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RB: Yeah, I just think I have one more question and then I think we're just about at time. I guess just having, remembered so much about the time there, your family's time there, throughout the course of this morning, this is just circumspection on your account, but what do you think it meant for Louise to be involved in this space, specifically?

LR: Yeah, I think that... I think it must have been just so essential for her. One of the things about Grandma that I remember is one of the reasons I had a hard time letting you part with the House, even though you needed to, was just Grandma had a certain aesthetic. She didn't have loads of money, but to afford a whole bunch of beautiful, fancy things, even the Nakashima that we have is sort of like not your top end Nakashima. It's not made of the top end woods. But she would go out of her way to get this kind of furniture. She would go out of her way to design the house with the tokunoma. And these projects went on for years and year and years. She got a gardener to come in and put in a garden in her backyard. I mean, this aesthetic was just so important to her being, it was just so much a part, and I never really appreciate it. Growing up, it wasn't 'til much later, but that I sort of really saw how she would see things at the Japanese House and Garden being done, and then she wanted to do it in house. She got such pleasure from design of things, from the aesthetic, from the Japanese aesthetic of that time period. It influenced the way she... even the way she dressed. Like she had a really unique style of dressing, I was sort of like, oh, that's just Grandma. Everybody says, "Your grandma cool, man. She dresses real nice." "That's just the way she dresses." But she had a certain flair that was kind of Japanese but kind of not. It was something that was totally unique. And as I get older, especially as I've been starting to do more music stuff, I sort of, I'm just finding all these things about my grandma that I just admire. Me, I'm kind of just dressed like this all the time, and I'm sort of like, "Damn, my grandma, she always had style up to her day she died. She always had flair. I need to have more flair in the way I dress," and I started thinking about that kind of stuff. And about having beautiful, not necessarily expensive things, but having things of importance and beauty around you, how you can express culture in that way. I mean, I think Grandma was probably frustrated to a certain extent that her Japanese, I don't think her Japanese was the greatest Japanese in the world, far from it, because she didn't get to use it that much. I think that's another reason she liked going to the House, was she got the chance to use it. But she could surround herself with beautiful Japanese things, and I think that really centered her, I think that really made her very happy. I mean, to the end, she didn't want to go, Grandma didn't want to go to a situation like you're in, that's not what she wanted, she wanted very much to... whereas you wanted to just be done with the house. "I want out." "You don't want this house, then fine, we're selling it." Grandma didn't want to leave, she wanted to stay there, she wanted to die in that house because it was so much a life work. I mean, she had that guy John coming in all the time to do all the woodwork in there and everything like that, there was a guy who was the gardener, John Erian maybe?

LG: John Erian.

LR: John Erian would come in and sort of do all this work for her over the years. And over the years, she transformed the house to be someplace that was really special. So when we actually sold the house, we were very happy that the people who actually bought the house -- although I'm sure they made plenty of changes -- but they really appreciated, we were just so touched that there was, a gay couple bought the house and they were, actually lived in the neighborhood and they just switched houses from the house that was, like, a few doors down. Yeah, they were in the back. They were in the back, yeah, right, they were in the street in the back, and they could see the garden. So it really touched my heart to know that. So when I found out that they wanted to do the deal, I was like, we were just like, "Let's do it." They can appreciate the house. Of course they're going to make changes and they already have. But what's interesting is they built up on the house, and they've done a lot of stuff, yeah. Yeah, they built up, they built another floor, but the garden is still there. The garden is still there, but I thought that was really interesting. I don't know what thoughts were going through my grandma's head, but I do know that she had a particular aesthetic and she... and what was going on at the Japanese House and Garden touched her and influenced her profoundly in terms of her personal style as well. And I think, living in a place like Philadelphia where there's not a real strong Japanese American community, I think, that was so important for her to have that connection. I sometimes wonder, would she have lived as long as she lived without the Japanese House and Garden? I don't know.

RB: Great. Yeah, well, that's all for me. Thank you so much, Lucas.

LR: You're welcome. Thank you for coming out. Thank you for coming out and taking the time.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.