William Naito

Harper: Good afternoon.
NAITO: Good afternoon.

Harper: If you can please tell us your name and the date and place of your birth.
NAITO: My name is William S. Naito, and I was born in Portland, Oregon, September 16, 1925.

Harper: And where is your family from?
NAITO: My mother and father are from Japan. They were born there in a little village outside of Kobi and came over here right during or after the First World War, about 1917-18. My mother’s older brother was going to Oregon State here. He was kind of an unusual man, my mother’s older brother, because there were very few Japanese, if any, going to Oregon State at that time, or college, period. They come from the same village. My mother’s maiden name was Naito as well. They’re not related. So my uncle suggested to my father that he come to Portland — there’s opportunities here — and learn the language and get some schooling. 

So he came here, and then he attended Benky Walker Business School [?], kind of a night school, while he was a houseboy at Mr. Wolfe’s house. It was a night and day school, a business school, where you learned typing, English, accounting, bookkeeping, and courses like that. Lipman Wolfe used to have a department store that was bought out by Frederick Nelson, and had a very prominent family here. My father was a houseboy, did the dishes or whatever, chores around the house, and they provided him with housing as well as food, and probably a little spending money. Gradually, he accumulated some capital and got to know a Japanese businessman who ran a curio shop, a little gift shop, selling Oriental artifacts. He worked for him and eventually bought out the store. 

About that time, he corresponded with my mother’s father and asked if he could marry his daughter, my mother. They knew somewhat of each other, not like a picture bride sort of arrangement. My mother was always very unhappy over the whole episode; she said she married a “country bumpkin” throughout her life. My mother’s background is from Kobi, a small village. I was there right after the war. A small village of maybe 25 families. Then her family moved to Tokyo, and she attended a girls’ school. Because she had more education than my father and she’d spent maybe three or four years in Tokyo, she thought she was very sophisticated. She was very much an outgoing person, whereas my father was absolutely an introvert. Although he did conduct his business fine, at home he would say very little, very little in social gatherings, very little when the family went out visiting other Japanese families in Portland. Anyway, my mother was a very unhappy wife throughout. 

About that time, her family moved to America from Tokyo. Her mother, her father, and her younger brother and younger sister — her only sister — moved to Los Angeles and settled there. Her sister married a dentist and did quite well. She was a musician and just loved music. My mother did not have that interest, but she had the three boys in the family take piano lessons from day one. It was a typical sort of Japanese family in Portland during the ’20s and ’30s.

Harper: Can you explain what being a “typical Japanese family in Portland” means?
NAITO: A typical Japanese family in Portland — it’s the food we ate. We ate American food Monday through Friday, and Saturday and Sunday we had Japanese food. She would cook Japanese food on the weekends. Then the other thing the typical Japanese family did was send their children to Japanese language school after school. Since we lived on the Eastside, we went to Montavilla Japanese School, where the truck gardeners’ families sent their kids to learn Japanese language. Today it would be Russellville school district. It was a two-room schoolhouse in the middle of a raspberry patch, and we would go there Monday, Wednesday, Friday after school, after dinner, and go there and study Japanese language, calligraphy. We had calligraphy classes. And not too much history, but mostly— there was not too much politics involved.

Harper: Did you speak Japanese in the house?
NAITO: We spoke Japanese in the house exclusively. I’m the second born, so when it came time to go to school, my mother took me to Mt. Tabor grade school, which was about four blocks from our house, and shoved me in the door and said, “That’s the first grade over there. Go.” I did not speak a word of English. It was a very traumatic experience, and to this day I remember that about the second or third week, the teacher was telling and motioning, and I could not understand what she was talking about. But finally I figured it out, she was telling me, “Take out your handkerchief and wipe your snot.” I just could not understand for the life of me what she was waving her hand and talking to me about. It was frustrating for her, too [laughs]. Anyway, finally I did take care of my snot. When you’re six years old, you learn very quickly, so the language came very easily. I had a wonderful time through the eighth grade, played all these games, played ball. 

But at home we spoke strictly Japanese. To this day I cannot understand how my mother was able to make angel food cake from scratch. That’s very difficult. She didn’t go to cooking school. And then we had fried chicken. We had asparagus and all of these foods that the American kids were eating, blackberry pie. She taught me how to cook rice, though. We had rice practically every night. Rice, but the rest — lamb chops, hamburger, holly [challah possibly?]. Then we’d have dessert, and she would bring home from — there was a bakery here, “Manning.” It was a combination restaurant and bakery, and they had the most wonderful apple pie at $.35. Anyway, those are childhood memories of dinnertime, and yet throughout we only spoke Japanese and they would talk about life in Japan quite a bit. 

The only ominous thing was when we’d visit Dr. Tanaka’s home. Dr. Tanaka was the closest Japanese family. We had to drive. He lived in Rose City. His kids went to Rose City grade school. We went to Mt. Tabor. That’s a couple of miles. We’d visit the doctor’s home once every two months or so. We were very close. The parents would be talking about — this was 1937, ’38, ’39, ’40. I could feel it. By that time I could read the paper, and I’d hear them talking about Manchuria. Then pretty soon the Sino-Japanese War started and dark clouds were rolling in. Dark clouds. At ten, 11, 12, 13, 14 that was very scary.

