Honoring Rio & Tamiko Imamura Part 3

The following is a speech given by Kirk Imamura at the Bench Dedication Ceremony held at the Japanese Friendship Garden & Museum to honor his parents, Rio and Tamiko Imamura, on November 16, 2024.

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Friends and colleagues of Rio & Tamiko Imamura. Thank you for being here to celebrate with our families the unveiling of the bench and the plaque in honor of my parents in this peaceful setting.

But first, I would like to thank you for all your well wishes, your letters of support and flowers when my father passed away last July at the age of 93. I can say that my mother very much appreciated hearing from you and she sends her sincere thanks.

Now, I will say upfront that I have never attended any Toastmaster meetings, and I might take up more than three minutes so bear with me.

Let me start with a quote.

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”
— Nelson Henderson

Beautiful & very fitting, isn’t it? I might modify the last part to, “under whose shade you do not expect to sit or find a bench to sit on.” We will walk over to that bench today.

As I contemplate my own impending retirement, I ask myself, what did I achieve from working all those hours? Did I make a difference? What is my legacy? Ah, the dreaded “L” word. I was lucky enough to spend 16 years in the music industry, interacting with prominent artists. To some of them, legacy was an all-important idea, mostly driven by ego.

Looking back at my own work, I was not seeing a lot that had staying power. I spent a large part of my career in the technology sector, and the march of obsolescence kept pace with Moore’s Law. I worked on products like the Betamax VCR, the television picture tube and the 3.5” floppy disk drives. The younger folks growing up today would not know what any of these things are without looking them up on the internet.

Reflecting upon my father’s life, I realized a few very important lessons. Number 1: Yes, nothing lasts forever, but there are some things that last longer than others. Just look around at this beautiful Japanese Garden. This place opened to the public in 1991 and it continues to be enjoyed by over 300,000 visitors every year. My father was lucky enough to be on the team that brought the very idea of this garden to life, along with many of you in the audience today, and it was made possible with the backing of the late, esteemed Dr. Inamori. The Minato Gakuen, the Japanese language school, is another great example. He worked with many of you here and the school is thriving today. My father was lucky enough to be part of many things bigger than himself.

But it did not end there. After retiring from Kyocera, my father still had the drive to build more. He was one of the founders, along with my mother, in establishing the Kitakyushu English speaking Toastmaster chapter. The chapter is very active with over 50 members and growing. Which leads me to lesson Number 2: you can still achieve great things, even after retirement.

None of these things can be achieved alone. You need help from lots of other people who share the same vision, but first you must find these like-minded people. My father had an uncanny ability to build bridges and connect with people from all over the world through the Toastmasters network. He was not shy about going up to people and starting up a conversation and was always interested in learning about them and their culture. He went beyond that. He kept in touch with almost everyone he met. His address books (plural) were like several phone books and the drafts of his correspondences literally filled his study, and we can attest to that.

Lesson #3, the final lesson was: legacy is not about products or things, stupid. It is about people and institutions, places where people can gather to learn, to enjoy, to appreciate and to socialize, places that have the potential to affect & impact multiple generations of people past, present & future – like this garden and the Minato Gakuen. That is certainly a legacy one can be proud of. My father was able to share in this legacy and he continues to be a source of inspiration for me, especially at the stage of life I am at.

I do want to acknowledge that all the things that my father was involved with could not have been possible without the support and understanding of my mother. She was the enabler, the one who held down the fort, and the one who had to primarily deal with my sister and me. She was also an active participant, getting involved behind the scenes, working with other wives, helping people get acclimated. She was no slouch. She was the Sergeant of Arms for the Toastmaster chapter she helped establish for many years. She achieved Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) status and became a good speech giver in her own right.

If we are talking legacy, one cannot go without mentioning family. My parents became proud grandparents recently. I would like to introduce the family members who are here today.

 

So, in summary, I would like to leave you with another quote, this one by Maya Angelou.

“Your legacy is every life you’ve touched.”

That is a legacy worth striving for.

I would like to thank the Board of Directors, the Executive Director and CEO, and staff members of the Japanese Friendship Garden & Museum for maintaining & keeping this magnificent place going. I want to give a special heartfelt thanks to Mike Kawamura for organizing and hosting this event.

Thank you all for coming.

Honoring Rio & Tamiko Imamura Part 2

The following is a speech given by Richard Forsyth at the Bench Dedication Ceremony held at the Japanese Friendship Garden & Museum to honor Rio and Tamiko Imamura on November 16, 2024. Richard Forsyth was the legal advisor to Minato Gakuen for 25 years, legal advisor to Japanese Friendship Garden & Museum for more than 10 years, and founding Chairman of the San Diego World Trade Center.

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It is fitting that we find ourselves this morning near the Inamori Pavillion in this beautiful garden. We all know that Dr. Inamori was very generous to San Diego. But, in my mind, one of his most impactful and enduring gits was in bringing Rio Imamura and his wife Tamiko, to San Diego.

