<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.

<Begin Segment 2>

JC: I'd like to backtrack a little bit. We've gone through history pretty quickly there. I'd like to go back to when you were a small boy, and hear about what, who was in your family, where did you live, what were your early experiences in childhood?

SN: There's so much to tell that I, you know, I get sidetracked and start talking, but I move on. I went to Mount Tabor grammar school. My father moved away from, did not live in the Japanese ghetto as so-called which in southwest and northwest Portland. So he had very little, so therefore, we had very little contact with Japanese. My mother was a little bit unhappy about that; but of course, we had a car so my father took her to Japanese church once every Sunday and waited for her and then picked her up and brought her home, but he didn't go to church himself. When I went to grammar school, I was the first Asian or even non-white to enter that school. So therefore, I was a big curiosity to everybody, you know, everybody from the first grade down. My teacher was Miss Lavin, L-A-V-I-N, and she was really, really kind, I mean nice to me, because she knew because I had very limited amount of English because English was not spoken in the house. So I learned very quickly English, you know, very quickly and got to know what it is, and the teacher took special time to try to teach me, you know, get me up to grade on my speaking ability. So, and also my father didn't know when school was started, so I got started in almost like, I guess he find out, found out that I was supposed to be in school a little late. [Laughs] I think school had started in January and I got to school in February or something like that, February as I can remember, and school was walking distance from my house. And I made a lot of friends in school and lot of the boys liked to get to know me because I was, looked different than others and so on. I still have friends that, from grammar school. His name is John Beema who comes down, John Beema who comes down here from time to time to visit me from Tacoma. He lives in Tacoma. He's married to a Korean girl. And then I have other friends that, grammar school friends here but I don't get to see them too often. Your friends change as you grow older.

JC: So you were kind of a curiosity when you were young because you were Asian. Did you, do you feel you experienced prejudice at that age?

SN: No. I didn't feel any prejudice at that age. That's very, very interesting. I think... I think prejudice comes up, flares up when there are more than a small group. Let's say there are more, a lot more of the people around. The other very important thing is that... that people don't realize is that if you don't see another Asian face, all right, then you don't think that you are Asian because everybody's white, everybody's white. And so it doesn't come to your mind that you're Asian, all right, if you're the only Asian. That is very important, I think, in my whole life of growing up, you see, growing up not thinking that you're Asian. I think it reflects on my school, and it reflects on my life and the way I talk because, you know, if you're in the ghetto, you know you're Japanese or you're Korean or whatever. You're different than the others. You realize that because you see it. So when I got to Washington High School, I started feeling that, and then a certain amount of prejudice starts showing up. It's amazing that the neighborhood my father built the house had, no one objected to my father and mother moving in, in Fifty-eighth and Burnside. This is a blue collar area, it's a blue collar. There was a physician down the street on the same street, Dr. Rose. But anyway, but the neighbors were all very friendly, very acceptance. Next door was a Norwegian immigrant, Norwegian couple named Olsen. And next door to that was Marlow who was a fireman, and he was very friendly, and on the corner was Ward. I can remember these people. Mr. Ward who was a delivery man for the Journal newspaper and did all the delivery work, heavy truck work and so on, and everybody was very friendly. We did, we did have a little gang, gang wars, throwing pears or apples and so on at each other. That was probably the extent of gang war in those days.

JC: So you said that you didn't sort of experience your "Japaneseness" until high school at Washington High School. Then how did you experience that? What was it that made you recognize that you were different?

SN: Well, when I see other Japanese, then you realize you're Japanese too. And then there is where the break started, the prejudice starts to bring up. I was taking public speaking and some of this... we're play acting, all right, boy and girl play acting. I was the only Japanese boy in that class. Now, we had to, you know, play acting was like asking a girl to marry you or some kind of a thing, one of those things. So the teacher was in quandary of which girl that I should be doing that because she didn't want to have the mother and father saying that, "You have a little Jap boy doing this lovemaking to my daughter." But there was one girl who was rather friendly to me, constantly friendly from way back and he knows that, so he used that girl. That was the first time I felt there was prejudice in high school.

JC: And what year are we talking about right there?

SN: We're talking about 1940, '39, '40, '41. As you know, there was a certain amount of anti-Japanese feeling flaring up. And when you went to prom and so on, you're supposed to take a Japanese girl. I didn't. I was kind of shy about asking any of the Japanese girls because they were, they were shy themselves. I can't remember the details, but I did end up with a girl for prom which I was embarrassed about. [Laughs] But anyway, that's why. So I went to, from there went to University of Oregon, and there were quite a few Japanese Americans, Niseis, Niseis at that place, and we stayed. Of course, none of the frats would allow Japanese in there. So I stayed at the student dorm, and there were several, there were quite a few Japanese Americans, Niseis, going to University of Oregon at that time. Of course that was 1940.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

SN: Then I started school there in '41. As you know, the end of '41, the war broke out. It was a very unpleasant day, extremely emotionally unpleasant. Couldn't believe that war would start, they would start the war, Japan would bomb Pearl Harbor. Everybody around the dorm and so on was yelling and screaming and so on. But there were several, several students who... students that was very supportive, understand that you're American, "Don't worry about it. We know you as an American citizen even though you look like Japanese," and so on and was very supportive. Okay. General DeWitt made the order that we had to leave, and this is spring term, and we wanted to finish our term before we left. And so we went to the president as a group, all Japanese group, and I was one of the spokesmen. Two of us were spokesmen and pleaded that he write to or phone General DeWitt and allow students to finish their term before they're forced out of school because we paid for the tuition, and it just would be very disruptive. This president was a very mean person, highly prejudiced. I think his name was Webb. I'm can't swear... I know someone looked it up for me and gave it and I think it was Webb. Anyway, he was the president and said no. I went to Dean Schumacher who was the liberal arts, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts. He was really upset. He said this is terrible, so he went to the president. I went to him because I made friends with him, and he was very liberal minded. He felt very good about Japanese Americans. And he went there and pleaded, and of course the president just ignored him, that's it. So we all left, Japanese Americans left.

JC: So what is it like to experience that? I mean, here you are, you're an American. You've been living your life like everybody else, and suddenly, you're something other than that, and you're saying some people were supportive. I assume there's a flip side to that, of some people weren't supportive. What's that experience even like?

SN: Well, there is a certain amount of bitterness going through you. Bitterness that is a, and you just feel really like you've been betrayed. You were told all along that you are an American citizen, you were born here, you're just as much American citizen as a German, you know, German second generation born here or Italian born here. And you've got to remember, the war was going on already in Europe against the Italians and the Germans. And so it was very difficult. We became, many of them became very bitter. Now it all depends on how, let's say, much contact that people have with white Americans, okay, let's put it that way. I think that because I had such long contact mainly with white Americans that I didn't get that extreme bitterness that some of these other Japanese people in Southern California did where they had this group called "no-nos." They are the ones that refused to sign allegiance to U.S. and all that because, when they were in camp.

