<Begin Segment 35>

MN: So since you brought up Little Tokyo, let's talk about that a little bit, because Little Tokyo was going through redevelopment during the '60s. Did you attend the Little Tokyo Redevelopment Association meetings?

YK: I don't recall attending them. I probably did attend a couple of them. And they were trying to redevelop on their own in the '60s. And then in the, about 1968, they decided that, hey, they don't have enough money, development isn't taking place, and so they said, "Let's take advantage of the redevelopment process." So then Dick Mitchell and I were called in, and so I did a study of all the uses and buildings and so forth. And we set the boundaries and we worked with the citizens committee. But we had one year to study it before it would become an official redevelopment plan. So we needed a project manager, and Kango Kunitsugu was irascible, very direct guy who kept saying, "You guys better not mess with Little Tokyo here. If you try to wipe us out like you did on Bunker Hill, we're going to jump all over you." So he was threatening. But then I approached him once, I thought, hey, wait a minute, we've got to turn all this energy around because he's a very capable guy, and I think he was working for a private (development) consultant at that time. He'd done some pretty good-sized projects. So I approached him, I said, "Hey, look Kango. You're criticizing how we're going to do this and so forth, look, the CRA, we're not in there to wipe you guys out. We're here to help you. In fact, under this new neighborhood redevelopment program, it's not gonna be clearance, it's gonna be incremental and we're gonna have citizens committees that are going to decide what's going to be done, how the money is spent and so forth, and which projects you approve. But we need someone from the CRA to be the project manager of this process. Why don't you become the project manager? That way you can help decide with the community what's best for the community and what projects should go and you can decide everything. And the CRA board, we're just turning it over to you and your citizens group. And our real estate and engineers and others, we're all here to help you." So he thought about it and said, "I've got to get back to you." But then he did the next day come back and said, "Okay, but I'm not sure what this is all about, but I'll try." And then he did a fantastic job. He got all the people in Little Tokyo involved, all the organizations, the businesses. He had umpteen number of meetings and we hired consultants to prepare the overall plan. In fact, he said, "I want the best," so we got Sasaki Walker from Boston to come in, and they'd done major projects beyond landscaping, a lot of planning.

So they sent one of their key guys over and we paid for it, and we had Tom Kamei do the whole structural analysis of every building there, and he found most of 'em were structurally deficient. And most of 'em were one to four story buildings that were built fifty years earlier, and they were all deteriorating, and they weren't up to earthquake standards and so forth. And so we prepared the overall plan, and said, "Well, among the things we want are a cultural center and museum," also they wanted a hotel, said, "Yeah, let's get a big hotel down here in Little Tokyo to kind of anchor things." And so an overall plan was prepared, and then it was officially, through the city council, adopted as a redevelopment plan. But we'd already done all the studies and sort of set the design and uses. And then so I helped write the redevelopment plan itself, and tried to make it as flexible as possible, because you never want to write a tight plan.

And so the redevelopment started, but then the controversy started because the Sun Building was being torn down in order to build the New Otani Hotel, and, "Where's the relocation going to be?" and "Look at all the people you're displacing and the cultural facilities." And so we said, "Well, we're going to build a separate complex where the smaller businesses can relocate, or they can build their own complex. We're gonna have senior housing, and gonna have a cultural center, we're gonna have all these things, so we need to proceed." So (Kango) took all the flack, too. He did a good job of selling it, and the CRA and the board backed him. And I only stayed on a couple years, and Tom Furoshiro took over as the project planner, and he was on there for the next twenty, twenty-five years. But we always had good project managers, 'cause they were really dedicated to the community. And so Little Tokyo got a lot of advantages of having CRA.

MN: Now, when Kango first started out, when you convinced him to take this position, how often was he calling you for advice?

YK: Oh, not too much. Well, we were both working on the project, so we talked about it all the time, what could be or couldn't be done, and how it should proceed. So we were jointly working on it. I was doing it while I was still doing Bunker Hill, too.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.