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TI: So, Ron, we're three hours in, so we're at the end, but I just want to give you an opportunity, is there anything else you want to talk about? I mean, there were other things on my list in terms of your post-JACL career, and elected office, is that, can you talk a little bit? So I guess the question is, what made you think of going into elected office?

RI: It's an interesting question, because when I moved to Washington, D.C., my decision to move to Washington was going to stay in Washington for two years, come back to California, run for local elected office, maybe do something in the assembly or state, and somehow get back to Washington, D.C. Well, two years ended up being over twenty-something years in Washington, D.C., a little bit longer than I thought. And during that time, what I ended up doing after JACL was I had developed a licensing technology practice, and I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley before it was called Silicon Valley.

TI: Oh, interesting. So what made you switch, leave JACL and go to this, was it something that pulled you there?

RI: I had friends and clients that said, "Well, you know a little bit of Japanese, know a little bit about law." The clients were Mitsubishi and Sony and Omron and Fujitsu, and they wanted licensing agreements on software. They could make the hardware, but the software is the brains of anything, and how that works was America. And so then I'd go to Silicon Valley with them and negotiate an agreement, and as that developed, my practice... I was a single person.

TI: Yeah, this is kind of overlapping my career because I was at Microsoft during that time in the CDROM industry and Sony was kind of the key player, so we did a lot with them on that.

RI: Oh, yeah. I remember one day I was in New York City, and the representative of Toshiba was there. And they were selling the, was it three-and-a-half inch discs? It's not the five-and-a-quarters, the three-and-a-half inch discs, and the drives.

TI: That's right, Toshiba was, I mean, back then there was, like, the format wars, right?

RI: Right. And so we're having... at a very fancy restaurant in New York City, and the American buyer was on this side, and I'm in the middle, and the Japanese client is here from Toshiba. And so I said, "Well, since we ordered lunch, why don't we talk about where we want to go with this?" And the buyer happened to be a Chinese manufacturer in the United States. And they said, "Okay, what is your...:" really it's about price, you already want the product, what is the price? And he goes, "Well, I want to pay nothing." And I said, "You're so Chinese." He goes, "I am Chinese and I want to pay nothing." And so then I'm looking at him, and I looked at my Toshiba client and said, "It's going to be a long lunch." [Laughs] But it was cultural, so I understood that. When I told him, "You're so Chinese," he started laughing because he knows this is the way things are done.

But anyway, it developed, and then one of my friends said, "You know, McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe, which is the oldest law firm in America, started in Williamsburg, Virginia, like in 1630 or something. They wanted to develop an Asian market and said, "You should consider joining them." And so I went to interviews, and after I went to the interviews, what happened was that I had to go down for three last interviews in the Richmond office. Richmond is ninety minutes from Washington, D.C., Richmond is the capital of the confederacy, okay? And so we get down there and I go into this first office, and the man says -- his name is Billy King -- and he's on the phone and says, "Sit down, sit down." So I'm sitting down. And so he's on the phone for twenty minutes, but I see this book, this magazine on his desk, it's from Dartmouth College. So he gets off the phone, I said, "You know, Mr. King, before we start our conversation, can I ask you, did you go to Dartmouth?" He goes, "Yeah, I went to Dartmouth." "By chance, do you know a friend of mine?" He said, "Who's that?" He said, "Henry Ota." He looks at me... do you know Henry Ota?

TI: Yeah, I know Henry.

RI: So he goes, " Henry Ota, you mean Hank?" I go, "Yeah, how do you know Hank?" I said, "Hank went to my high school." He said, "Well, that's nothing. Hank was a varsity pitcher at Dartmouth, and I was the catcher." And so we talked about Hank for twenty minutes, he said, "Don't worry about it, Ron, you're in the law firm." And so because of Henry Ota, my interviews went really well.

TI: Oh, that was a good story.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.