Harper: Before we get into those things, did you have American friends in school? Were you allowed to visit with non-Japanese friends?
NAITO: Yes. I would say I did not have any real Japanese friends until I went to high school. They were so far away that you couldn’t play with them after school. So my friends were all white kids in the neighborhood, neighbors’ kids and so on, like Dick Moren [sp?] two doors down. And all these kids had friends that I developed through grade school: Virgil Rofeeny [sp?], Bob York. We played together. And then we had Bob York’s mother in a 4-H kind of club/class after school. I’d go to this one home that I would be allowed to enter and see how the white people lived [laughs].

Harper: You weren’t allowed to go into your friends’ homes?
NAITO: Not too often.

Harper: Their parents wouldn’t let you, or your parents wouldn’t let you?
NAITO: Both. I wouldn’t say not let you, but it was not done. I don’t know. Today it would be different. We’re talking about in the middle of the big recession, and our whole street was running a little scared. And then I looked different. Maybe that was why. There was one — Bernard Christiansen is the only home that I really visited frequently. He was my friend. She was a divorced woman, had one child and lived on top of a garage, a very humble place. I was always welcome there to play games. 

Here’s another interesting — this whole town moved on streetcars. There were not very many cars. The streetcars went all over the city. I’d ride in the streetcar, and the streetcar was getting fuller and fuller, and I’d be sitting there, and no one would sit next to me. That was always disturbing to this day. Why wouldn’t they? I didn’t have AIDS, I didn’t have chickenpox, I didn’t have scarlet fever, and why wouldn’t they? That always kind of bothered me. Ride the vintage streetcar here or a public bus today. Today I sit there and all the white people sit next to me, but back in the ’30s, residents in the city felt uncomfortable sitting next to a “Jap” or Oriental or Asian. I think it was the same with Black people. At that time Portland had about 2,000 Blacks, 2,000 Chinese, 2,000 Japanese.

Harper: At what age did you first start noticing this?
NAITO: When my mother started to take us on the streetcar to town. I’d say four or five, six. But I think it was later because I would have had to go on the streetcar alone. If my mother took me on the streetcar, I would sit next to her and my younger brother, so he didn’t feel this. He couldn’t see this kind of prejudice or segregation operating on the streetcar. So it must have been when I was ten or 11, when I could take the streetcar by myself.

Harper: Tell me about your brothers. Two brothers?
NAITO: I have an older brother, Sam, and a younger brother, Albert. My older brother is a partner in my business today. He’s been a partner for 40 years. It was a family business that we were. He’s four years older. He went to the University of Oregon, and then the war came. He went to the University of Utah and graduated, and got an MBA from Columbia University. My younger brother, Albert, is two years younger and went to — at that time the Vanport — Portland State. The first two years at Vanport, a two-year junior college at that time, and then two years at University of Oregon. Presently he lives in Costa Mesa. He lived down there for about 35 years. He has four children, married a grade school teacher and did quite well. 

Harper: Do you think your parents were happier in the United States?
NAITO: Than they would have been in Japan?

Harper: Did they regret coming here?
NAITO: They never said that. I think they were pleased to be here. They never talked very much about going back. Matter of fact, they felt very much at home in Portland. They did not say, “What a terrible place. We made a big mistake leaving our village and coming to America.” There was none of that. I think they were just very pleased with the house they lived in. My father had a nice garden, a Japanese garden, and got a lot of satisfaction from raising [vegetables?]. His life was his business as well.

Harper: He had the business while you were growing up?
NAITO: Yes, he had his business. One time, early part of the ’30s, he had two stores, one on Washington between 3rd and 4th, and another one on Morrison between 9th and 10th across from today’s Galleria — a small curio shop, or gift shop. About 25 feet storefront and goes back 80 feet or so. He had that store and made a living and survived the Depression, although one day he came home and looked awfully glum and said, “The total revenue for the day was one dollar.” One dollar. The country was coming out of the recession about ’37, but then it fell back down until about the ’40s. 

He started a wholesale business importing dishes from Japan. He found an agent in Yokohama who would be the export agent, and he would write what he wanted. Mostly he did not import dishes or dinnerware as such, tableware, more like giftware — incense burners, cup and saucers, teapots, and vases. That business was going along quite well, really perking along by ’39, ’40. And then the war, of course, came and wiped it out. 

