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HH: What kind of career are you involved in today?

KI: Well, I have my own business today. I have a safety and health consulting business, and I operate throughout the country. And I have a number of people who work for me, it's a small company, but I have about eight people working for me on a full-time basis. And it's something that I've done really all my adult working life has been involved in safety and health issues. Even my wife today, of course, is a leading environmentalist in the state of New Jersey. Probably one of the foremost environmentalists in the state, I think, of New Jersey.

HH: And this company that you have, this is something you started on your own?

KI: Yes.

HH: From scratch?

KI: From scratch, scratch business.

HH: Is there something that might be mentioned here, as to some experience you've had in starting something, a company like this from nothing?

KI: Well, it's something that I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to have my own business, and I've always felt that the best way for an individual like myself to really get ahead was to have my own business. I wanted to be independent, I wanted to be able to do the types of things that I didn't feel that were afforded to me working for a corporation. And so I started out on my own, and I've continued now for almost ten years. It's been a lot of fun, I've really enjoyed it, and I think that developed a lot of good business friends and associates, and it's been very rewarding.

HH: And you have two children.

KI: I have two children.

HH: And their gender and how old are they?

KI: Well, I have two daughters. My oldest daughter is twenty-six years old, so she's finishing her master's studies at Stanford University. I think that she'll probably stay out in California or maybe go to Hawaii or Japan, I doubt she'll come back east. But her major is Japanese language, and at present, her major of study is really in the Ainu culture of northern Japan, and so she's doing some translations of Ainu literature that had been translated from Ainu, the Ainu language, to Japanese, and now she's translating it from Japanese to English. And so she should graduate this January, but I think she's going to stay on for some postgraduate work and, I don't know, maybe go on for a PhD out there. My second daughter is going to Rutgers University, and she's a physics major, she's twenty-four years old. Hopefully she will finish school this year. She promised me that she'll be finished in May with her undergraduate studies, and so I'm very happy about that, I just hope that she'll go out and get a job and be self-supporting.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.