Densho Digital Archive
Oregon Nikkei Endowment Collection
Title: Sam Naito Interview
Narrator: Sam Naito
Interviewer: Jane Comerford
Location:
Date: January 15, 2003
Densho ID: denshovh-nsam-01-0001

<Begin Segment 1>

JC: Okay. Today is January 15, 2003. I am interviewing Sam Naito on behalf of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, and the interviewer is Jane Comerford. So Sam, let's start sort of at the beginning and talk about, a little bit about your family as early as you remember and the stories that you were told about Japan and how they came to this country.

SN: I was born in Portland, Oregon, December 10, 1921, at Saint Vincent Hospital. So therefore, I'm one of the few people in this city that really was born in Portland and raised in Portland. My family, my father came to this country by himself around 1917 and did odd jobs around and so on and finally ended up in Portland, Oregon. He was in Los Angeles and worked in grocery stores and did odd jobs and came up to Portland and washed dishes at a restaurant. And he finally worked for Lipman Wolfe family, Lipman family that own the Lipman Wolfe department store, and he worked there as a houseboy while he was going to school at Binky Walker night school to learn bookkeeping and learn English and so on because he wanted to be a businessman.

Very luckily, he landed a job at a gift shop, and the man liked him. And he wanted to return to Japan, so he sold the business to my father, the small gift shop which was located on Washington Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth. That's the same block in which the famous W.C. Winks Hardware Store was located. Mr. Winks was very, very friendly to my father, helped him out and so on. The prewar days, there were many, many Americans who were very friendly to the Japanese, very much so, until it got into the '30s and the war situation started and the level of prejudice start going up.

My father kept the store going all through until the war started. Meantime, he did other businesses. For example, he constructed a bobby pin in Japan that would be in different colors to match the hair color of women. They were known and called the invisible bobby pin, and he sold this bobby pins all over the United States. Bloomingdale was a big customer, Woolworth was a big customer, and he had a business that was quite big and no one really knew that he had this little business because, you know, bobby pin business does take a lot of warehouse space and so on. The bobby pins were very thin because they were made of Swedish steel, and very, they weren't cheap, you know. But they were carded two, just two bobby pins to a card and sold and sold very well.

The other thing he was bringing in was Agar Agar. Agar Agar is the seaweed that is dried that the doctors recommend as a very natural medication for people who are constipated, the older people, and brought that in for mainly the two drug stores. One I can't remember, one was McKesson and Roberts, big wholesale place. They had a great big warehouse down here on around Fourteenth. So my father was, I thought he was sort of an entrepreneur.

Then the Depression came along in the '30s and the business, he had to scramble around to think of new things to do, and he had a green thumb. He just loved plants and so on. Around the house, he built a garden and raised vegetables, and he bought the lot next door to the house. And he built a small greenhouse and he grew cactus, and he sold cactus in his store. And nobody in Portland was selling cactus, but he was because you can grow cactus in a greenhouse which you can't do outside. And he sold cactus. He sold cactus, and there were cactus collectors and so on. It's amazing, people, you know, you hear all about people collecting this and that. In those days, they were collectors, but they were collecting better things. They were collecting netsuke which my father was importing. Netsukes are the small ivory carvings that are used as a decoration for the little pouch that men used to carry around in Japan.

We had, anyway, I would say that my father was an entrepreneur, but he has a little different personality in that he did not communicate with the Japanese community very much. I mean, he didn't join the Nikkeijinkai which is the Japanese Ancestral Society. He didn't go to the church. My mother went to the Methodist church, the Japanese Methodist church, but he wouldn't go. So he associated with very few Japanese and so on, which is a great saving for him because all those men who were active in the different Japanese groups were picked up by FBI the day of December 7th and taken away to Montana and down to Crystal Springs because they were considered "dangerous aliens." FBI did come to our house and looked around and walked away. My mother came to this country after my father, but they knew each other because they grew up in the same place, and the place was called Tara. Tara was a small town, a village, near Kobe, about... I would say it was a good 50 miles away. I visited there and my mother's father and grandfather owned practically all that land around there. And my father used to tell me that when he was a little boy, he would go up there, mother would ask him to go and get some matsutake. That's the mushroom up in the hills. He would run up the hill, gather mushroom for the dinner for the night. He said they were just all over. So when my father came to this country, he could easily spot mushrooms very easily, because he had all this mushroom training, but he didn't go very often. I mean, he was so busy just to go to Mount Hood to get matsutake. There's so many interesting side lights that I get off track here.

My mother went to move from Kobe to Tokyo, the family did, where she enrolled in a Christian school to learn English and then came over to be with the father and got married here. My mother's family moved here also early years. My grandfather on Mother's side was an entrepreneur that failed. He opened up a drug store, drug store in Tokyo, and it just failed. He was just a very poor businessperson unlike my father and my... so my mother, that's my mother's father that moved here. My mother had a sister... sister who was quite musically talented and she plays the harp. Very unusual to have a Japanese immigrant girl play the harp, and my father bought her a harp. She wanted a harp very badly, and she took harp lessons and she played harp. She was so interested in music that she had one daughter and one son, that's my aunt on my mother's side, that she got the very best teachers, piano teachers possible in Los Angeles. They were living in Los Angeles. She got married to a Japanese dentist which is the dentist that took care of my teeth when I had my terrible bike accident. I got hit by a truck while riding a bicycle when I was going to college, and all of my front teeth were knocked out, and he built the whole bridge which is still the original. This man, his name is Dr. Niiya. He's got to be probably considered the best dentist, first generation dentist in Los Angeles. His reputation is such that he was so busy constantly that you, in those days, in depression days, you know, there weren't that many customers, dental patients. You had to wait two months to get an appointment with this dentist. So he was very successful, but he was quite eccentric person. Eccentric, had a very, very short temper. If a patient wasn't there on time, you had to wait another two months. [Laughs]

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.