When I became governor, I told my secretary, “I don’t care how busy I am, whatever I am doing. When one of my children comes to the office, you ought to let me know that they are here. And I will take a break as soon as I can. You ask them to wait, I will take a break as soon as I can, and I will spend some time with them.”
We also, during our years—very early years when Jean and I began to have our children—we began to have family meetings. And we had all of our children together, and any one of them could ask for a family meeting. And sometimes they would want a family meeting when somebody was mean to them or somebody did something to them. And many of the time it was nonsense. But, it gave us an opportunity for them to talk and begin to understand that oh...brother or sister did not mean to do anything to hurt your feelings or harm you. And I think we developed a closeness because we could talk.
And Jean and I says to our children, “We don’t have any experience as parents, and this is our first opportunity for us to become parents. And every one, each one of you, are different, so we'll have a different experience with each of you. And please understand that because of that, we don’t have any experience, and we can make our mistakes, too. And we are prepared to say we are sorry to you if we do something that we feel have hurt your feelings.” And so, we remained, because of the things that our parents was, and because of the closeness that’s remained with my parents and Jean’s parents with hers—we developed a closeness with our own children.
Date: December 15, 2003
Location: Hawai`i, US
Interviewer: Art Hansen
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum.
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