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MN: After five years as president of LTRA, you approached the CRA, the Community Redevelopment Agency. Why did you do that?

BK: Well, we ran into a situation of self help. We tried to get people to buy property and develop it. Kajima came in and they built a building, but they came in with their own capital and they also built the hotel, and that was a great addition, but others that wanted to come in would have to come up with a lot of money. And we didn't have the wealth in our community. Our, our community, because of what happened during World War II, we were put into camps, we were broke. There was no one around that had any wealth to do the projects that ordinarily there would be someone with money to get into a development. All the big money that came in was either from Japan or from outside our community, and we tried to encourage development, but when the whole population of stateside is put into camps for three years, you can't expect them to come back to where they live and start off from scratch and start development. They're all broke. I had friends that were living in hostels for two years. They didn't know where to go. You had others that lived in trailers. They had no homes. Lot of 'em had, didn't have jobs. I attended some of the meetings with my fellow GIs, and you heard about how they raised money, didn't you? No? They would, well, our community, coming back, a lot of 'em were in the 100th/442nd, they came back and found themselves to be broke. They got the mustering out pay and that was not (much). They didn't have jobs. Male folks couldn't find jobs because the community didn't hire them. The girls, fortunately, they were good secretaries and all the law firms were looking for good secretaries, and a lot of 'em were very, very fortunate to be hired by the best law firms. But the guys, they were not sought after, even if they were qualified, like going to school and being the top accounting student. The accounting firms wouldn't hire 'em because they had... well, they didn't have anything written, but unpublished rules of not hiring Japanese Americans. But it was difficult for the GIs that came back, and what they used to do is to try to raise capital.

And I would be attending some of the meetings, maybe you heard of tanomoshi. So a group of maybe ten guys said, "Okay, we'll meet once a month," and tanomoshi, he'd bring a hundred dollars to the meeting. And so they'd come to one of the member's homes and the member would serve the food -- the wife would make sushi or whatever -- and they would have the meeting, and the meeting would be out of ten guys, who's gonna bid the highest to get the hundred dollars? And with a hundred dollars from ten guys, it's a thousand. A thousand dollars, you could go out and put a down payment on a car or buy a mower or buy things that you need that you couldn't do because the bank don't give you credit and you don't have cash, so the person that bids the highest, "For the hundred dollars, I'll pay you six dollars. You keep. You pay me ninety-four dollars." Or "You keep ten dollars, give me the ninety dollars." And that's how the tanomoshi worked. So each month you had a tanomoshi, and so that gave whoever bid the highest the cash to do whatever he wanted to do. If you didn't have to use it you wouldn't bid. So that was a banking system developed by the (veterans and the) gardeners. The tanomoshi was even before the banks. So to me, I went to one of the meetings, I said, "Hey, that's a pretty good deal." I mean, you're not being charged any more by the bank, but you're getting less, but you use whatever you want to get what you want, to get started and you wouldn't have to worry about borrowing from a relative. This is a, strictly a business deal. And the tanomoshi served its purposes for the GIs. It's kind of original and unusual, but it was very practical. I give them credit. I don't know who came up with this tanomoshi.

MN: And now, the Nikkei Credit Union is sort of the outgrowth of the tanomoshi, is that correct?

BK: I have no idea, 'cause I didn't follow through on the credit union. I think credit unions are, may be offspring from the tanomoshi, but the credit unions are, are more legalistic way of doing business. Credit unions, you have to be a member, you have to have bylaws, and you have to have legal sanction, where tanomoshi, you don't have to have any legal sanction.

MN: Now, while you are still at Merit Savings, in the fall of 1964, your brother in law, Taul Watanabe, calls you again and he needed some help at Gardena Savings. So what did you do?

BK: Gardena Savings was the first savings and loan that he had formed and Gardena Savings had run into a lot of problems, and so he asked me to come over and see if I could, I could take over and try to straighten it out. I didn't know how bad it was until I got there, but it turned out that it was at a point where it had to be sold and in order to do so we had to form a new corporation. So we were able to find some investors to come in and take it over, and in order to do so they formed a public corporation and sold stock and bought the old Gardena Savings. They says, "We'll, we'll take it over, providing you stay and take care of the problems." In order to get the thing resolved I stayed there until we got the savings and loan resolved with the regulators as well as found investors for the property, and the investors who came in then formed a public corporation and went public with the assets. They got rid of the problem assets and raised more capital. And one of the fellows that was with a new corporation from Century City I had just met, but his partner had developed a real estate corporation that developed apartments all over the state of California. And they were unique, really scientifically put together. They were apartment projects which were for married couples, and at the front of the development he had facilities to take care of children, babies and young people, not schooled, but you know. So people who were wanting to work and had young children could leave 'em -- they would have to pay, naturally, for the services, but at least they were then able to go out and find a job and work and bring some money in. They developed these homes or apartments with that kind of service and were successful in catering to the general public. They also developed other apartments up and down the coast. And they said, "Well, if I take over, the troubled savings and loans assets that Gardena Savings had," says I could also manage the properties they had, so I had found some real estate developers to take care of the problem savings and loans that Merit, Gardena had made loans on apartments, most were in Orange County, fourplexes. Developers came in and built the fourplexes and they ran into problems. They couldn't rent 'em out, and so they had people who came in and rented, they couldn't collect, they chased 'em out, they damaged the property, all kinds of problems. Anyway, we got a crew together to go one by one and straighten these out, so we at last found some corporations that would take over the whole thing at a reduced price and got rid of 'em. Then I came back to Merit.

MN: And that's 1972, so between 1964 and 1972 you were working on that issue with the Gardena Savings, the real estate.

BK: Yeah, that took a little while.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.