He was very cheerful and optimistic although the war cloud was coming; it was growing darker and darker. He was kind of a man like a Mr. Yasui [Minoru Yasui] who developed a sizable business in Hood River. There’s lots of writing about Mr. Yasui in Hood River. He was a pioneer and a labor contractor. He brought all the Japanese to Hood River. He spoke very good English, which was unusual. My father, and most Japanese, have a difficult time with English, and I think my father would have been much more successful had he been able to overcome this language handicap. It’s like Mr. Reischauer [Edwin O. Reischauer, US Ambassador to Japan 1961-66] says, “East and West will never get together because of this language barrier. It’s impossible for Americans to learn Japanese and vice versa.” Today he’s been proven wrong, but he said that about 25 years ago. He was married to a Japanese woman, Ambassador Reischauer. That was a handicap, but he still was successful in his business, and he’s always paid all his debts and had some money left over, and he owned his house on 58th and Burnside.

Harper: Would you say you were middle class?
NAITO: I would say we were lower middle. The other part of our lives — my mother’s life revolved around the Japanese Methodist Church, which is on 14th and Everett. Today Chown hardware is located there. It’s a large Victorian house they converted into a church. My mother was very active in the church, went to meetings and went to services. I think she was secretly in love with the minister. There’s an age gap among the Japanese. The husband is on average 15-20 years older than the wife, so this gap. The one was disappointed anyway, kind of being brought over here on false pretenses. They thought the man was much better looking, and that he had a good job and a house, but it turned out that he was living in a hovel, or living on a farm, back-breaking, dirty. Disappointment. So here the minister is kind of educated and younger and good-looking, so all the issei mothers were enchanted by the minister. But the social life — and I think that’s where she learned how to cook angel food cake and all these different American dishes. 

She wanted us to be Americanized, and she was smart enough to figure things out and raise us accordingly as Americans. But in our family growing up on 58th and Burnside in the ’30s — I mentioned that we were just three boys and no daughters. That was a great disappointment to my mother. She wanted a daughter in the worst way. That’s another disappointment. Her life was a series of disappointments. But she wanted a daughter, and she made me into a daughter, a girl, by dressing me. Looking at the old picture, here I am with long hair like this, with a dress on. Now that, I think, is hard on identity [laughs]. It’s a wonder I survived. And then she had me in the kitchen. She didn’t have the other two boys do any of the — I was brought up like Cinderella in the kitchen doing all kinds of menial tasks. I had the job of washing dishes. I had the job of cooking rice, although it takes a certain amount of talent to cook rice just right. I cooked rice. 

At Christmas time my mother would go help my father at the store because it was so busy, so she’d ask me to get dinner ready. I would get the rice, wash the rice a certain way, have a certain amount of water, and cook it at high a certain number of minutes. You don’t have a timer, you just sense it, and I was able to do that. And then do the dishes. At Thanksgiving time I’d help her get Thanksgiving dinner ready. She had turkey. In Japan, there are very few turkeys. There’s a name for turkeys, shichimencho, but there’s hardly any. My father learned about turkey from the Wolfe family. Anyway, we had turkey for Thanksgiving like everybody else in the city. She learned how to make stuffing and I would help her, but I didn’t want to tear the bread up in small pieces by hand. She said that’s the way it has to be done. I wanted to do it by a knife and slice it in cubes like this, which is a lot faster — it’s about three times faster — but she said it won’t taste as good. It’s wrong to do it. She said, “It’s the form.” Form was more important than substance throughout her life. Form was being dressed just right and speaking just right. The form. I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t like it at all [laughs]. Cooking is also form, how the food is laid out on the plate. That was important to her. And here I am five, six, seven, eight, nine years old, and couldn’t be bothered [laughs]. 

Anyway, here I was scullery maid and did all that as well as help my father. We had a wood-burning stove in the basement, and I would always have kindling there for my father to start the furnace early in the morning in the wintertime. I love to this day chopping wood. The whole basement, one side, I’d have all this nice kindling chopped up for my father. And then, I did all the repairs and things. I caught the mice. To this day I catch mice in my house, scaring my wife. “Here, I got one!” But I look back, and I was actually very angry being the Cinderella there.

Harper: Did your brothers make fun of you?
NAITO: They didn’t really; they appreciated that they didn’t have to do this dumb work. Another interesting talent I got is I could iron. I ironed everything but shirts. My mother would not let me iron my father’s shirts because I wouldn’t do it quite right. I hung up the laundry and brought it in, folded it, and did whatever ironing was necessary. My two brothers did not. They don’t know which way to hold an iron [laughs]. That’s the way I grew up there. 

I had a wonderful time with my friends in grade school. The teachers loved me, and I loved my teachers. It was a second home. Whatever love my mother didn’t give me, my teachers did. I got attention, love. To this day, those teachers like Mrs. Lamb, Woodmere, Mrs. Yompaw [sp?], they just — and I was a good student. Well-behaved. But most of the kids in the whole class were well-behaved in those days. Everybody paid attention, did their homework; there was no truancy. I just marvel. 

And this was a lower middle class, working class neighborhood. Mt. Tabor was just on this side of Laurelhurst and also Glencoe. Glencoe was where the middle class lived. The Presbyterian Church vs. the Methodist Church. And I went to church every Sunday. My mother sent me all scrubbed, dressed, to Sunday School. There was no Japanese, no Black, just us plain working class Methodist Church. There was Reverend Reed. Watford Reed, who writes for the Oregonian, his father was the minister. He was the Sunday school teacher. This year is the 50th reunion of Washington High School, and Watford Reed is still around. He taught Sunday School. But anyway, that’s how we grew up there. I didn’t really know prejudice other than the streetcar.

