<Begin Segment 20>

TI: So Ted, anything else you want to talk about in this interview? I've gone through my questions and my notes and wanted to know if there's anything else that I'm kind of leaving out that you wanted to talk about for the interview?

TK: All I know is when we came down to California we didn't expect to see what everything happened at the end. We, I guess after Kee came back out of the service and we had a successful nursery operation, and Tom in '59, when Union City was, became a city, he said he wanted to try to be one of the councilmen. And my mother discouraged him because she said, "You might bring disgrace to the family," or something, but when he found out that he had won the council seat, one other comment my mother made was, she was saying, "This could only happen in America."

TI: Yeah, when you think about what happened to Japanese during the war.

TK: The war, yeah, and this was in '59, so it wasn't too much after the war. And then, since he was, since he got his, I guess the most votes, he was elected to be the first mayor of Union City.

TI: Oh, that's a good story. And when he was doing public service like that, was he also helping out with the nursery?

TK: Yes, he was.

TI: So he was able to do both.

TK: Yeah. Union City is still a fairly, a relatively small city in the East Bay, and probably one of the reasons why Union City was even organized, it was because there was a strip of county land between Hayward and Fremont and I think both cities were, wanted to annex them, but then I guess the people in the area said, no, we don't want to be annexed. We want to be an independent city. So that's how Union City was formed.

TI: So it's kind of this nice little sliver of land between two bigger cities.

TK: Two bigger cities, yeah.

TI: Interesting. And is that where the nursery is located, in Union City?

TK: That's where Union (City Nursery) was located, Union City. And after that we started a nursery in Brighton, Colorado, and also one in Watsonville.

TI: Wow. So how many, and so for the nursery business, do you measure in acres, or how do you talk about the size of the nursery? How large is your nursery? Is it, like a larger one, or a midsize one, or how would you describe it?

TK: At one time, I don't know, maybe it's a little bit exaggeration, but they said we were one of the biggest carnation growers in the country. We had about a little over a million square feet at each one of our locations, and then when the imports (of carnations came) from South America (...) the demand for (domestic grown carnation) went downhill so that then we changed our crop to roses. And then we became one of the biggest rose growers in the country. And then when the South Americans and the Ecuadorians came with roses, well, we edged back a little bit, and now we sold our Union City operation and our Brighton operation and today we only have our Watsonville growing operation left, and that's about a million square feet. So we're one of the few, I guess, family-owned Japanese nurseries left in the country.

TI: And is it still roses down in Watsonville?

TK: No, we're almost out of roses. We're growing different miscellaneous crops. We're, right now most of our operation is done by the next generation, but we're mostly in sales. And we have quite a few wholesale operations in the country, and right now I think we've got one of the bigger wholesale chains.

TI: So you actually now buy from other places?

TK: Buy from, yeah.

TI: Like even overseas?

TK: We buy mostly from overseas.

TI: And is this a national operation?

TK: It's a national operation. Many of our wholesale operation is in Texas, Oklahoma, that area, but we have stores in the area and in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Idaho.

TI: So do you ever think about what your father would have said, especially when you had the Brighton and the Watsonville and Union City all going at the same time, did you ever kind of sit back and wonder what your dad would've thought if he saw all this? 'Cause he started with this really small greenhouse with a little boiler up on Bainbridge Island.

TK: Yeah, what my, I guess what my parents said is that if you got one bamboo it's easy to break, but if you got two it's harder to break, but if you've got four working together it's almost impossible to break, and I think in a way that's what, our family stuck together, so...

TI: So the brothers pretty much all worked together.

TK: All worked together, yeah. And now it seems like the cousins are working together, so things are working out very well.

TI: Now, are you or any of your brothers still involved in the operations of the business? Do you still...

TK: We have some interest in the business, but operation, no. Three of my brothers are gone now, so...

TI: Okay, so you're the last surviving?

TK: I'm the last of the brothers, yeah.

TI: Okay. Interesting. Good, I'm glad you added that. I didn't know about the --

TK: Huh?

TI: I didn't know about the business, so that's interesting. I'm glad we talked about that. Well, thank you for this interview. I think, again, I hope you enjoy it when you look at this and your family enjoys it, but I think it's really interesting, all the things that we covered. So again, so Ted, thank you so much.

TK: Okay.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.