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RI: But then in the other part, after that, I was with them, and then eventually what I decided to do is that... you know, I have a son, and my father, my mother died in 1976, and my father was alone. I figured, geez, I've probably seen my father one year out of twenty-five years, like two days here, three days there, so I said, "I better try to see my dad more. So I came back to Gardena, and there was an ad in the paper, said, oh, the last day to file for city council is such and such. And so, since I met the residency requirements, I'm going to run. I didn't tell anybody.

TI: You just filed?

RI: I just filed. What's there to lose, right? So I ran, and there were like seventy people running, and no one knew who I was, but they knew who my father was. And so I ran and there were two slots open, and I got the second slot. And I concluded that I didn't win the election, I concluded that my father won the election. And so that made a huge difference. And it's probably, if I was going to do it again, I would recommend people run for office when they're, like, thirty. I ran when I was fifty-four. I'm thankful that I did run, it takes a lot of time, and you just have, like, the whole world on you, even though it's a little city like Gardena, you just learn so much. And the friendships that you make, it's unbelievable and lifelong.

TI: Well, and you had all these role models, like I still think about your story about Norm, so hopefully you wrote a lot of thank-you notes.

RI: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's just amazing, politics is an interesting process. Today it could be extremely brutal and non-forgiving, which is unfortunate, because I think people really want to go out and make a difference in life. I ran three times, got reelected, and then was out for four years, I was termed out. And then there was seven, eight people running for mayor, I said, "Oh, what the heck, I'll run." So I ran in 2016. And there were seven of us running, I beat the hell out of the person that came in seventh, I came in sixth. But Terry Terauchi came in, like, fourth, third or fourth. If I didn't run, Terry would have won, because he would have had enough votes.

TI: Oh, so you split the...

RI: But, see, the three top vote getters were African American, and they each got a thousand something votes. And you know what that told me? And I knew we were all in trouble about one month before the election, because I was up looking at the registration for Japanese Americans, less than five hundred households. So let's say two people voted, that's a thousand votes. You're not going to win. African American community went out and registered new voters. There was no new voters ethnically for Japanese Americans to pull from. So that period was probably past, but what's interesting, every time I run into Terry Terauchi in Gardena, he goes, "Darn it, if you didn't run, I'd be mayor." And I said, "What are you talking about? If you didn't run, I'd be mayor." [Laughs] So we laugh about it. But you know what was fun about it is that when I was out in the community in front of Giuliano's, this delicatessen in Gardena, in downtown Gardena, people would come up to me that knew my mother, that knew my father, knew when I was a bad kids. And what's really fun about it was that teachers that knew my sister from high school said, "Oh, I was your gym teacher." It was just very fun to see and hear a lot of your old friends.

TI: To reconnect to all these people.

RI: To kind of wrap it up, one of the things about Gardena, especially being back in Gardena, I now live in the home that I grew up in, 1953. And on our block, other than one house with a family, the Nisei family passed away, all the same families since 1953. And the other side of the street, there's almost the same. And so our street, other than my house, they all look like nice bonsai trees and everything's really pretty. But what happens is that every Wednesday is trash day. And I don't know if you know the Nisei, the biggest day of the week for Nisei is trash day, because they don't want to miss the day to take out the trash. So they take the trash cans out on Monday. Well, Monday is two days before Wednesday, but it's illegal to take your trash can out early, you know, because the city, you don't want to do that. But, for me, it's like a beacon. If those trash cans aren't out by Tuesday...

TI: Then something is wrong.

RI: Then something is wrong. Oh, so I'll go up to, like Mrs. Ikegami, she passed away recently but she was one hundred years old. "Ikegami-san, genki desu ka? Are you okay? Let me take your trash can out." And, you know, these are the same people, in the 1950s, that would call my mother and father when I did something bad on the way home from school. And so sixty years later, I'm taking care of them. But sixty years before, they were taking care of me. Where else could you want to live?

TI: That's a good story.

RI: That, to me, is "Honto ni arigatai," that's what I'm thankful for. But I want to thank you for your time.

TI: No, thank you, Ron, this was wonderful. This was fun.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.