Harper: Let me ask you one more question, and then we can start talking. You said you were raised Methodist. Was the whole family raised Methodist? Was religion important to your family, and was it important to you growing up?
NAITO: Religion was important to me. I could see this big painting of Jesus, and if I didn’t behave, or did anything bad, he’d get me. This sort of Sunday school class. There are two churches here. One is the local Methodist Church, a white church. The other Methodist Church is an all-Japanese church where older people and grownup Japanese attended. There was really not much connection between the two. One sang hymns, “Rock of Ages,” in Japanese, and the other one in English. Also, my mother wasn’t all 100% devoid of Buddhism and Confucianism because that’s how she grew up. Her mother was a Buddhist, and she’d always have, not a real Buddhist altar, but a sort of a halfway altar in our house. She would have my uncle who passed away, the student at Oregon State, his picture would be there. Later on, when my grandfather passed away, she would have grandfather’s picture, and she would burn incense in the house. She brought that. She didn’t completely give up this Buddhism.

Harper: Did you meet your grandparents?
NAITO: Yes, I met my mother’s parents. Going back in the ’30s, every fourth year my father would let my mother go to Los Angeles to visit her relatives down there. In the summertime she would take us on this very long train ride, and we’d go through the tunnels and nearly expire. Every summer. We’d stay there six to eight weeks. My grandparents lived right in Japantown in Los Angeles on East First St., in an SRO [single-room occupancy] hotel, like the ones we’ve got downtown in Old Town. A two-story building with about 20 rooms, and they would be occupied by bachelor Japanese. My grandmother would make their beds, change their bed sheets and stuff, and my grandfather would in the morning sweep the halls, probably did the bathroom, and then he spent the rest of the day playing Go, Japanese chess, and drinking wine all afternoon, and betting and usually losing a quarter. He was a happy camper. 

They would correspond. Once a week they would exchange letters, all this time between the four years. She would go down there, couldn’t do enough. She had a younger brother who was my grandmother’s pet, just absolutely enchanted with this kid. My mother would go down there, and all she heard from her mother was how terrible that no one does enough for my Uncle Ted, this cute little boy. He was by that time in high school. My mother’s sister lived there, too, and from the second, third day we’d get there, all my mother would hear were incessant complaints from my grandmother about how this poor boy. She never said, “How’s Portland?” How’s my father? How are things with you?” My grandmother was very selfish, and that went on for about six, eight weeks. But it was a wonderful place to visit. My grandfather would take me to the zoo. They had an alligator farm as well as a zoo there, so that was great excitement. And eat quite a bit Japanese food. My grandmother would have Japanese food every day rather than twice a week. That was the big excitement in my mother’s life, to go down there. She just got unhappy when she got there finally [laughs]. Well, shall we talk about the war?

Harper: First tell me where you went to high school.
NAITO: I went to Washington High School.

Harper: What year did you graduate?
NAITO: I started there in 1940, and I did not graduate because the war came. In the spring of ’42 we moved to Salt Lake City.

Harper: OK. Let’s take this chronologically. So that’s . . .
NAITO: Let’s go back. 

Harper: First . . .
NATIO: You asked me what year I graduated Washington High School. I didn’t graduate. I did graduate from Granite High School in Salt Lake City in 1944.

Harper: OK. Now I want to shift focus. Is there anything about your childhood that I left out that you may want to say?
NAITO: I did have this poor people’s disease, rickets. I can’t understand. My brothers did not have rickets. Rickets is a vitamin C [D] deficiency. No one ever in this country has the rickets today. I had this terrible rickets, though. You see pictures of my father carrying me, and I had steel braces on. That’s, I think, one reason why I’m smaller than my younger brother. My younger brother’s almost six feet tall. My older brother is two or three inches taller. I think he’s shrinking now [laughs]. But anyway, I had that and they took me to white doctors, specialists, who could not figure out the reason for rickets, or they didn’t prescribe the right medicine. My father used to carry me for a couple of years when I had rickets. But somehow they accidentally figured it out, or I started to eat oranges. 

Other than that, I had, I would say, a great eight years at Mt. Tabor grade school, the best time of my life bar none. And all of these friends were all white kids. I did not have any Japanese friends. We were not impoverished. We lived frugally, but we had enough to eat, and clothes, so we had a good time. We’d visit our Japanese friends, and they were not badly off either. Quite a few lived in South Portland, around the auditorium site there. We’d visit there, these two-three story old buildings, small buildings, and they would have a Japanese grocery store on the first floor. They would live above there and have a trap door to go down to the grocery store, which was kind of exciting for a little kid. I thought, “What a marvelous thing to have. You go down through this secret passageway.” 

