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MM: So it sounds like the time spent, about three years with, in the governor's office, was a very interesting experience for you

RK: It certainly was, yeah.

MM: And from there you went then to Tokai University. How did you make that transition?

RK: Well, my friends came to me and said, "There's this Japan University. It's a huge one, they want to establish a base in the United States, and starting with Hawaii, and wonder if you could help?" So initially, Mildred and I got an assignment to look at the feasibility of Tokai University of Japan starting something in Hawaii. And we recommended that they start with maybe a community college, because to have a full-fledged university required, you don't have to have athletic fields, but you need science laboratories, you need high-priced professors, etcetera. And why don't we start with a junior college. And they bought into the idea. And they put up a magnificent building, right close, well, in Honolulu, in a very nice area in McCully close enough to the university, close enough to the Ala Moana shopping center. It's a very attractive building. In many ways people think it's, looks more like a hotel, very nice accommodations. And so they gave me the job of starting a junior college. We called it Hawaii Tokai International College. And really wanted to make it international, although we knew that we would be drawing, especially initially, many of the students from Japan. And they gave me a short timetable.

And we opened up and they, was on six months' notice or whatever and all we could do was pick up sort of stray students from the streets of Honolulu, and we found quite a number of Japanese, what do the students call them? Ronin. These were students who didn't quite fit the strict Japanese educational system, rebelled, and so forth. Many of them came from wealthy families and as one of them said to us, he said to us, "I am enrolling because my father said as long as I go to school, he'll support me." And he came with this dyed hair. And you knew that, from the color of his skin, that he was a surfing bum. But he turned out to be one of our best students. But we picked up a lot of those so-called strays. And we had a great time. Many of them were very brilliant and I try to have a very flexible institution. At first I had a, I made the schedule such that we left one day free, it was Wednesday, because I said, "Now, we have these foreign students, they have to learn English, and that's one thing we don't do well." I said, I don't, it's no slam on those people teaching of English as a second language, but I said, "You really learn a language by using it, hearing it in real life. So Wednesday is a day when these students will be let loose or you faculty will plan field trips." 'Cause that didn't last long. We got a regular faculty who insisted that you have to meet every day and so on and so forth. But we got, especially, we got a very good instructor, Glen Grant, very imaginative person. And he was a pied piper. He was great. And he was entertaining, but he also had his standards and he really motivated students, which was important. Teachers and students loved him. Poor Glen recently passed away but that was a big loss. But with teachers like that, we were able to succeed.

And I really wanted to make it international. We didn't think we could handle, given the size of our building and our facilities. It was a... and we had excellent dormitory rooms. They were too nice. Each one had a private bath, complete bath and each one had a television set and view of Diamond Head and Waikiki. But any rate, we had, we couldn't have more than say, two hundred students. And heyday we had maybe hundred and fifty. And what was nice was we had students from all over the world, although the largest percentage would come from Japan. We had a good contingent from Korea, we had from Taiwan, and later on we got from Cambodia and Thailand and these Southeast Asian students turned out to be excellent. Whereas, frankly, we didn't get the cream of the crop from Japan. The cream of the crop went to England, went to Cambridge, went to Stanford, went to Harvard or to UCLA or Cal Berkeley if they could make it. But we got some very good students from Japan. And lo and behold, to our surprise, we got students from Canada, we got a student from Germany, we got students from Brazil, so for a while we had a rather international group, we even got a student from Mongolia. But when the economy in the Far East, especially Japan went down, the Koreans practically disappeared and well, it was only for what, three years or so. And gradually, I think it's now more Japanese students. But at one point we had it quite international. We had difficulty attracting our own Hawaii students, although we did give scholarships, for example, to a girl form Molokai who was very, was made it, gave it a very good mix on our campus. But we had difficulty because our tuition rates were comparable to what private junior colleges charge, which was way above what they would pay if they went to (Manoa), or went to a Hawaii community college. You know, Hawaii community college cost was ten percent what they'd pay to go to Tokai. So we weren't as successful in attracting local students. But I think some of our students had a great experience. A lot of them went on to the University of Hawaii or came to the mainland to go to different universities.

<End Segment 43> - Copyright © 2004 Japanese American National Museum. All Rights Reserved.