So the war broke out, and I went back home and my father was really upset, of course, because he had this business going, and then Mayor Earl Riley decided to pass an ordinance in which any Japanese cannot have a business license in Portland and took away the business license, and we had to close the store. In the meantime, of course, I told you he had these other businesses. Another business he had started was the wholesale business and started importing quite a bit of things from Japan to wholesale, and was selling mainly in the western states. He had a salesman selling goods and so on. Of course, those, the depth of the Depression hit, you know, all those years in the '30s. So we had a terrible situation where we couldn't open the store and so on. Then, let's see, the federal reserve bank sent in an auditor in to look at my father's books, and they closed up our store for two weeks with a marshal, federal marshal came in and closed... this was my father's store. Then after two months, two weeks or three weeks, they allowed to open up the store. But then Mayor Riley passed an ordinance to close down the store, well, that's that. So we lost the business completely.

Now, people wonder, we wondered what to do next. And then we had relatives, that is, my mother's sister-in-law lived in Salt Lake City. So she called up, my aunt called up and my mother and says, "Why don't you come to Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City is not in the evacuation zone. You might as well get out and not go to camp," which would be terrible, you see. It's beyond me yet, to me, why the Japanese didn't get up and more of them get up and move. Quite a few did, quite a few did move to the interior, away from the evacuation zone instead of going to the camp which is a horrible thing. My wife's family went into Poston which was a horrible place, just out in the desert, no water, hot, dust, constant dust. She says that every day they had to sweep out about an inch of dust out of the, sand dust, inch of sand dust off the floor and off the bed because the bed was being very gritty because all this constant blowing. I'm quite sure it wasn't good for your health breathing that dust constantly, and hot. But I still cannot seem to understand why, but they all said they had no place to go. Well, it's true, they had no place to go. Many of the more aggressive Niseis did pick up and move, and a very large number moved to Ontario, Oregon, and started farming. They became very successful farmers, did very, very well.

JC: Do you think economic status or, is there some distinction that you can come up with why some people did move out and other people didn't and went to the camp? What might be that?

SN: Some part of it is economic. My very good friend who I met at the University of Utah, his name is Tets Okada, just picked up, decided to pick up and move. They were farmers in Salinas, California, where a very high level of anti-Japanese situations, and then moved to a hotel, you know, and moved there. I think it was because he didn't want to go to camp, my friend. And I guess they just packed up, and they had a brand new Buick, I think a brand new Buick or something and moved there and moved into this one room hotel. But I would say it was better than going to the camp. And then quite a large number did move there. Many of them were students who moved out. Students were allowed to come out and go to school in the, that area. We didn't know whether we were going to be, when the line, the demarcation would be moved eastward, but we took our chance and just went there.

JC: So when you lose the family business, that means literally you lose everything that was in it? What happened to those things? What happened to your family home?

SN: We had a salesman that helped us get rid of some of the goods. It was very interesting. He sold it to two or three stores in Seaside and another coastal town. And what they did was took all these merchandise which look, they look like European style merchandise and used their agate polishing machine and polished off the "made in Japan."

JC: That's amazing.

SN: And sold it all for a very good profit.

JC: So that's what happened to the goods and the merchandise. What about the family homes? You had a home in Mount Tabor.

SN: Oh, the home, we rented it. We rented it. I told my father, "Don't sell it. We don't need the money." Which is another thing, too, we were fairly well off. My father being in business and so on, we had... and then my father, my brother and I, three of us built chicken coops and we raised eggs, chickens and eggs.

JC: Where is this?

SN: In Salt Lake City. We went out in the country. It's not country now. It's all built up, but a small acreage, small acreage, and raised chickens and turkeys, and sold the eggs. When the chickens stopping laying, we took the chickens, chopped the head off and took them over to the restaurant, Coon Chicken Inn which is like Kentucky Chicken, but there was a... maybe it was before your time, I'm quite sure. Big black... you walk through his mouth. And every morning before I went to school, I helped my father take all these chickens that stopped laying, take them over there, and they dumped them in a great big kettle. You know, they stewed it all, and then they dried it out and deep fried it. If you boil the chicken long enough, they get tender like spring chicken.

JC: So here's a question. At the time that you... there was a Coon Chicken Inn in Portland at that time, I believe also...

SN: Yeah, yeah, up on Eighty-second.

JC: Did you think that that was prejudicial?

SN: That's on Sandy. I didn't think... no, no. In those days, people didn't think things like that were prejudicial. And also you got to remember there very few blacks in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City is a Mormon town, and the Mormon was highly prejudiced against... religious reasons, prejudice against blacks, anybody with dark skin.

JC: It seems ironic to be making chickens for the Coon Chicken Inn when you're a Japanese American who has been pushed off of the West Coast and has to go to Utah.

SN: [Laughs] That's right.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

SN: Well, anyway, we had that... but, okay, so I went to school, started college again, University of Utah. I went to the University of Utah. There were a strong group of students who were, who didn't want to see us get registered at school, and they wrote editorials, editorials and letters into the Utah paper, Utah college paper. And I wrote a strong letter saying that, you know, my side of the story, that we are Americans by birthright especially, and educated here and so on. But there was quite a bit of prejudice. But I got along very well as far as that goes. Jobs were very hard to get. Nobody hired Japanese people, businesses especially. One business person says, "If I hired you, they'll throw a brick through my window so I'm not going to hire you." But I got a job, I got a job mowing nineteen greens every morning, seven days a week, at the country club. A country club where they won't allow any Japanese or blacks to be members, of course. I don't think they would allow Jewish people in there either. So that's what I did right on through two summers, it was two summers. And then in school, I graded econ. papers for the blue books and the term papers. I brought home big stacks of them. I did two classes for a professor, did all the grading at seventy-five cents an hour. [Laughs]

So those, that's the way I... then I went to... oh, and people would ask why I wasn't in the army. I went to, I was drafted and my eyes at that time was much worse than what they are now. They gave me a ranking of 4-F, so I didn't go in the army, but my brother did. My brother was, brother went to the army. So the army... but a little later on, I did go in the army. But before then, I went to Columbia University and got a master's in business administration and economics. And there... tuition was much higher, so I had to work. So I had several different jobs. I worked in a post office, worked in a post office at night, midnight, the graveyard shift. And then another interesting job I had was I was assistant to the window dressers at Borden Taylor department store. And so I've been very fortunate all my life, having lot of experiences. Also, I assisted the professor on grading, grading some lower term class papers, grading their tests and did that kind of work. I had some other odd jobs I was able to get, but regular steady job was post office and working for... and that was right in the middle of the night where you change the windows.