Around the auditorium site, there were quite a few Jewish families. The Japanese and Jewish kids would play. They went to school together, Lincoln High School, and the Jewish kids would all go to Hebrew school after school. The Japanese kids, those who lived downtown — I felt very fortunate — they would have to go to Japanese school every night, five nights plus half a day Saturday. They were much better in the Japanese language than I was. They could read a Japanese newspaper, and that’s quite an accomplishment, 3,000 Chinese characters. But, anyway, shall we go on to the next chapter?

Reich: I have some questions, actually, about this period of your life. Was your family in touch with any other part of the family in Japan? Was there close contact?
NAITO:  They exchanged letters. My father’s two younger brothers — he was the eldest — lived in Kobi there. I think they were kind of low-level bureaucrats in the city of Kobi. And then my mother had a cousin in Japan, and they corresponded, but they never came to this country during all that time. They could not afford to come. Nor did my father ever return to Japan until after the whole war was over and he started his business over again. He never went back to Japan from 1920 to about 1955, 35 years, nor my mother, either. They lived here and had very little contact. My father had business contact with this agent in Yokohama ordering porcelain ware.

Reich: Did you expect to go to Japan for higher education?
NAITO: No, I did not. The only kind of interest my mother had was she wanted us to be doctors, and medicine was high on her list of ambitions for her kids. Matter of fact, all Japanese women at that time came over here in the 1920s and 1910s, when in Japan the most desirable person to marry for a young girl would be a doctor. A doctor, but not a Japanese PhD, which is not given early. It’s given at 45 or 50, an honorary sort of a scholarly achievement. Here there’s no honorifics or titles, while in Japan they have all types of titles — baron, whatever. All the titles are there. The only title you can have here is “Dr.” Doctor Hara or whatever. But at that time, the mothers wanted their daughters to marry a hakase, a doctor. 

If the immigration was delayed by 20 or 15 years, then all the nisei would be army officers [laughs]. The militarists came in about 15-20 years after my parents left Japan. At that time, all the mothers wanted their daughters to marry generals. I’m sure that’s where this great interest in Japanese mothers in this country, issei mothers, wanted their sons to be doctors, and if you couldn’t become an M.D., — say the first son made it to medical school. They had a quota at that time, two Asians and two Jewish students, that’s it, at the medical school here. That was the quota before the Second War, before they started opening up, probably in the ’50s. It was very different. So they became dentists next. 

There were a lot of Japanese kids that went to dental school. And then, if you couldn’t do that, you’d become a pharmacist. They all have doctor titles, you see. Then pharmacist, and finally, I suppose, the optometrist. A great many Japanese, those who lived in this town, their sons became one of those four professionals with a doctor honorific. In Portland, the most famous successful optometrist is Dr. Uyesugi [Newton K. Uyesugi Wesley]. He changed his name after the war to Wesley. He changed his name to Wesley because Wesley is the founder of the Methodist church from England. He found out it was very difficult. Wasugi is almost impossible to spell — it’s just tough — so he changed it to Wesley, and he invented the contact lens and founded North Pacific School of Optometry, which became part of Pacific University later. I think he’s still alive. He lives in Illinois. Why I know so much about this family, my mother’s best friend was Mrs. Wesley. This optometrist’s mother was my mother’s best friend. I think he’s very generous; he gives quite a bit of money to Pacific University. They lived on 14th and Flanders, or somewhere like that.

Reich: Did you have any contact with Chinese-Americans?
NAITO: Zero. Japanese and Chinese never intermingled, intermarried. Maybe got one out of a thousand. The Sino-Japanese War did not help. There’s a distinct societal difference, two different societies. In summary, we grew up in a Japanese community, and no one really had any interest to go back to Japan. And gradually, I suppose, over the years, the relationships over there would disappear to nothing. My mother never had a bank account over there or sent savings. They were so busy trying to make ends meet and raising their kids, and showing me how to cook rice.

Reich: Did your parents get their interest in Christianity and Methodism in the United States or in Japan?
NAITO: In the United States. My mother’s mother was a practicing Buddhist. She was a very religious woman. I would say my mother really didn’t become very religious. It was like a social club; it could have been a bridge club. But my grandmother was a very religious woman. Any more questions?

Harper: Do you want to take a break now?
NAITO: No, let’s go on.

Harper: You mentioned that this dark cloud was beginning to form. Tell me when you first knew attitudes were rapidly changing against the Japanese, and then tell me about the war itself.
NAITO: The war clouds were getting — you’d read that newspaper, and we did subscribe to the Oregon Journal, the afternoon paper. My parents would be talking about these war clouds, and then Pearl Harbor came. Everybody seems to remember that day as a sunny day here in Portland. My brother was at the University of Oregon, a sophomore, and I was a sophomore at Washington High School, and then things started to fall apart in our family. First, the following night, the Treasury agent came and put a red tag on my father’s store in front. It said, “No one is allowed. Do not enter. This is under the control of the U.S. Treasury.” He couldn’t go to work, he couldn’t take — they froze all his bank accounts so he couldn’t get money to pay for groceries in the whole, I suppose, emergency. Then gradually this hysteria started to grow.

