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BF: Was, was, what -- I'm wondering, though, there, there, the Ni -- Issei were getting up in age, so they were needing nursing care. But it's not as though the City of Seattle didn't have nursing care facilities.

TM: Uh-huh.

BF: What was it that made you think those weren't either enough or somehow not quite satisfactory?

TM: Well, there's a number of stories. And people, once they got wind that there was being considered, it came out of the woodwork to tell you that the services that their parents or their friends were receiving were bad. And one example, I remember and Tosh Okamoto mentioned, that he went to a nursing home with his friend one time, visiting, I assume it was the father. And the friend is giving the father a dollar or two. And I said, "What's that for?" I mean, Tosh asked, "What's that for?" He says, "In the middle of the night, when he puts that dollar up, he gets service." And that was one. And then also, I can't remember distinctly, but people like saying, "Well, my father doesn't like the tsukemono" -- I mean, "does, wants, craves, tsukemono, and doesn't like the American food." And so if you look for those stories, you get all of them. All these reasons why care would be better in a culturally sensitive, Japanese-speaking environment. But you're right. That was the argument, says the next generation doesn't need the English and cultural, but, so there was a lot of argument why we should even do it. In fact, people like, I was surprised, Henry said, "You're going to bankrupt the organi -- community by $500,000." Which was a large amount of money. But, so anyway, we went through and we met practically every night at Nikko or Bush Garden. And we went through this whole thing, Tosh, Harry, myself, and a few others. And we kept saying, and we start to form, that we have to put a new organization together, and who should represent that. And one of the things, and I don't know whose idea it was, but I think initially made it successful, was that we said that as many of the prominent, established Japanese organization had to be at the table. And that's why we had the two classes of board members, so-called board members representing the Buddhist Church and vets and whoever we went to, and talked about the program. He says, "If you're interested, send money and send somebody." And I think to this day, I think that was a success. And the sidelight, getting back to the initial issue, Seattle is small enough that we could talk to -- if you did this in LA, you would have a heck of a problem because you're invariably going to leave somebody out, and you couldn't accommodate 500 different organizations that would consider themselves leaders of the community. So Seattle, I can't remember what it is, but maybe we have ten organizations, Nikkeijinkai, Buddhist Church. And no one to this day challenged us as, we're an organization, why aren't we at the table? I would think you would have that in Hawaii or Los Angeles. So Edwin encouraged us. We talked to Russ Akiyama, he was willing to be the first paid director. We hired a young lady, Kathy Cox-Mihara. And we asked -- I gave her a table, a desk at my office, and we started to fund-raise. And we went around to look at different nursing homes. And so we went into the business. About a year later we opened the door.

BF: And well, I guess that you had Dr. Ruby, Dr. Inouye?

TM: Oh, yes.

BF: But other than that, no one had any experience in nursing care?

TM: Well, we had -- yeah, that's true. But we had a couple, Nina Chinn, who was, I think, or people like that. We had various people.

BF: In health care?

TM: Yeah. There were, there were nurses, and they didn't stick, but they came and served, served us well. And we had Russ, who had the state connection.

BF: Was it, was there a kind of, any kind of conflict between sort of the traditional cultural values of the elderly you, you take into your own home, your parents you take into your own home as opposed to, I think it's probably a more American culture of having nursing care facilities. Was there, were people who had a problem with, with that issue?

TM: Oh, yeah, there was. But the very fact that there was sixty to seventy parents in existing nursing home, I guess...

BF: There was a need.

TM: ...convinced us that there was a need. And then if you look at the graphic, the population graphic, if you look at it from a dall point, it's small, as from older than, Isseis kind of popped up, then it kind of neck down, but then it gradually grew up from Niseis. And if twenty-five years ago, if the longevity and the health of the Niseis were the same as the Isseis, then the need for the nursing home would have just dramatically exploded in about 1995 or the year 2000. But that's not true any more, fortunately.