JC: It seems like your experience as a youngster was more American than Japanese as I'm hearing this, and yet it feels like that very experience worked well for you later on.

SN: Oh yes, right. It is true. When I went to Columbia, Columbia University, only Asians were Chinese, Chinese from China, and they were the ones that Chiang Kai-shek sent over for education, and they were brilliant students, and they were being trained for government work and so on. And this is called the Chinese CIA. Chinese CIA person went there also to watch over these students. Chiang Kai-shek wanted to make sure they didn't... let's say decide they wanted to stay in, stay in there and become anti-Chiang Kai-shek. [Laughs] Really, there were two of them. They didn't go to school. They just lived there, checked on the students, see what they're doing, and they got kind of suspicious when they were, Asians do talk to other Asians, and I talked to them and was fairly friendly to them. I made good friends with two or three of them. The CIA men would want to know what was going on. [Laughs] Very amusing.

But I stayed at International House there which is a very nice facility which had all foreign students, lots from South America. South Americans were there, and students that were going to, part of them were, Julliard was right across the street. So there were a lot of American students, and that's where I met my good friend, Frank Kelly, who is still a friend of mine that lives in North Carolina. He and I became very good friends there. And he calls me up once a week or so. Now I have all these long contacts with different people. But he was very, very supportive of me and we did a lot of things together. But the students were, all the students at Columbia, I felt no prejudice of any kind.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

SN: So after getting, then from there, I went into the army, went into the army and was there for over a year. And luckily, luckily, I didn't get sent overseas because I got into, through friends, into what they call in the army intelligence, you know, analyst of all the soldiers who were going into G2 work. You had to go through their whole history, make phone calls, and check out on, if they were slightly suspicious, to reject them. So I had, I did the job of rejecting about... I think I rejected about a dozen. That's all I rejected, that they may not be one hundred percent.

JC: What is G2 work?

SN: Well, that was going over to Japan and doing intelligence work; translation, interpreters and so on. So that was the job I had which is an easy desk job.

JC: And did you have that job because you were Japanese?

SN: Yeah. But that was... then after that, I got married and came back to Portland to start up the business again. After I stayed... we stayed at my mother's and father's small house, houses were small in those days, you know, and started the wholesale business in the basement of my father's house. I did everything; invoice, packed, shipped. It's a one-man business, and we reopened the gift shop. We had a lot of people boycotting our store but... still, and then my wife help clerk, as a clerk help my father in the retail store. And then we decided we want to move to a house because we had children, and I met a vicious type of prejudice that got, I bought a house and had numerous threatening calls. "If you move in your house, we'll burn down that." This is back of Franklin High School on Ivan Street, and it mainly was pulled down by the next door neighbor who was so furious that we had bought the house. And the real estate people got... of course got, she said she was kind of got phones at two o'clock in the morning, one o'clock in the morning, I got phone calls.

JC: What year are we talking about when you've now gotten married and come back to Oregon or Portland?

SN: We got married in '46... '49, '48, '49, before '50. But we had friendly, others that were nice people. One was a minister up the street, and that was, then they moved out. A nice mother and a teacher -- the daughter was a teacher -- moved in, and they were very nice people, so things all worked out that way. But I faced really... and there's, I'm quite sure, I kept on going, that prejudice, you know, that existed, existed at a much higher level than before the war. There's no doubt about that. But I wasn't perturbed by it and so on. Then we start, then our business grew, and we moved out of the basement of my father's house. Then I brought in, some of the products I brought in was English bone china, cups and saucers, and sold them all over the United States. That's how our wholesale business started. Wholesale business is good in that people, it's not like retail stores you see. People don't know whether it's owned by Jewish people or Norwegian people or what. [Laughs] So we, I did go and selling at trade shows at the early years. A lot of people thought I was Chinese. That is one of the big advantage. When you go back East, they don't think there are any Japanese around because after all, if you look Asian, you must be Chinese. So many, many people thought I were Chinese. But I didn't want discourage them by saying I'm not Chinese because that was not going to hurt me, hurt me to let it go as being Chinese. Of course, some Japanese resented it in a big, there were some Niseis that resented that in a big way, but I was, "So what?" My feeling was about that. But you see, it's amazing thing, if you start doing business and you are going to be an income to some other people, they become nice to you, and so they overlook that I'm Japanese. So I'm, one thing is because I grew up, grew up one hundred percent as you can see in this class photo, I was the first Asian, and I'm right here in this class picture. I can't even find myself. Here I am, right here. They took pictures in grammar school, all girls only, all boys only, okay, Mount Tabor Grammar School. It was a wooden building. They tore it down and built a new building.

JC: I'm going to backtrack to a couple of things.

SN: Okay, go ahead.

JC: What kind of kid were you?

SN: I think I was quite outgoing. I was really and, so I talked a lot with other people. That I think is a helpful thing. I was not shy about, you know, anything I was doing. I made friends very easily.

JC: And is that true in college as well? Were you an outgoing --

SN: Yeah, I think so, college, right on through.

JC: How did you meet your wife?

SN: At University of Utah. She came out, they allowed students to leave out of the camp to go to school. She came to the University of Utah. She was going to Berkeley UC and was second year, second year I think. I think she finished the first year, and the second year, she went into camp and then came out the same year as I did. She grew up in Calexico.

JC: So you met her in Utah and did you marry in Utah before you went to Columbia?

SN: No, no. We went to, went to Columbia. And after I got out of Columbia, I went into the army and then got married then.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

JC: Okay. So then you came back to Portland and started working in the retail. Tell me about your own family, your kids. What is your family like?

SN: Well, let's see. Of course, we grew up, the whole family grew up in Portland, and I have two younger brothers, and my second brother was in the army longer. He was taken in, and he went into the language division that is the interpreter and so on, was sent to the Philippines, and my other brother was gone. He went to school, and he was too young to be in the army. What is the particular you want to know? I mean, I thought I talked to you about my father and his business.

JC: Actually, I think I didn't ask that question very well. But I'm glad you told me that you had these two brothers. What I was actually asking about is now and your wife have come back here and you're starting a family. Who is your family, your kids?

SN: Oh, my own kids. All right.

JC: Yeah, your own children.

SN: I have three boys. Larry, who was in our business for quite a while until we closed up the business called Import Plaza. He was running that business, and then after that, Ron became a physician. He went to Oregon medical school or OHSU and became a physician. He works out at Portland Clinic, and Vern, the youngest brother, youngest son is here working.

JC: With the family business?

SN: Yeah, the business.

JC: You have a decided lack of females in your family.

SN: Huh?

JC: You have almost no females in your family.

SN: No daughters.

JC: No daughters, no sisters.

