Tomio Moriguch, Executive Officer of Uwajimaya, Inc
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Tomio Moriguch, Executive Officer of Uwajimaya, Inc.: Integrating American and Japanese Business Models Moriguch, Tomio My name is Jess Van Duzer and I am the dean of the School of Business and Economics. This is the first of our three Dean’s Speaker Series for this year. We are very glad you could be here. I suspect many of you are here as part of a class. You should know that each of these three speaker series are open to you at all times, whether or not your class is asking you to come. What we try to do is bring some of the leading business leaders from our community here so that you have a chance to get to know them in a relatively intimate way. They will tell you a little bit about their background, a little bit about their company. Really it is a time for you to ask them questions. Our hope in doing all of this is that it will help you take some of the stuff we are trying to teach in classes and see how it shows up on the ground. So I encourage you to be thinking as you listen of questions you might want to ask or you might want to say. In our class we are always told this but how does that really work and is my professor nuts? So however you want to phrase your questions it will be fine. We are glad you are here. I am going to ask Mark if you would do the introductions. Just before you do the introductions if you would let folks know who our next two Dean speakers are. Certainly. Thanks. I am Mark Oppenlander. I am with the Center for Applied Learning and we sponsor these under the offices of the School of Business and Economics. The next two dean speakers will be Ms. Rita Ryder Who is the long-term presidents of the YWCA and she will be coming to campus on I believe January 26th. This is from memory so don’t quote but I think that is right. We always post these on the School of Business and Economics website. And then the third one for the year, the spring quarter we will have J Allard. Mr. Allard I believe is the Vice-president for Entertainment and Technology Division on Microsoft which basically means he gets to play with all the X-boxes and Zunes and all that cool stuff. One of his employees told me any cool toy that we have at Microsoft, J gets to play with it. So he will come and speak in spring and I believe that day is tentatively April 27th. The schedule is a little bit influx right now but that is what we are hoping for. It is my pleasure to introduce to you today Mr. Tomio Moriguchi, our speaker. Mr. Moriguchi is a lifelong resident of Seattle. His current wife Jenny Young Li is from China. He and his first wife, Lovett have a son Tyler and a daughter Denise. In 2003 a new daughter-in-law Thy Pham and a grandson Hew in 2007. Mr. Moriguchi earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington in 1761. He joined the Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions family business in 1962 with the passing of his father Fujimatsu Moriguchi. Mr. Moriguchi is held increasingly responsible positions within Uwajimaya Inc. and is currently its chairman of the board. He is very active in business and civil affairs and has received numerous awards and recognitions for his business leadership and volunteer involvement in both civic and charitable affairs. The Moriguchi family owns Uwajimaya Inc. Uwajimaya is lead by Tomio and three brothers Kenzo, Akira and Toshi, and two sisters Suwaki and Tomoko. A third generation of Moriguchis are also active in Uwajimaya Inc. Its business focuses on the distribution of Asian food products. Uwajimaya businesses include free retail Uwajimaya Asian food and gift markets, customs foods, a manufacture of Asian foods, and food service international, a wholesaler to Asian restaurants. Mr. Moriguchi led the successful real estate development of Fujisada Condominiums in the Uwajimaya Village complex in Seattle’s international district. He is the director of Puget Sound Energy, President of North American Post Publishing and a past director of both Seattle First National bank, Seafirst now Bank of America and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Tomio Moriguchi. Thank you very much. Welcome. I assume you are here because you will get credit or something like that. I was saying that I was doing something like this was at the University of Washington. I am involved with their economic development program. Three quarters of that class was Asian so I think I many have to change my little discussion here. As I stated, I was born in Tacoma. My father started Uwajimaya in Tacoma in 1928. Although I was born in the USA I have very, very strong relations with Japan. I have visited there a number of times and my village where he was born, I just recently brought my grandson there. I stay in touch with my cousins. My father came to the US in 1922 or 3 for the same reasons as many of your parents of grandparents came to the US. He told me at one time that he wanted to make 5000 US dollars to go back to Japan which at that time was 10,000 yen. I said what can you do in 10,000 yen? Probably even in the United States you are able to build a house for about 1000 dollars so for 2000 he would have been able to build a house. Fortunately he never saved that much money here. He started his business in 1928 actually before he was married. It was very difficult. And then the Depression came in the 30’s and then as all of you know in 1932 he and a 120,000 Japanese Americans, mostly American citizens were incarcerated. We were sent to Northern California a place called Tule Lake. He was forced like all the Japanese Americans to sell whatever assets they had for 10 or 25 cents on the dollar. 1946 he came back to Seattle and he purchased a business on Mainstreet. I remember walking in with my dad and there was a Pilipino person who was running a grocery store and he practically threw the keys at my father. He says, “If you are dumb enough to start a business after a major a war, take over.” It was common wisdom that after a major war there is usually a depression or slow down in economy. But anyway my father said he had $400 so he took it over and looking back, because of his Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions reputation in Tacoma and some business contact, he was able to secure merchandise for his shelf on credit. So I guess one of the first things I want to tell you about running a business, you have to build up your reputation so you could have good credit. As business was growing, we expanded a 20 ft storey to maybe 40 or 60 feet. In 1962, he opened a store in the World’s Fair in the fairground. That is the year he passed away. In the fairground store we were very successful because we weren’t selling too much with the tourists but we were selling cigarettes and candies and cookies to the workers in the fairgrounds. Again sometimes your best MPA programs don’t work but the consequences of it. As long as you are there providing good honest service, I think you can make a living profitable business. We prove that at the World’s Fair. The World Fair showed us that our customer base was outside of not only the Japanese Americans who were very important but the awareness of Japanese products to an expanding population. That was also very enlightening during the World’s Fair. That is also unfortunately the year my father passed away and I was working at Boeing. I was there punching the clock 40 hours anyway then coming home and helping my mother and brother. About six months after that, well I can’t do both so I ended up leaving Boeing. My friends said you would have been fired anyway. But anyway… So I came back and my older brother, myself and my mother and a few employees took on the business. My too male siblings that he mentioned, came to work with us after they finished their duty in armed service and my youngest brother finished school I think in Portland. The three sisters, they all had their careers. The youngest sister is now the CEO, returned after the two daughters grew up in the bay area. My one sister is a school teacher at the community college. She has been there for a long time now. We are still trying to figure out if she is the smartest of dumbest of us all. She is probably the smartest. As he also mentioned, we have eight third generation people. My children are not with the company but my nieces and nephews and actually four blood next generation and their spouses are with us. My mother passed away six years ago. My father gets a lot of credit but in most Asian businesses where couples worked together, my mother worked very tirelessly. I think we have to give her probably more credit than she is given.