<Begin Segment 15>

BN: So how did that happen that you came to be involved at JCCH? And we should clarify, the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i.

JK: Yeah.

BN: And they were just starting at the time. So how did you end up coming to them?

JK: Yeah. Again, just serendipitous kind of happening, because when I finally was released from my receptionist job at the dentist's office, I was really wanting to... I mean, I left librarianship before I was ready to, because family comes first, of course. But I really wanted to keep my fingers or hands into librarianship. And so one of the things that... and there were a bunch of us that retired around the same time. So one of the things we decided to do is help brand new librarians because we knew that when you're a brand new librarian taking over a library where an old timer has been for twenty years, there's a bunch of junk there that needs to be gone through. And so we became the SWAT team, and so we'd go out and help clean up a brand new library, a librarian's library. And to treat ourselves, we'd go to lunch together after that. And so we were doing that for a while, and there was a retired librarian there, Clara Okamura, and she kept asking us, "Could you guys come and help me at Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i?" and we just ignored her. Because that wasn't a school, and we didn't know what that was. But then, after she'd been asking for about a year, I felt kind of sorry for her. [Laughs] And we said, "What is that?" And so she explained, and she explained she got tied up in it because Jane Komeji, who was a Maemae School teacher, had retired and she was very active there. Clara Okamura was the librarian at Maemae School. So when she retired, she innocently asked Jane, "Do you need help?" And Jane grabbed her. And then Clara realized what she was into, and she says, "I need help." And so finally I decided, okay, I'm going to help her for a year or so, and then I'll move on. And so I showed up at JCCH and the gallery director then, Ruth Tamura, said, "Are you sure you want to do this? There isn't even a resource center, per se. There's no budget, there's no staff, and I said, "Yeah, but you know, my friend is there, and she needs help." "Yeah, I'll help her for a while." And so she took me into the room which is now the diagnostic lab. And there was Clara and Mildred Tahara sitting amongst the whole pile of boxes of books, and you'd see silverfish running everywhere. And they were trying to process and organize the books into an English and Japanese collection. And so Ruth says, "This is all we've got," and I said, well, I can help her doing what she's doing. And so that's how I got started. And then after we had worked for a while, Clara didn't feel well. And then she got quite sick and then we realized she wasn't coming back. And so when she passed on, I felt like I couldn't leave, and so I'm still there. [Laughs] I'm still here.

BN: The one year turned into... going on thirty years.

JK: Yeah. But I've learned so many lessons and grown, and the one I learned from Clara was patience. Because I said, "We don't have any money, we don't have this, we don't have that, we don't have things." And she said, "Now, Jane, get busy." [Laughs] It's okay. And so I learned patience from her that if you go with the flow, things have a way of working out if you're doing the right thing. If you're not doing the right thing, you'll know. [Laughs]

BN: Did you then turn into Clara in terms of recruiting others?

JK: Oh. You know, there were actually people retiring around them that were asking us if they could help. And at first, we said, "Honestly, we can't ask you to come, because we don't know what we're doing. And so you'd come and you wouldn't know what you're doing either." But then eventually it propelled us to figure out things and organize them, and then we could bring in all our retired friends to start with.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.