SN: No daughters, no sisters, right, right. That's true. Whether that is good or bad, I don't think it's good though, really. I really think that, you know, there should be a girl in the family somewhere along the line because on my father's side, on my father's side, there were just three boys. He had two younger brothers and that's it, no daughter.

JC: So the family name --

SN: But on my, Mary's side, of course, there were daughters. There were, let's see, my wife came from a family with eight children, a big family. Ours was small, three is small. With eight, there were four boys and four girls. And my wife had to take care of the youngest one. They're fourteen years apart from the oldest to the youngest, and they lived on the farm until the evacuation came. They didn't go back to farming.

JC: Did not go back to farming?

SN: Right. They had leased the land. They did not own the land. As you know, the Japanese aliens cannot own land anywhere in the United States.

JC: Until --

SN: 1952.

JC: Where was your wife's farm?

SN: Calexico.

JC: Calexico?

SN: Yeah. Calexico is right across from Mexicali right on the border.

JC: Right on the border.

SN: Yes. You've heard of "Mexicali Rose" song, that's it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

JC: So here's another question I'd like to ask. As a young man, high school years, what kind of values did your family try to instill in you?

SN: Well, I really think that, I can't remember their giving big long lectures of any kind, but I feel that we learned by example of our mother and father. My father worked very, very hard, long hours, very seriously. He was not, he was no, let's say social butterfly or something like that, playing around. He never smoked, he never drank, he absolutely didn't do any of that while his contemporaries, Japanese immigrants, would smoke or drink, carouse and so on. He never, he was really, my mother used to complain about that. He wasn't the real social type. My mother was more towards being a more social person.

JC: So when you mention that you didn't live in the Japanese ghetto, for your mother, that was probably a bit of a hardship?

SN: Little bit, yeah. She would use the telephone. The telephone was a great thing. She would talk on and on and on. I come home from school and there she is on the phone and talking to all of her friends, church friends, which was really, I think was nice that there was a telephone that she had to contact because she wanted, after all, women like to talk, of course. [Laughs] But my father was just satisfied with going to visit together some of the friends, you know, once a month or something like that.

JC: So your father taught you to be hard working, nose to the grindstone. What were some of the other values that you were rewarded for, or maybe the opposite is what did you get in trouble for?

SN: Get in trouble for? I can't remember anything. All I remember is one time I got bawled out by my mother thinking that we were trying to, oh I see my friend -- the gumball machine, right? We were little kids trying to see if we could get a gumball out of there free, and my mother heard about it and really bawled me out. I can remember that. Then I was, must be like four, five, six years old, seven years old. But I think all children growing up in those years, you see, I think when desperately poor, most people and so on, they just learn values that just automatically, I think... because you see your mother and father struggling along, got to work hard, and life doesn't come easy. Naturally, you just learn those things, I think I did, by what you see around you. And the teachers too, teachers are very good role models. Teachers are entirely, attitude of teachers today are entirely different than what the teacher's attitude is, really, really different.

JC: So say more about that.

SN: What?

JC: Say more about that.

SN: About the teachers?

JC: About the difference between teachers now and then.

SN: Well, teachers then, you know, went way out of their way to interact with, even with the family, go to see the, visit the family and see if the children is not doing well, and there were a lot of children not doing well. Maybe it's malnutrition or as you know, this is the depth of the Depression. Also, the teachers were very kind. I thought that they were very kind. There were good teachers that taught students well, and the students were well-disciplined. I mean, they would be under control and so on. I think today, the biggest objection I have about teaching today is so-called tenure, guaranteed jobs. I see it all the time. On the higher education, I see these teachers get tenure, after that, they don't need to teach any classes. "I'm going to do research, and I have a lifetime job here," and so on, and that's the same situation you have with teachers here when they became unionized, you see. And the union is, the trouble is that they, the teacher, a poor teacher just can't be fired, you see? You can't fire a poor teacher, and there are a lot of poor teachers, really. I have friends who are teachers, you know, high school teachers, and they tell me there are some really terrible teachers that are there, and the principal would like to get 'em transferred out of there. [Laughs] But I think that teaching jobs, the profession has, the level of professionalism in that profession has gone down. That's what I'm trying to say. The teachers are not as professional as they should be. And I sort of fault the basis of teachers being, I mainly fault that teachers are taking teaching jobs, want to take life a lot easier, you know, and I admit that the teachers are paid low, too little. They should be paid more. There is no doubt, but not to have the union saying that the poor teacher gets paid as well as a good teacher. That's the thing I object to because that's not good.

JC: So, you said that your values came from both your family and the school?

SN: Yeah.

JC: When you were passing on family values, has it been more difficult as a father than it was when you were a son?

SN: I think so. I think that so many more factors are, changed, you see, you know. I think that things like the Vietnam War had a terrific influence on education. I think that the moral values and so on change drastically with the late '60s and changed. The situation changed drastically at that time.

JC: What are the values that you passed on to your children?

SN: Oh. Well, my wife and I just really feel that being, that I tell them that you do not want to do something that you would regret doing, that honesty, being forthright about something that happened and so on. I've had situations with my children that were really, you know, upsetting in the past. And it does affect you, affect me. It's not easy. I think when the '60s, late '60s started, you see, I think all parents would tell you that it was a very difficult time to raise children, very difficult time to raise children. A lot of them went wayward because of the war, Vietnam War.

JC: And how did you deal with the difficulties that you had in raising children? How did you and Mary work together on that?

SN: Well, what we tried to do as much as possible working with our children is to try to be as close to them as possible, talk to them constantly. I think the oldest one left the house too early. I mean, going out, I think that we didn't, in hindsight, our oldest son, I think both of them didn't mature enough to leave home. And I think a lot of cases, I think, I see other children, you know, who were sent off away from school and been better for them to be, I think we protected our kids too much. That's typical of Japanese families. You take for example, for example, in Japan, the daughters do not leave the home until they get married, okay. They do not live by themselves like the Americans' daughters do, okay, in separate apartments. And that sort of feeling of mothering them too long wasn't good for our sons, I mean, the first two sons. I mean, they had problems when they went out on their own because mother took care of them too much, and my wife was a real mother hen.

JC: Do you think one should return to the old ways of doing things?

SN: [Laughs] I guess so, maybe, I don't know. I haven't come to that conclusion yet.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

JC: You say you've had so many opportunities. What are those opportunities that you've had?

