<Begin Segment 5>

[Discussion of number of siblings currently working in Uwajimaya]

TM: There's six out of the seven. And my sister Hisako teaches at the Seattle Community College. There's, my mother had seven children, and six of us are still in the business.

BF: Can you kind of give us a quick run-down of what they all do?

TM: Oh, my oldest brother who's about ready to retire is in the retail. And then my next brother -- well, then my oldest sister who's older than -- she does the non-food buying, she goes to Japan and buys the dishware, non-food stuff. Primarily to sell in Uwajimaya, but for a few restaurant customer type. And then myself. When my father passed away and I came back to the company, we had to incorporate, my oldest brother said, "Well, you take the presidency," because we had to have that when you incorporate. And that's right. So I been kind of looking at the overall business, plus the real estate part, developments and things. Then my next brother, Mori, who kind of came back from the army and took over the wholesale division, and made that... and we call that the distribution business. Including the wholesale to the, big supermarket wholesale to the restaurants and smaller Asian stores. And then now with the production of food, food line that you saw, Kustom Foods...

BF: Kustom Foods.

TM: ...he's been in, he's in charge of all that. Plus, the growth right now is in our Sun Luck brand, we're distributing that as brokers throughout the country. So we think that's a potential. But it's also low margin and takes a lot of work. But I think once we, if, he's confident once we get it going, we're working with a major chain. The second largest grocery chain in the United States, we're trying to convince them to take forty or hundred items that goes into their catalog. And then any store within that chain could then order it. But it's, it doesn't happen overnight, it takes a lot of work.

BF: So did we cover everyone?

TM: Oh, excuse me. [Laughs] Then Toshi -- then the next sister, who's Hisako, is a school teacher at the community college. And Toshi is our comptrol. He's kind of into the finance and comptrolling part. Then my youngest sister Tomoko is in charge of the three retail stores. In the, Tomoko came back after she had went to the bay area and married a San Francisco person. After the girls got into about high school, I guess she wanted to move back with the family and with my mother, and she came back. When the kids start to, probably were in high school, she said, "What am I gonna do," she came back to work, and before we knew it, she was kind of running the retail stores. [Laughs] Which was great because it freed me up to do more of the real estate development.

BF: So how many, how often do you meet as a family to discuss...?

TM: The five or six of us meet almost two or three times a month.

BF: Uh-huh. And other than that, do you find yourself running into each other very often? Is it just sort of, "Hi, bye," in the...

[Ed. note: walking towards the deli]

TM: Well, just like any family, when there's seven of us, there's two or three that seem to kind of run into each other, same circle of friends. And we try not to talk business but we all were together for Mother's Day, Father's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, in one form or the other. Christmas weekend we were together about four times: Christmas Day, Christmas Eve, this and that. And then my oldest brother's wife Carol was born on Christmas Day. And my wife was born on December 23rd, so there was a birthday party, a Christmas Eve party. Which was all nice, you know. There's a lot of informal gathering, too.

BF: Wow. That's spending a lot of time together.

TM: Yeah. Probably less so now because each of us have our children. But when the kids were young, we used to meet all the time. Especially around my mother.

BF: And she's at Keiro.

TM: Yes. But before that she had her own house.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.