BF: It's been delayed.

TM: Delayed. So the delay might happen, but it's just a matter of time where the population, the internal, because we're having very few new immigrants, but although it's not as explosive as other minority, but we are increasing in population slow enough. And if all things stay the same, you're going to have more people at a certain age that the percentage will require nursing home. That's been delayed for a lot of reasons. But unless some factors change, the need for nursing care will continue to just expand slowly if all things stay fairly constant, unfortunately or whatever. And fortunately, I guess, after the bubble of Issei, we knew there would be a contraction, but we thought it would come out again. But because of the delay -- and very frankly, a lot of the Isseis are dying before they need nursing home. I know that's not statistically, but a lot of my friends, you're hoping if they need the care, it's there. But Harry Kadoshima is a good example of people like that that, statistically, they would come down and need the nursing care. Well, they're gone. But anyway, so we should have known this also. We were pretty naive. Let's say there was seventy Isseis in nursing care, so we got sixty-three bed. "Wow," we says, "how can we not fill up?" Well, we went to about thirty-five, and they got stuck there because a lot of the parents, for whatever reasons, were not moved. Children, for whatever reason, didn't move all. So we got stuck there. And we said, "Wow, maybe the few people that said we were crazy were right." Because unless, even a 63-bed, we knew we couldn't make money, but if you have it only full -- half full, you're losing big bucks. So that's also you're thankful for input from people like Edwin, says you got to raise that 500 instead of the 300. But in about a year, year and a half, the darn thing went up to 63-bed, and then waiting list started to climb like crazy. So that's when we said, "Wow," we started saying, "What can we do?" So we bought properties adjacent to the existing 63-bed, and we wanted to just add twenty or thirty more beds. In fact, we went and spent 2, 300,000 for a, enlarging the dining/activity room, putting in a nice kitchen. So we were prepared, getting ourself ready to expand the bed from sixty-three to maybe eighty or ninety beds. And we kept studying that, and it just didn't make sense because the original building was just not very good, and the location wasn't the best and different things. So I can't remember now, maybe ten years after we opened the 63-bed units, we had quite a change in our administration too. Fred Takayesu was there. He retired. And we then got and Anne Arakaki-Lock, and she's a, was a very good director, I, I thought. So we started talking about what can we do to serve the sixty, thirty or forty people waiting? So we said we need about 120 beds. And the state really wanted to give us only about a hundred bed, as I was telling you. They didn't want to get off that. As we were doing all this mathematics, Janet Deguchi did our, she was working for one of the hospitals that did our certificate of need, which is very important. You have to prove to the state you need these beds. And that was a very political -- they were willing to give us a hundred. We could have probably got 120, but I think I was one that pushed for 150 for a couple of reasons. Like I say, we, we knew although there was a contraction of the need for the Niseis, we knew that it would eventually be needed. And if somebody tells you, or your bookkeeper tells you need 100 or 120 to break even, you probably need twenty or thirty more. [Laughs] As it turned out, right now our break even is about 145. So they kept saying, 120. But the state was adamant against it. So we, here again, I was fortunate, myself, Harry, and so we had this political connection. So we used that wisely. And we were able to -- that in itself should be an interesting story. I just should sit down and think about that a little more.

BF: The politics.

TM: The politics of getting -- because they were, there was two or three arguments. They said, First of all, the Japanese community -- you don't say that publicly -- really don't need 150 beds. Privately, we knew that, not for a few years anyway. There was people arguing that, well, you know, Niseis, the younger, the older Niseis might want cultural things, but the younger Niseis, they could eat anything. They, Japanese language was not important. So the argument was, and rightly so maybe. But I just felt that, and I strongly feel that any organization I belong to, it can't be ongoing sub -- substain itself on ongoing income from the community. If at all possible, it should be self-sustaining. That's -- so 150. And I guess I just felt that, by gosh or by gone we could fill it. We had ups and downs, but right now, it's doing pretty good.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.