SN: Opportunities that I had? Well, being able to go to Columbia University, go to New York, meeting what the eastern side of the world is like in this country. I think it is entirely different kind of people meeting, meeting people from all over the country. I think it's so important. Then my business, business took me to, took me to all over the world, and that really, that is really very, very important to see the rest of the country. When you find that ninety percent of the Americans have never travelled outside of the north continent, you get that exposure of going places and meeting people and seeing the country and see what poverty really is. It's not poverty that you see on Burnside Street. There's poverty that is so overwhelming that in this world, you see, and just know that you realize, you know that situations is what it is and listening to lots of people talking, foreign people talking, I think it's very important. I mean, when you're talking to Americans day after day, you see one side of the picture only. You never see the back side, never, and you should see the back side of the picture, see what the rest of the world is like. And I have been to many, many, many countries, seen so many, had so many experiences and so on. And then the other thing is I try to find friends who are good at discussion of different things, you see, not just talking about baseball or football. It's unfortunate, I can go on and on and on about that matter of adult who gets, finally gets out of school and decides he doesn't need any more education, need to not learn anything or read another book or listen to, listen to a discussion on OPB and so on. It's pitiful. I mean, there's so much more to learn every day. I learn something, I want to learn something every day. Reading, just reading and so on and just that knowledge is fun to get, and people don't seem to realize that. All they want to know is, "Oh, who won that basketball game?" And talk about that, but that's not intellectually stimulating at all.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

JC: What would you... two things. Why don't you give me a little bit of a feeling about, we skipped over the business, how you got your business actually started when you did come back. I believe you started with your brother or worked with your brother.

SN: Well, no. I started the business with my father. My father has had the retail business started back up there on Morrison Street, and we had, right after war, we're back there and different people come there yelling at my father derogatory remarks about being a "Jap enemy" and all that kind of thing. We took that and my father took all that, and then Mary went in there to help, my wife. She says every day there would be somebody come in there and making, run in there and make a nasty remark and run out. But I was isolated from that because I was in my father's basement working away, shipping the merchandise. We brought in, I bought some ceramics from California and so on. Hardly anything was allowed to be imported. Then we started in English bone china cups and saucers and that helped us become a national company because it was very rare. This is very, well, starting businesses, for example... one of the salesmen, I had a couple of salesmen, "Do you know that if we can get this English bone china cups and saucers it would be just going gangbusters?" "Oh, is that right?" So I went to the library and got the list of all the English potteries and wrote to them and thinking maybe I'd get one or two companies that would be willing to sell to me. Twelve companies said they'll sell to us, and we started the business, brought it in and nobody else hardly had any. We were about the only ones, and it was amazing that they came. In those days, prewar type of shipping, you know, big cast, heavy cast pack. You got to unpack the whole thing, packed in straw, and took that and repacked it and send to customers, and there were all these collectors of bone china cups and saucers collectors. They all wanted to buy, the stores did. That, then we moved to Sixth and Davis, the business, there in Old Town. I did that. Then pretty soon, we were able to import Japanese porcelain and goods, but they had to be marked, "made in U.S. occupied Japan." And so we had that, and we were selling that. We had quite a few people ship it back to us saying, "We don't carry Jap merchandise," you know, when they bought it. They didn't realize that it was Japanese-made. So we had all those incidents.

The business grew. My brother joined the business, and the business grew very rapidly because of the big shortage of this kind of merchandise in this country, and so we were able to... and I started taking trips to Japan. My father was doing it for a while, then I took over and started going to Japan and was there quite often, three times, four times a month to Japan. And so I did all that and then started going to Korea and Taiwan, India, all the different countries to import, and we were importing large amounts of goods to Portland. That was the basic. And from there, we started buying property, and the first piece of property that we bought was the Globe Hotel which was a transient hotel. We gutted it out and started the business called Import Plaza. They took it down and there it is, opening over there. Had a newspaper article about the opening of Import Plaza which we did very well. It was, the very interesting thing is my, it was -- the building was right across the street, and we saw it emptied. There was no more transients there. So we bought the place and everybody says, and then the parking lot and everybody told us that you are crazy, and it's never going to work. Even our real estate man who sold the property says, "Those people are fools thinking they're going to open up a retail store down here in skid row and think that anybody would come in." And we put out the newspaper ad that we had all this thing, and we were just packed. God, we did so well, the business. Of course, finally, it kind of died out, novelty wore out and so on. We started getting a lot of competition, but it's true, it's an interesting part of how, what we learned is you got to "think outside the box." That's a recent terminology, thinking outside of the box, but that's what we did. I mean, I thought that rent would be cheap and so on. We had plenty of parking and people came, and that was one of our business that we started. From there, we bought properties around there in Old Town and retail stores came in, and there was a little flurry of retail business of incubator businesses. One of the most -- the big one that really did well was Daisy Kingdom. We bought that building, put Daisy Kingdom in. And restaurants opened up there, and we had a Chinese restaurant move in, and we had offices out of the Merchant Hotel which, Merchant Hotel was the first hotel to have an elevator. And we bought that building, architects and lawyers and so on rented because the rent was low.

JC: So you and your brother and your dad had some very revolutionary ideas. I mean, I think Import Plaza is the first of its kind in the country, and the concept of, as you say, incubator buildings, what was the workings when you and your dad and Sam sat around and talked -- I mean, you and your dad and Bill sat around and talked, how did you get those ideas?

SN: I don't know. We get all the different ideas. It is just like Made in Oregon store was my idea that -- I don't want to brag, it sounds like I'm bragging about these things, but I'm just talking about just the way business goes. You know, I travelled all over the world, and always sat in the waiting room, you know, terminal, waiting room. I noticed all these stores that were in there were doing tremendous business. So I thought I'd like to open up a store in PDX. And so I came back, and I had a friend, Punch Green. Punch Green was very friendly to me, person. He was the commissioner of the port here, and then I went to Punch Green. I said, "Punch, I want to open up a store in the airport," and Punch said, "There's a store there like that already, can't have another store." Well, I thought there was supposed to be an open bidding basis because this is the public. "Yeah, but those people have the inside room with the governor so, you know, can't do much about it." [Laughs] Politics, you know. There is always that. So I thought, then I talked to him again. What if I come up with a new idea of retailing that might fit in? "Oh, there's nothing much you can do," you know how he talks, and Punch went on, and I said, "Okay." Well then, I said to him -- I said, "What if I started a store that sold just Oregon products, Oregon products, and I'll call it Made in Oregon?" And he lit up. He says, "That sound good, but what is there in Oregon you can sell?" [Laughs] "Well, just give me a little space there, and I'll gather some stuff together and get one going." So he calls up the executive director, tells him, "See if you can find a space for him." So he gave me a little dinky little space the size of this room maybe at the airport and right off, immediately of course, it was success. Everybody want to buy things that are made in Oregon. And so, and then more and more things, products came on. More things started, more people were making things because -- for our store. That's the way... well, we had Pendleton, you know. I went to see Mort Bishop and bought from Mort and the wineries. Sokol was there. Sokol Blosser and the Willamette Valley people started out just about that time. That was over twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven years now since we opened the first store in the airport.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

JC: It seems like the Naito family has been blessed with the Midas touch. That everything that you started was very successful. Is that true or were there things that were difficult that weren't so successful?