Harper: Let me interrupt you. How about before Pearl Harbor? Was there anything building? Any hints that something drastic like this might happen? Were you treated any different?
NAITO: No. I would say there was nothing except this kind of — my friends did not treat me differently. There was no rock throwing or anything, no abuse whatsoever. It was sort of business as usual until the war came.

Harper: Until America’s involvement in the war, until Pearl Harbor?
NAITO: Yes, Pearl Harbor. Then the whole world fell apart for us. There was a disaster, but I kept on going to school, Washington High School. They didn’t throw rocks at me there. My good friend, George Katugeri [sp?], didn’t go to school. He couldn’t face his friends, so he stayed home for about six weeks until finally his mother made him go to school. It was utter humiliation. It was devastating, the war. Then, at the same time, the FBI came and scared my mother to death. They came and searched the house and the crevices. In the meantime, I threw my air rifle and camera into the pond. We had this pond in the back with goldfish. I threw them in there. I don’t know whether we burned anything with the Japanese flag symbol on it or anything, but my mother could have done that.

Harper: I’m sorry. I’m going to interrupt you again. Did you understand what was going on and why? Also, what was your personal reaction to your parents’ country attacking your country? Do you see the difference? Emotional vs. the physical?
NAITO: I didn’t know. It was confusing. They depicted the Japanese here — all these cartoons started to come out. Those cartoons started in 1937 in the Hearst paper, with buck teeth and horrible looking people. I look at my mother’s friends, and they just don’t look like that. Anyway, it was confusing for a little kid of 16 years old. I kept on praying that things would work out OK. They closed my father’s — they wouldn’t let him open the store, so I went around the neighborhood with a petition asking to write little letters that my father was a loyal American, a loyal resident. He was not a saboteur, not a fifth columnist; he was just an ordinary businessman, loyal to this country. He bought war bonds.

Harper: You knew that anyone who was Japanese was suspected of being a saboteur?
NAITO: Saboteurs, traitors to this country. They closed down my father’s store and wouldn’t let him open up. This was our livelihood. He had all this merchandise in there, and it was a disaster, so I went around and had the minister, Reverend Reed, write nice letters that my father was loyal to this country. He couldn’t be a citizen because they didn’t allow citizenship to Asians, kind of a really stupid law. Asians. So he couldn’t be a citizen even if he wanted to; he would have been a citizen long before, but he couldn’t become a citizen because of the law. 

Anyway, so my father had a similar problem. He liked this country. He was loyal to this country. He had mixed feelings. The Japanese were doing well, whatever. Especially in the Chinese War, I think he kind of favored Japan, but this Pearl Harbor business, he said it was a dumb thing to do, what a stupid thing. He knew what Japan was 20 years earlier when he left. It was a very primitive, backward country, like a third world country. A third world country taking on America. He could see the vastness of this country, and the industrial strength of this country, and how could they be stupid enough to take this country on? It’s a wonder he didn’t get completely depressed, but he was able to function. Anyway, here’s war, and finally we had to . . .

Harper:  Tell me about this petition.
NAITO:  It worked.

Harper:   So what happened? Who did you send it to?
NAITO:  The FBI and the Treasury Department. It worked, and they let my father open the store. Here’s another amazing thing about my father. He did all this business with Japan importing, so he was constantly writing letters back and forth, and the FBI never took him away. About a hundred from their community, men, were taken to Montana initially, and eventually ended up in Tule Lake.

Harper:  You mean this community of 100 men?
NAITO:  Yes, they were classed as “dangerous.” Maybe 70, quite a few, who were just taken away in the middle of the night and locked in jail. Then they didn’t hear from them very often, but they ended up in Montana in a prison. A lot of those were just members of a Japanese fencing club, or just innocuous clubs. And here my father who had direct connections in 1940, he was not; he was allowed to go free. Maybe it was because of that petition.

Harper:  When was your father allowed to reopen his shop? Do you remember the date?
NAITO:  It was about one week, and that kind of saved the day.

Harper:   Who did you send the petition to exactly?
NAITO:  I think I sent it to the Justice Department. I must have hand delivered it, I can’t remember. I got it to them anyway. I think they were more like letters from our neighbors, and the minister. Maybe I had a teacher write a letter. It was sort of a miracle that they would listen [laughs]. I was just a 16-year-old kid. Ever since then, I’ve thought one person can take on a bureaucracy. But anyway, the store was opened and we kept on just pins and needles, and finally they had this kind of window of two weeks where you could voluntarily leave this state and resettle beyond the 200-mile line.

