that office?

BK: Kiyo and I decided on which clients I would take to Gardena because I was moving physically. I wouldn't be in Little Tokyo anymore. And we divided the clientele, so he, he took all the clients in town and I took all the clients down south, so it was no problem. We weren't that rich. [Laughs] There was no arguments.

MN: And then earlier you had mentioned about this investment group that bought property, and this was the group that was meeting at the Town & Country Center? You folks were meeting there?

BK: Yeah. Right, we would meet at the Town & Country. Everything was revolving around my office, forming the group, I formed the group, meeting, they would come to our office, and the new partners that would come into the accounting partnership, they were looking for opportunities and they would refer 'em over to me and I would say, "Okay, you have that desk. You bring your adding machine and you're part of it." That's how, how it went.

MN: Was your office on top of the Kyoto Sukiyaki restaurant?

BK: Well, the second floor was operated, occupied by the Kyoto Sukiyaki, the back half. The front half was the corporate offices and the accountings office, so it was large enough to do both.

MN: And the market that you're talking about, was that the Spot Market?

BK: Spot Market, right.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.