SN: Oh, yeah. There were some things that weren't successful. I would say that, that this building here was a very tough building to rent. It was, you know, very expensive, very expensive. McCormick Pier Apartments, we didn't really make any money for it the first ten years. For some reason or another, it just didn't come, overrun cost was way over. Our Norcrest wholesale business became very, very competitive, so our business there has slowed down there. We don't, it's a shadow of what we used to do around the country. That's because the economic situation changes. When you are selling to lots and lots of small stores, corner drug stores, the hardware stores, little gift shops in all these smaller towns and so on, they've all disappeared because when the big box stores like Walmart, Target and all those stores came in, they just crushed all those small stores, the mom and pop stores and so on. And so the Norcrest business can't survive without some chain store. We'd sell certain line of things to Fred Meyer right now, for example, but we used to sell to big chains of 2000, 3000 store chains, you know. Some of those stores have gone in the wayside like K-mart is doing, and so, you see, things change very rapidly in the mercantile business. It's a very, very difficult thing. But there's so many, we tried other things. I can remember we thought that a candy shop would be great. We opened up a small candy shop in Lloyd Center, but it didn't go, unit sales were too small. We couldn't sell, we were selling jelly beans, jelly beans made famous by Ronald Reagan. So we were selling that, but you know, the total amount was too small and we had, we opened up different kinds of concepts, some good. We have to do that, otherwise, you can't...

JC: You had big ideas that were very successful, obviously. What's your connection with Dr. Martens shoes?

SN: Oh, Dr. Marten shoes. This man had a shoe store in Galleria and had that connection with us. And then he found this Dr. Marten shoes with another partner that he had to put, to sell Dr. Marten shoes in mainstream through a connection that he had in Nordstrom. And so he started, but we couldn't buy, we couldn't import Dr. Marten shoes directly. Of course, one thing is they needed financing, so we gave them the financing. So you went to the gray market and bought Dr. Marten shoes in the gray market and brought it in and sold it to Nordstrom, and it was just very hot at that time, and then made a contract with, finally the factory decided to make a contract with us and made us exclusive. And when they did that, there was another company that was importing Dr. Martens in Los Angeles, and we had a lawsuit because they were unhappy, so is, one thing's another. But the Dr. Marten shoes people were very happy to have us do it. What they were doing well, I didn't have direct, my brother and my nephew were the ones who were running the Dr. Marten shoe business mainly. But the problem was that, at that time the demand exceeded the supply, and it was very hot, you see. But we learned, you know, dealing with people like Nordstrom who takes back anything and gives you refund, kept on sending back all these worn out Dr. Marten shoes and deducting it, typical department store tactic. That's why we don't like to do business with department stores. Department stores will take back anything willingly, and then they send it back, send it back for credit, but it was good for a couple years for us. And then there was a contract in which, we had to sign a contract in which after two years that they would take the business back, so Dr. Marten took the business back. That was the end. That was not very good, after we built up the business for them with our contacts, with Nordstroms, with Meier and Frank, and Bloomingdales and all those people.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

JC: What do you feel have been your greatest accomplishments in your life?

SN: Getting married. [Laughs] I really think so, really. I think that I was very, very lucky to get married to Mary. I thought... because I was really worried I wouldn't find the right person because in those days, in those days, you see, getting married is what you have to do, and there is this compulsory that, you know, today, the situation is entirely different, I know that.

JC: And in addition to getting married which was your greatest accomplishment, what was some of your other things that you're most proud of in your life?

SN: Well, I think that in a small way that I was successful in running a business, starting the business, and growing the business. And my brother and I were very lucky. I think, I always say, I always say to people, success is ninety percent luck and ten percent knowing that you're lucky, really, definitely.

JC: If you were, if you were giving advice to young people today, well, let's say you are giving advice to young people today, what would you tell them based on your own experiences?

SN: Well, I always say that you got to develop common sense. So many people have no common sense to succeed. They are, just really have to think these things out and to keep on looking at the big picture, not micromanage your life, day-to-day life. I mean, you just get swamped with doing small things. And never let your one failure, your two failures get you down to the bottom. I mean, just ride right over and keep going because you're going to stumble. You're going to stumble regardless. If you are walking down the street, you might stumble, and just like that, just keep going. Life is, and I think you have to think of life as fun, always. I think that you just have to say, you know, and you could make it fun. You could make it fun. I think that -- I think too many, too many people get discouraged over little things and you've got to always think out of the box. Things are different out there, and you got to find that difference. But I don't believe in putting twelve, fourteen, fifteen hours just working, just doing things. Most of that is a waste of time. I think that you got to work intelligently and think, for example, I bawl out these people, people, they were shuffling paper. I mean, they look through the paper once, they looked through the paper again, they look at it a third time. What are you doing? Just make your decision on what it says on the paper the first time you get it and look at it. Think it out, all right. They don't want to think about it and that's why they set it aside. They look at it again, and they don't want to think about it. And it's those things that I think... when paper, a lot of paper comes from my inbox out, I look at it just once, all right, make the decision there and end. Otherwise, you spend whole day working, and I want to say is that people got the misconception is that working long hours means you're succeeding. [Laughs] Work smart, that's all.

JC: I realize that when you brought in your artifacts, there was an interesting little black enamel box. Could you tell me something about that?

SN: This is the award that I got from the emperor of Japan.

JC: And tell me what that, what that means? What does that signify?

SN: Oh. That means that my activities that I had promoting Japan and the Japanese culture and business, you know, years of importing and helping the Japanese develop their businesses and so on is what that signifies.

JC: That's quite an accomplishment.

SN: Thank you.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

JC: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you'd like to talk about given that this videotape is going to be available for generations to come? Is there anything important? Is there an event in your life that I missed? Is there a feeling? Is there an experience that we should have on this videotape?

SN: Well, I've been very fortunate that right or wrong, that I became the first Asian or first non-white to become board members of prestigious organizations such as Standard Insurance Company, First Interstate Bank. I've been appointed as commissioner of the Oregon Department of Transportation, commissioner of Port of Portland, and those things there makes me feel very good that I was the first Asian to do. I was the first Asian, non-white to join the Arlington Club which is pure white. And I feel those things put me, not in a different light, but that those things were sort of rewarding to me. And I've been given, my brother and I were nominated as the first citizens, and we were nominated as, given the Watseka award. We've been given just all kinds of rewards, and I think that I want to think that my breaking in as the first Asian in all these organizations has sort of helped to break the color code or whatever you want to call it which is, I think is important.

JC: So your successes have opened the doors in a new way for other Japanese Americans?

SN: And other Asians.

JC: And other Asians.