I first met Rio in 1986 – during a job interview. He and two others were interviewing me to take the role of outside legal counsel for Minato Gakuen, San Diego’s Japanese elementary and secondary school. I say it was a job interview, but Rio made it immediately clear that there was no pay attached to the position. I was successful in that interview and happily served in that capacity for 25 years. In the years following, I discovered that Rio and Tamiko had arrive in San Diego in the mid-1970’s as a Kyocera executive and became an immediate presence in the Japanese business, educational and cultural communities. Rio played a major role as one of the founders of Minato Gakuen in 1978, and by the mid-1980’s, had become the Chairman of its board.

Let me take a minute to emphasize to you the importance of the decision to start this school, not only for the Japanese business communities of San Diego and Tijuana, but to these cities as a whole. This region was looking to expand its industrial base and this meant attracting foreign investment.

In that era, that meant Japanese investment. The way to secure that investment was to make the region more attractive to Japanese companies and their Japanese employees. There is no better way to do this than to ensure the educational needs of the community are met.

Schools like Minato Gakuen existed elsewhere, nearby in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, but putting Minato Gakuen together in San Diego was a major commitment by Rio and a handful of business colleagues, some in Kyocera, some in other well-known Japanese companies.

I say Rio and other Japanese business leaders – who were likely all men considering the era – but I think it should be stated, that it was without a doubt, Tamiko and other ex-pat wives who were the most important drivers of this movement.

And to state that Rio and his associates founded Minato Gakuen is too simple an expression. Let me take you through the process.

They needed the school to be first accredited and supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, then form a US nonprofit corporation, next negotiate a significant lease of space from the San Diego Unified School District, hire teachers and staff, and finally convince Japanese parents to send their children to the school. This was a significant undertaking.

Minato offered and still offers classes in Japanese in core subjects every Saturday to elementary and secondary students. Since its founding, thousands of students have attended Minato Gakuen and benefited from its offerings.

Rio was not only there at the founding, but he guided the school for much of the 1980’s and 90’s as its board chairman and later as chairman emeritus. It was in those roles I saw his best work.

For example, Minato, by the mid 1980’s, had outgrown its original facilities and Rio renegotiated and expanded the least of space with the San Diego School District. I recall we encountered some resistance from the district because, as it turns out, something I did not know – most teachers are possessive of their classrooms and do not like them used when they are not present. Rio, always a diplomat, convince those American teachers to accept the lease and open their classrooms. He did that by encouraging the US teachers to attend a session or two of Minato, to meet the Minato teachers and staff, and to become acquainted with Japanese teaching methods. He was always a builder of bridges between cultures.

One of my fondest memories of Rio was in the late ‘80s during Minato’s Sports Day or Undokai. If you do not know, Sports Day, as celebrated in Japanese schools and at Minato, is a day-long event with wonderful athletic competition among the students. During this day, he spoke to virtually everyone in attendance - parent, teacher, and child alike. He inquired about them. He welcomed all and treated them as family. My own family was among those he charmed that day.

I think this typified Rio. He loved people. It did not matter to him if you were a high-ranking Japanese executive sitting on Minato’s board, or if you were a second grader enjoying Sports Day. He cared about you and once you spoke with him, you could tell he cared.

He also cared about San Diego, its diverse communities and this garden as demonstrated by his family’s action here and by his friends who join Kirk and Yukina today.

I want to leave you with one last story. In preparing these remarks, I came across some correspondence I received from Rio, which I think will serve as an inspiration to us all. I found a letter from 1997 – I know many of you received such letters from Rio throughout the years, because he also loved to write.

He and Tamiko were just newly returned to Japan. He was lamenting his lack of accomplishments and energy that year. He went on to write that he had only that year restarted his Chinese language lessons and was back to swimming daily, and he had traveled to the US to hike the Olympic Peninsula and visited six cities in Mexico and four cities in Australia. Rio may have felt disappointed but I have a feeling that Tamiko was probably feeling pretty exhausted.

Kirk and Yukina, thank you for this bench. I plan on using it often, and when I do, I will reflect on Rio, his life, his dedication to San Diego and his lasting legacy.

Honoring Rio & Tamiko Imamura Part 1

In the morning of November 16, 2024, at the Japanese Friendship Garden and Museum in San Diego, California, 20 people gathered to dedicate a bench with a plaque engraved with the words, "In Honor of Rio & Tamiko Imamura." They were there to celebrate the life of the late Rio Imamura and pay tribute to his surviving wife. The family was represented by their son, Kirk, and daughter, Yukina, and her extended family. The rest were friends and colleagues of Rio & Tamiko, from their time working together at Kyocera.

Speeches of remembrance were given and photos were taken. After the ceremony, the family was treated to a full tour of the beautiful garden grounds and even got to feed the Koi.

The bench rests under the shade of a tree, offering a view of a small creek and a cherry tree grove behind it. In the spring, the cherry blossoms will be in full bloom and the view should be breathtaking. Many people will walk by the bench and a few might sit to rest or just take a moment and enjoy the tranquility and beauty.

It was a very memorable event, particularly for the surviving family. The next two posts will feature two speeches given during the ceremony.