When I was at school—at Stanford—I went to a speech given by John Kennedy when he was a candidate for president, and he talked about—I mean, I was so inspired by him that when I graduated, I signed up to go to the Peace Corps. And I had actually gotten my papers. They had assigned me to go to training in Colorado. I expected that I was going to Nepal, but it turned out that my father had a very, very serious stroke right at that time, and he became debilitated. […] So I ended up staying at home with my father to take care of him [for a couple of years]. During that time, I got a part-time job working in a law office in Little Tokyo. And I worked for a lawyer by the name of Robert Iwasaki. And he…he represented a lot of Japanese Americans. He was the lawyer for the Gardeners’ Association. So there were a lot of people coming in from the Japanese American community, and I just thought, oh my goodness, this was so wonderful how you could help people. So that was how I became interested in law.
Date: July 10, 2012
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Lawrence Lan
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum; Japanese American Bar Association
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