Harper:   Did you get a letter in the mail or something?
NAITO:  No, it was in the newspaper, and I guess there were handbills sent out. My mother’s sister had a cousin who was a doctor in Salt Lake City and taught at University of Utah Medical School. He taught anatomy. Anyway, he was there, so my mother and my grandmother, we all kind of escaped there, and then we bought a little house on the hill there. The last house on the hill. Salt Lake is built on a big Wasatch Mountain [on the Wasatch Front], and beyond that was only sheep. We spent the whole war there, four years, and I went to Granite High School and got my high school diploma and then went to the service, Army. They wouldn’t let me in the Marines. They wouldn’t let me in the Navy. They’re more prejudiced than the Army.

Harper: Let me ask you. You moved to Utah. You sold the business here?
NAITO: We sold the inventory of our wholesale import business. We sold it to a little gift shop like Seaside Agate Shop. We only served this four-state area. We had one salesman, Mr. Nicholson, who went and traveled around and sold that merchandise for us, sent my father the money, collected the money. Then we had a lady there, Mrs. Saunders, ran the store by herself during my father’s absence. She kind of ran it on her own; she took the money and paid herself as well as paid the rent and paid for the merchandise. We had a lot of merchandise there in the basement of the store. So we survived, my father’s business, more or less. Then in Salt Lake City, here’s my father, he’s kind of active and he didn’t have anything to do, so he’s getting more and more depressed. 

I didn’t tell you, but in Portland I also ran a poultry farm, about seven chickens and one rabbit, in the backyard. Probably illegal today. And I learned how, where the eggs came from. I went to the central library and read books on animal husbandry, learned about chicken disease, coccidiosis or something [laughs]. Then we moved to Salt Lake. I thought this is a good area to raise chickens because it’s dry; the chickens don’t get sick as often in Salt Lake. So finally I designed these two large chicken coops that held 600 hens. I built that thing from scratch, laid the concrete. That’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life, and I had my father and my older brother help. I was the contractor, carpenter, mason, everything. I figured this whole thing out, started this egg business there, and right behind our house — we lived in a brick house there — in the backyard I built these two, and I had my grandmother and my mother clean the eggs. 

You guys that don’t know chickens, eggs come out with poop on them, so you need to sandpaper. These two ladies just thought it was beneath their dignity, just awful, to have to sandpaper eggs all day. And there were 500-600 eggs to clean every day. Then my father would put them in the box and take them to the poultry wholesaler and sell the eggs and buy feed, and feed more chickens. We had chicken every day; to this day, I hate chicken. We had chicken sukiyaki, fried chicken, roast chicken, chicken stew. What it is, chickens have this terrible — they’re cannibalistic. If you have a little blood, a peck and there’s blood, all these hens would pounce on and kill the hen, and then there’s nothing you can do but kill it, finish the job. So we had a lot of chicken [laughs]. But it saved my father’s sanity. It kept money to pay the bills.

Harper: Was this then the means of support you had?
NAITO: Yes. To this day, I like chickens. I mean, I like chickens alive, but I hate to eat chicken. But anyway, then I served in the Army two years and came back on the GI bill and went off to college. 

Harper: You enlisted in the Army?
NAITO: We were drafted. This was June of 1944. You registered on your 18th birthday, and I was drafted. They sent me to this segregated infantry unit, the 442nd Infantry in Camp Blanding, Florida. We were the replacement troops for the 442nd. We trained, and then at the end of the training, they pulled out anyone who could speak, read, or write Japanese. They gave those the Army intelligence test. If you scored high enough, then they sent us to military intelligence school in Ft. Snelling in November of that year, ’44.

Harper: Let me interrupt you, please. Were you aware of the internment camps, the concentration camps of the Japanese-Americans?
NAITO: Yes, I was well aware because it was in the newspaper. Our friends were there. My mother’s friends ended up in Minidoka, Idaho, next to Sun Valley there. There was a lot of correspondence, and we knew that well.

Harper: This might be a strange question, but what did your family and you think of this?
NAITO: I would say we felt bad, that it was a big tragedy. And then you didn’t know what was going to happen. That was the worst. These things came on in a window of two weeks, and most of the people in Portland did not have the wherewithal, or relatives in Salt Lake, to depend on, so they were shoved in these camps. The war was still going on, so you didn’t know what was going to happen to all of us. After the war, will they send us back to Japan, or kill us, or whatever?

Harper: So you were scared?
NAITO: I was scared all the time. That’s why to this day I’m terrified to read Anne Frank and I’m terrified to see that movie because that’s the way we felt — that poor little girl hiding. In our house on 58th, the FBI came knocking and scared my mother to death, and I just didn’t know what was going to happen. And that Schindler’s movie where they come to get everybody out of the ghetto, and everybody’s hiding under the floorboards. You don’t know what’s going to happen. And that’s why those were scary days. I think we were all scared; I don’t care whether I was 16 or my father was 48, 50. Here’s the majority, the big majority here, and they go hysterical, and here’s a small minority in Portland, just 2,000 Japanese-Americans there. They heard that bombs were falling, and people just went crazy. I’m going to run out of time, but so I used to tell my father, “It can’t happen. They can’t mistreat us because we have a Constitution, a Bill of Rights. They aren’t going to mistreat us because our lives are protected by the Constitution. They don’t shoot people here unless you’ve done something wrong.”

