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MN: Now, I'm gonna go back to your childhood and ask you, now before World War II started, where did your family live and what did your parents do for a living?

TS: Well, we lived, I was born in, we all lived in Japantown on Geary Street and my father was a porter, but he mostly did odd jobs because good jobs were never afforded to Japanese. My father was a pharmacist from Japan, but he never practiced in this country, and he worked at a... when I was born, or shortly after I was born, my father was working at a sandwich shop on Market Street as a cook/sandwich maker, I guess. And he was always underemployed or unemployed, so that's my father's work history. My mother never worked because she had five children.

MN: Now, in the Saito family, of the siblings, where are you in the hierarchy? Are you the youngest, in the middle somewhere?

TS: I have two older sisters, I have two younger brothers, so I'm the middle of three boys and two girls.

MN: And what was your childhood like before the war? Who were your playmates, and did you folks, did you play in the streets?

TS: We played in front of our house. It was a lot of traffic -- well, it wasn't, not as much traffic as, Geary Street became a main thoroughfare after the war, but during that, when I was growing up, Geary Street was, it was on a slight hill. We played in the front of the house. I played only with my brothers, two younger brothers. My sisters were off to themselves, so we didn't have any playmates, per se. And there was no recreational facilities. We were just, we were just delegated to play in the front yard and on the sidewalk or in the house, and we had very little to no toys. We lived in the back of a, of a per diem employment office. People would call for service workers on a per diem basis or maybe a week, weekly basis and my mother would answer the phone and clean up, etcetera. We lived in the back quarters.

MN: So when you, you mentioned you didn't have a lot of toys, so what kind of games did you boys play?

TS: Good question. I don't remember. I don't remember any specific games we played. We didn't have a ball. We didn't have any apparatus. I really can't recall any organized games. There was no baseball, basketball, that kind of stuff. That's a good question, but I remember this: my, my mother still remembers that I, I had a drum, a drum with a string around it so you can put it around your neck, and I wanted to be in a parade, the parade down Japantown. I don't think I made it, but I remember, my mother still remembers that I wanted to be playing the drums in the parade. That's the only thing I did. Well, I guess I had a drum then. So I had something. Wasn't much, though. We never had any money.

MN: Now, in your household what was the main language spoken?

TS: It was all Japanese. My mother was born in Los Angeles. She's a Kibei-Nisei. She went to Japan when she was seven and returned to Seattle in 1924. She met my father and moved to San Francisco and the five of us were born. So we spoke nothing but Japanese. My mother, I just told you, my mother's a hundred and four today and she still speaks Japanese exclusively.

MN: Did you speak any English?

TS: I learned English when I went to the first grade in Topaz.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.