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KE: So you touched on being on the board for Keiro. But what was, can you describe both your personal and Seattle's JACL's involvement with establishing the nursing home, and what was the motivation?

TM: Well, Tosh Okamoto is a very good friend, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago, but he was the Vets commander and I was JACL active, and frequently as vice president or some officers, Min or Don Kazama would say, "Tomio, you go to these banquets," so I kept running into Tosh Okamoto. And one time, he told me an interesting story, he said, well, you know, he had friends his age, they had fathers, one father that I think I know of, that was in a nursing home. And so he accompanied the son to the nursing home, and the son turns around and says, "You got change for a dollar?" And Tosh says, "What for?" He said, "Well, if you give a quarter or fifty cents, the nursing aide will take care of my father. Or if you don't give him, they ignore them." So, the point is, the nursing home issue became very important. And then when I was a vice president of JACL or president, I can't remember, Mitch Matsudaira and I, you know, we started this so-called Social Concerns organization, branch of the JACL. And then we would, once or every other month or something, go to the different organizations and try to meet the board members. And so we said, "Okay, what's the issue?" They always came back invariably with those Isseis there, that, "We need a nursing home." They had a Hirabayashi nursing home that had only six beds or something like that. They kept saying there's a need for a nursing home because at that time, I don't know exact number, but fifty or sixty Isseis were scattered in about fifteen nursing homes throughout Seattle. And like I say, when you hear the story, like Tosh told you, that, you know, language is a problem. And, you know, and just the industry itself was not geared to be that nice to the people. I mean, they were always good, but there was always a few percentage that were just not being treated well.

And so here again, Tosh Okamoto's daughter, Joyce, was working in L.A. and working for the Los Angeles Keiro nursing home. So I knew Joyce very well, and every time we would talk, she says... oh, you know, the director at that time, Bill, I don't know if you've met Edwin Hiroto, he was the executive director of the L.A. Keiro. Well, anyway, he would come up frequently to go fishing. And one time,  Glenn Akai, who was a member of our community, was a real estate person. And he calls me up or called me and says, "There's a sixty-two-bed nursing home available, and it's old and it's almost going to run out of the license because it's not been well kept. And so we looked at it, we said, "Oh, gee." Just by then, coincidence, Edwin was in town for vacation, and actually, Tosh wanted to take him out to dinner. And so he called me and Edwin just happened to be there, and we showed him this old site. And he says, "Buy it." He says, "It's a deal." Because in those days, getting a license was very expensive. So this site already had sixty-two beds, and it was like, $300,000. So it's only five thousand a bed. He said, you can't build -- it in those days -- for even ten, fifteen thousand dollars per bed. Right now it costs you $250,000 per bed. Anyway, so he encouraged us. We were not that interested to buy the damn thing, but he encouraged us. And he said another thing, he says, "You pay $300,000 for the building and the license, but you gotta raise $200,000 to run it because it's going to, you're not going to make money for the first couple of years." So we went out to raise $500,000 and then getting back to this JACL, so we went to, at that time, Kato was kind of active, what's his name? Well, anyway, so we went to them and we said, "Can we borrow your mailing list?" And of course they met for five hours or five, ten hours. He finally said, "Okay, we won't give you the list, but we'll send out, mail your flyers begging for money." So that's how... so they not only mailed our flyer requests for funds to the community using their mailing list, they also, I think, donated $1,500 for postage or something. So to me, the Seattle JACL was instrumental in the seed money in providing the mailing list to get us going.

BT: Chuck Kato?

TM: Yeah Chuck Kato. Anyway, that's how... I probably have some dates mixed up, but generally, that's how it got started, yeah. And then you said the difference of JACL. Well, in our days, it probably, JACL was very Japanese-centric, you know, I mean, we didn't know about pan Asian or, very frankly, the Chinese had their own organizations, so we kind of did our own thing. So that's a major differences I see it. And it's after people like Don Kazama and Min started to take on other social issues. Up to that, it was strictly a Japanese-centric organization with people like Frank Hattori, Dr. Toda, you know, they were very good people, but this whole notion of pan Asian or social issues was not a big deal.

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