SN: Yeah, right, because up to them, you know. One thing I must say is that for whatever reasons, maybe it's because Asians are shy, they have not worked hard to enter into that arena that is joined into, joined on the boards of corporations here, joined in exclusive clubs and going to lectures or going to meetings. I go to meetings, many meetings, and I'm the only Asian there. I know that they are shy. That's why they don't do it. But I don't feel that at all. And I think it really goes back to, I got to thank my father and mother for keeping me out of the ghetto when I was very young to be with all-white people. I think that's important. And so, and my boys all grew up that way too, so they have no hesitation of being... I think subconsciously, Asians feel like they are out of place if they go anywhere. I don't ever. Ever. I walk into the all-white Arlington Club. They are all bunch of snooty people, you know. You know what I mean. They think so, and I just go up there and talk to all these people, these name people that you hear about all the time. I have no problem talking to them and saying things. But I really hope that, and I don't see that slowly changing, but not en masse, you know what I mean, more. I mean, in other words, the Asian population here is something like, the minority population here is about six percent in the city. I think it is lower in the state, but here I think about six percent. So there should be six percent people sitting in a lecture hall. For example, six percent should be on different boards and so on, I mean, state boards and county boards and so on. That isn't happening. Even today, the situation has got to change. It's got to be the Asians got to step up and get themselves recognized and be accepted more. And you do need to, you know, in order to be recognized, you do need to have some accomplishments. You got to be just, you can't be just a, you know, just an ordinary Joe Blow, just going to work, eight to five and play golf on the weekends and just be ordinary, you can't. You got to do something a little more than that. Otherwise people will... I think that's important. And there are a few Asians who are getting that way. I know that there are a few business people that are getting... Asians in Portland are Mr. Yoshida, he's a Korean man, and Koreans are, I have to hand it to them are very aggressive businesspeople. They are much more so than the Japanese Americans. Japanese Americans got to be more aggressive in doing things I think, really.

JC: I think of -- being a Caucasian, I think of Japanese Americans as being very self-effacing and the very thing they're raised with which is to be humble, to take a background position, seems to be counter to what you are saying which is to step forward.

SN: Yeah, I think so, definitely. I just, I know that people are going to be upset when I say this, but I just don't believe that if you're in this country, that you should have your own ethnic little church, ethnic clubs and so much of that. They should make it, join an integrated club of different, or to just join clubs that you're the only Asian or you're one of few Asians in the club and so on so that you get people to know you. The problem, you see, prejudice comes on mainly because you don't know the other person, so you think you're a different animal and so on kind of thing. You've got to get yourself over there so that you can see that, you know, they're just as much as a human being as you are kind of thing, and I know it takes effort, you know. It takes effort to do it. I went to, I went to the governor's inaugural ball and looked around and there's hardly any Asians there. There were quite a few -- I won't say quite a few -- few blacks there, but Asians, they were not there. I know that Los Angeles is maybe different because there are that many more people. But here, I think it's easier for one to go into these white groups easier in Portland because of a smaller town than it is in Los Angeles.

JC: Do you think it's a fear of prejudice that keeps people from going into those?

SN: I think, they become self-conscious, you know, and shy and feel, like you walk in there and nobody knows you and so on. Well, you can't do it one time. I mean, you've got, you can't let that embarrassing feeling get to you. I think that you need to overcome that and just go. I go places where I don't know a single person there, and people stare at me saying, "Why is that Oriental person sitting in this audience?" Exactly, but I just...

JC: I wanted to ask you a question. When I was told that I was going to be interviewing you, somebody said your name is Naito, and I said, "Naito, I've heard 'Nayto' all my life." What is that like to have something as special as your name mispronounced in the news day after day after day?

SN: Well, I don't want to fault anybody, but you see, from years back, lots of people, my brother and his family, you know, because his family is half Japanese and he thought well, they're not really Japanese, so I'll make them all "Nayto." That's basically the kind of a thinking that was going on. I didn't care. I'm just one of those people that's happy as... but Vern, my son Vern was, thought that, oh, it is very embarrassing for me because the Japanese people who come here, come here, Japanese, like Japanese company people are here and so on and a white person says to them, "Oh, do you know Mr. Nayto?" "Nayto, that's not Japanese man. Is that Korean? Okay, got it?

JC: So I'll ask you once again, is there anything else that you want to say that I haven't asked you about, anything else you want to talk about?

SN: Talk about? I would say that I had a very happy life. I'm very fortunate, extremely fortunate, and I think that, like I say, luck is everything, just to be lucky. I know that Japanese Americans, Niseis, who are much more wealthy than I am. My god, I'm really very happy with where I am, not looking for anything, and at my age, my age, I hate to talk about age because I'm very self-conscious about age, self-conscious about age. I don't want to, at my age, I really think that very few people will have more ambition of doing more, but I do have. I do want to do some more things and have been looking at a lot of things to do. I'm trying to open up another store at the airport, looking at a new concept, couple new concepts of stores. I'm looking at, we're looking at some other real estate situation. It's not very good right now to buy anything, so we're watching very carefully. In other words, we're not just retired, retired in that I don't do anything. So I really feel that I have to keep on thinking about those things. Otherwise, you see, you just deteriorate. You end up with, you can end up with dementia and that's the end. So I feel getting up every morning, and I really think that, really think, thinking positively every day is a very important thing. I get up in the morning and some mornings I get up and I used to jog all the time, but my doctor told me, "At your age," he always tell me by my age, "you shouldn't be jogging because it's hard on your knees. Your knees are getting bad, so you might end up with bad knees." Then when I'm with my friend, one of my friends had a double knee replace, both knees replaced, those artificial, and he just barely walks around. Oh god, I don't want to look like that. I do want to look halfway, I like to look a couple years younger than I really am if I can, but I have lots of fun. I do really have a lot of fun. I think that's the most thing, to have fun, enjoy yourself.

JC: Thank you, very much for this interview. It's been extremely informative and delightful and that's a great ending to end on. I don't think you're in danger of getting too old, at least not in the near future.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

JC: Sam, tell me a little bit more about your aunt that lived in Utah, that family.

