<Begin Segment 9>

JC: What would you... two things. Why don't you give me a little bit of a feeling about, we skipped over the business, how you got your business actually started when you did come back. I believe you started with your brother or worked with your brother.

SN: Well, no. I started the business with my father. My father has had the retail business started back up there on Morrison Street, and we had, right after war, we're back there and different people come there yelling at my father derogatory remarks about being a "Jap enemy" and all that kind of thing. We took that and my father took all that, and then Mary went in there to help, my wife. She says every day there would be somebody come in there and making, run in there and make a nasty remark and run out. But I was isolated from that because I was in my father's basement working away, shipping the merchandise. We brought in, I bought some ceramics from California and so on. Hardly anything was allowed to be imported. Then we started in English bone china cups and saucers and that helped us become a national company because it was very rare. This is very, well, starting businesses, for example... one of the salesmen, I had a couple of salesmen, "Do you know that if we can get this English bone china cups and saucers it would be just going gangbusters?" "Oh, is that right?" So I went to the library and got the list of all the English potteries and wrote to them and thinking maybe I'd get one or two companies that would be willing to sell to me. Twelve companies said they'll sell to us, and we started the business, brought it in and nobody else hardly had any. We were about the only ones, and it was amazing that they came. In those days, prewar type of shipping, you know, big cast, heavy cast pack. You got to unpack the whole thing, packed in straw, and took that and repacked it and send to customers, and there were all these collectors of bone china cups and saucers collectors. They all wanted to buy, the stores did. That, then we moved to Sixth and Davis, the business, there in Old Town. I did that. Then pretty soon, we were able to import Japanese porcelain and goods, but they had to be marked, "made in U.S. occupied Japan." And so we had that, and we were selling that. We had quite a few people ship it back to us saying, "We don't carry Jap merchandise," you know, when they bought it. They didn't realize that it was Japanese-made. So we had all those incidents.

The business grew. My brother joined the business, and the business grew very rapidly because of the big shortage of this kind of merchandise in this country, and so we were able to... and I started taking trips to Japan. My father was doing it for a while, then I took over and started going to Japan and was there quite often, three times, four times a month to Japan. And so I did all that and then started going to Korea and Taiwan, India, all the different countries to import, and we were importing large amounts of goods to Portland. That was the basic. And from there, we started buying property, and the first piece of property that we bought was the Globe Hotel which was a transient hotel. We gutted it out and started the business called Import Plaza. They took it down and there it is, opening over there. Had a newspaper article about the opening of Import Plaza which we did very well. It was, the very interesting thing is my, it was -- the building was right across the street, and we saw it emptied. There was no more transients there. So we bought the place and everybody says, and then the parking lot and everybody told us that you are crazy, and it's never going to work. Even our real estate man who sold the property says, "Those people are fools thinking they're going to open up a retail store down here in skid row and think that anybody would come in." And we put out the newspaper ad that we had all this thing, and we were just packed. God, we did so well, the business. Of course, finally, it kind of died out, novelty wore out and so on. We started getting a lot of competition, but it's true, it's an interesting part of how, what we learned is you got to "think outside the box." That's a recent terminology, thinking outside of the box, but that's what we did. I mean, I thought that rent would be cheap and so on. We had plenty of parking and people came, and that was one of our business that we started. From there, we bought properties around there in Old Town and retail stores came in, and there was a little flurry of retail business of incubator businesses. One of the most -- the big one that really did well was Daisy Kingdom. We bought that building, put Daisy Kingdom in. And restaurants opened up there, and we had a Chinese restaurant move in, and we had offices out of the Merchant Hotel which, Merchant Hotel was the first hotel to have an elevator. And we bought that building, architects and lawyers and so on rented because the rent was low.

JC: So you and your brother and your dad had some very revolutionary ideas. I mean, I think Import Plaza is the first of its kind in the country, and the concept of, as you say, incubator buildings, what was the workings when you and your dad and Sam sat around and talked -- I mean, you and your dad and Bill sat around and talked, how did you get those ideas?

SN: I don't know. We get all the different ideas. It is just like Made in Oregon store was my idea that -- I don't want to brag, it sounds like I'm bragging about these things, but I'm just talking about just the way business goes. You know, I travelled all over the world, and always sat in the waiting room, you know, terminal, waiting room. I noticed all these stores that were in there were doing tremendous business. So I thought I'd like to open up a store in PDX. And so I came back, and I had a friend, Punch Green. Punch Green was very friendly to me, person. He was the commissioner of the port here, and then I went to Punch Green. I said, "Punch, I want to open up a store in the airport," and Punch said, "There's a store there like that already, can't have another store." Well, I thought there was supposed to be an open bidding basis because this is the public. "Yeah, but those people have the inside room with the governor so, you know, can't do much about it." [Laughs] Politics, you know. There is always that. So I thought, then I talked to him again. What if I come up with a new idea of retailing that might fit in? "Oh, there's nothing much you can do," you know how he talks, and Punch went on, and I said, "Okay." Well then, I said to him -- I said, "What if I started a store that sold just Oregon products, Oregon products, and I'll call it Made in Oregon?" And he lit up. He says, "That sound good, but what is there in Oregon you can sell?" [Laughs] "Well, just give me a little space there, and I'll gather some stuff together and get one going." So he calls up the executive director, tells him, "See if you can find a space for him." So he gave me a little dinky little space the size of this room maybe at the airport and right off, immediately of course, it was success. Everybody want to buy things that are made in Oregon. And so, and then more and more things, products came on. More things started, more people were making things because -- for our store. That's the way... well, we had Pendleton, you know. I went to see Mort Bishop and bought from Mort and the wineries. Sokol was there. Sokol Blosser and the Willamette Valley people started out just about that time. That was over twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven years now since we opened the first store in the airport.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.