If you blew up Bonneville Dam, which they thought we might do, they aren’t going to shoot us or hang us or throw us in jail because we got the Bill of Rights that protects, the Fifth Amendment, due process. I learned that in high school, and about the cost of a free country. It’s a great place to live. But it didn’t work out quite like that. It’s one of the few times that the Bill of Rights failed us. Only twice, once in the Civil War when there was martial law. They were trying people by the military court rather than civil court, even though the civil courts were still open. And then there was our episode here. Anyway, I still have, I suppose, quite a bit of faith that things will work out, and the Constitution is there. 

I was talking to the mayor of Leningrad a couple of years ago, and he said we have done a much better job of handling minorities in this country than in Russia by far. And I told the mayor, I said, “That’s because the founding fathers, when they started this country, thought that they should have a written Bill of Rights to set out the tone of how this country should be run, and that the majority should not pick on the minority, a small fortune [?] minority, and that’s why we’ve got the Bill of Rights there.” The mayor listened and said, “That’s a good point.” It doesn’t happen by just issuing the edict like the Bill of Rights; it takes 200 years for people to gradually absorb it and understand it, and it gets into your hearts and minds that we don’t pick on people unfairly, minorities.

That’s the lesson that has relevance here, about how the founding fathers started with the Bill of Rights there in place, and I thought that was true. But the tragedy here is we didn’t commit a crime. I didn’t blow up Bonneville Dam, but they were afraid we might, so they told us in order to go to Salt Lake, we could not go down the Columbia Gorge Highway. We had to go around Mt. Hood, across through Burns, Oregon to Salt Lake. Ridiculous. How could I or my father blow up Bonneville Dam? There was hysteria. Then to deprive us, take away property, take away a lot of our friends. We had to leave, were never really compensated for it. 

Then the city of Portland, the city council here, right after, in February 1942, about two months after Pearl Harbor, cancelled all the business licenses of all Japanese aliens. That meant all these first-generation Japanese that all had proprietorships, or small businesses, because they couldn’t get a regular job. There was so much prejudice. I could not get a job as a mailman, policeman, garbage collector, nothing. About the only job you could get was a dishwashing job at Benson Hotel or Multnomah Hotel. The alternative was to run a little shop, grocery, or these small hotels. But they canceled their licenses, and then the city council that same afternoon goes out to the battleship Oregon [USS Oregon], which was parked right by Hawthorne Bridge at that time, for a ceremony welcoming newly-sworn-in American citizens on the boat there after they just passed this very mean, mean ordinance. Welcome to, “This is America.” Welcome to your citizenship. That’s ironic, that story that Charlie Davis or someone told me about that very afternoon after.

My father hired a lawyer to oppose this kind of stupid, this cancelling the business license. How would that help the war effort? Zero. And what were all these people going to do to make a living? Cruel, irrational action on the part of the government. That’s why we need all these laws to prevent the government or the authority — they have a monopoly of guns and all this power there. That’s why we circumscribe and limit. That’s the difference between here and Russia. Anyway, I survived that. When we came back, I visited my family’s burial ground in Japan with my American uniform, and I was treated very well by my relatives and people over there. The war was over and that was it. I spent a year in Japan right after the surrender. That was in August. By the first of October, we went first to the Philippines and came up.

Harper: This was with the Army?
NAITO: Yes, the Army, military intelligence. I was with a civil censorship detachment, which is kind of ironic. Here we were doing censorship, radio, mail, everything — magazines, newspapers — and then four years after the war MacArthur figured out that it’s not very democratic to have censorship and to have a democracy in Japan. Censorship is somewhat of an anomaly.

Harper: What were you censoring?
NAITO: They were censoring for propaganda.

Harper: For things coming out of Japan, or going into Japan?
NAITO: Everything: mail, opening people’s letters, opening people’s packages, as well as radio broadcasts. The whole gamut, all print media as well as radio. They didn’t have television. They would censor that, too. We had a 50th reunion of this civil censorship detachment a month ago in Los Angeles. NHK [Japan Broadcasting Corporation], the big national TV like BBC in England, had a program there at the reunion. There was a lot of curiosity in Japan: what were the censorship people doing there during the four years?

Harper: This censorship group was all 442nd people?
NAITO: No, they’re a different group. 442nd people were there, but part of them, like I mentioned, were pulled out. Those who could speak or read Japanese were put into intelligence, and then they served at all these different — they were at every event, from Guadalcanal on, every major battle, and they’re the ones that listened in on Japanese. The Japanese people thought that they could speak Japanese on the radio and no Americans would understand. But these niseis were there writing down all this information. [For instance,] they listened to the radio and knew exactly what time Admiral Yamamoto’s airplane would be coming by there as well as the battle plan at Midway. 

OK, that’s it. I’ve got to go.

Harper: Would you be willing to reschedule another time?
NAITO: Yes, I’d rather do that if you guys want to hear any more.

Harper: Yes, definitely. We’d like to hear more.