SN: Yes. My aunt really was living in Los Angeles and had to move also. Her husband was a dentist, a very good dentist, took care of me, with my bridge work when I had the accident with the bike and truck. So, but she had her sister-in-law lived, named Hashimoto, lived in Salt Lake City and when the order to evacuate came, they decided to move, move in with the aunt, I mean, the sister-in-law. And at the same time, she called up my mother and said to come also to Salt Lake City. We had, my father had the means to move, and then they bought a house in Salt Lake City, and I already told you that they raised chickens and so on. Coming back to the family, the Hashimoto family, Mr. Hashimoto was the first person to start a bus system between Provo and Ogden through Salt Lake City, Japanese immigrant. He was an immigrant. He was not American born, he was not a Nisei. It's amazing. And he did something other business, I forgot what they were. But one big thing was this, he ran the business very profitably until the Great Depression came, the ridership just fell. He started the business in the '20s. He had one son, Ed, Ed Hashimoto who became a physician, a doctor. And of course in the Depression days, you know, there wasn't enough doctoring to do. So he got a position as a professor of medicine at University of Utah Medical School. Interesting story is about, he was a very good doctor. He was well-liked and so on. The story is that on December 8th, the day after Pearl Harbor, the physiology class, which were at least 100 students, were all waiting to see what the professor was going to say when he walks in the day after Pearl Harbor. And the class is, you could hear a pin drop kind of situation. So he walks in there, gets up on his lectern and says, "I'm sure glad I'm Irish," and the class started. That was a true story.

JC: Just out of curiosity, do you have other stories that people told about December 7th and December 8th that you remember hearing?

SN: Well, one thing I want to say is that at my university, I think I touched on it a little bit, the fact that... but the day, that day I would say is one of the most memorable days I'll never forget. I couldn't believe it. My friends there all said they couldn't believe it that Japan would drop bombs on Pearl Harbor, but all my dorm mates -- we were in the Sherri Roswell dorm. Every one of my dorm mates came and supported me, just hugged me, and said, "Don't worry, you're American and we're not, you know, going to be... we want you to know that you're, that we know that you're faithful and loyal, a loyal American." They all did. So that was very good.

JC: An incredible experience for you.

SN: Incredible experience, yeah. I'm quite sure I had tears in my eyes. So those kind of experiences in life I think makes a big difference a way a person grows up, I think. You have to have, I think you have to have some tragic things happening. I always felt that tragic things has to happen in your life that makes one into more greatness or a step above and so on. I just believe that. I read books about it and so on. One of the late books I read is about how a lot of men become very great when they lose their father at an early age, when they're very young, and those men have come up and become great. This is a lot of people, my memory is really giving out, like Ted Turner lost his father when he was only five years old. I think to men, losing a father at an early age is a real traumatic experience, I think.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

JC: You talked a little bit earlier about the Japanese ghetto in Portland. Can you tell me where that was and what that was like?

SN: Yes. The ghetto was located in northwest Portland between, mainly between Second and Third on this -- from Burnside down to Glisan. And there were old buildings where there were some retail businesses below and upper floors where the Japanese leased their space and rented for transients. And it was, the men did the janitor work and the wife washed the sheets and put new sheets on, and collected the money. And the family lived there also, the kids lived there. It was a very visible way of living, you know. I mean it was down there with, in contact with the transient population which is not very desirable group of people and so on. The Japanese, Niseis grew up, hundreds of them grew up in that area. In southwest Portland, it was the same kind of situation. Many of those buildings have been torn down for urban renewal where the auditorium was built and all those, but it was, it was an area where also the Jewish families lived in that same area, southwest, but they ran the second floor of hotels in all these places there which is completely dependent on the transient trade.

JC: What was the relationship with the Japanese American community to the Jewish community or the Italian community or the gypsies or all of those other minority groups?

SN: I don't think they socialized very much with them, especially they didn't socialize with the transients or the gypsies, but they did associate somewhat with the Jewish. I mean, especially southwest Jewish community people went to school together with the Japanese and a lot of them knew each other, and they got along very well. The Jewish kids that lived in the Southwest, that was sort of like Jewish ghetto there too. They went to Lincoln High School and what's the other school? I can't think of the other school they went to, the grammar school. They did go to, they did go to Lincoln High School and that's why Lincoln High School had so many smart people, smart people. It's always had a reputation. My three boys all went to Lincoln High School.

JC: So you're saying that Lincoln was a smart, was a smart school because there were so many Asians and so many Jewish people there?

SN: [Laughs] That's right. I would say that Japanese names were always on honor rolls in high school and also in -- I don't know why, but I was never very, smart enough in school. I was getting A's and so on, but I wasn't that real smart. But there were some Japanese Niseis students in high school that were really bright in Washington High School, very bright students there, did straight A's all the time. It's just really amazing how the Japanese Americans were doing, did so well in school. I think it's, maybe they're not that smart, but there is a carryover where education is so important in Japan, and it's carried over by their mother and father that studied hard, that's most important. It's emphasized so much, and I think that's where the big plus for the Japanese Americans, that the education was the most important thing.

JC: And following up on that, that same emphasis is true in the Jewish community with what you said earlier, adversity. So you have the combination of stressing the value of education, having adversity in your life --

SN: That's right.

JC: -- to excelling at Lincoln High School.

SN: Yeah, right.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

JC: Tell me what you know about the Japanese schools in Portland?

SN: Well because, I did go to Montavilla Japanese School at night, but going to school like that, I think that maybe if it weren't for the war maybe we would have been much better in learning Japanese. But when the war came, teaching Japanese just stopped, and we went to school, we went to this Japanese school. The man came in a Model A Ford and picked us up at 58th and Burnside and drove out way all the way out to Montavilla. Montavilla is not quite as far as Gresham. Montavilla is about 102nd, I can't remember. And also downtown kids went to a much better school. They had better teachers, and they went practically every day after school to learn Japanese, and a lot of them learned very good Japanese, I mean, especially conversational Japanese. But the other thing that happened is many of the Japanese were sent to Japan. The reason for that is that Niseis were sent to Japan to be taken care of by grandmother or grandfather because the mother and father couldn't support that many kids. And so they sent them over there to go to school to go there, and many Niseis are very bitter about that. They are very bitter that they were forced out of the family to go to Japan and live with the grandfather.

JC: Did that happen during the Depression?

SN: During the Depression days, yeah, before World War II.

JC: And then they are bitter about that experience because they had to stay in Japan or --

SN: That's right. Bitter because they're separated from the family, but not all the children went, okay? The older children were sent over there, and I have numerous examples of that where they are so mad at the mother and father for their being sent away at a very young age. It was like after graduating high school and so on, could be different. But the mother and father, Depression days, couldn't feel that they could take care of so many children and that was a very tragic thing. I have friends who are so bitter towards their mother and father, and I've analyzed, analyze the fact that they were sent off and while their brother or sister, younger sisters were allowed to stay here and they were sent. And I know it doesn't have to be Japanese. It could be Caucasian families who are, the children are sent away to live with the, and so on. They feel abandoned and so on, but that has some bad consequences that they won't speak to their mother and father and so on. People don't hear about it too much, but I know some and close people that --

JC: So when did those children then return back to the states? Did some of them get caught in Japan?

SN: They got caught, some got through the war. There are still broken up families, and they sort of separated themselves from the family completely, but some came back. There are Niseis who speak very good and write and speak very good Japanese. I mean they can write Japanese, read Japanese. And some, they are called, for some reason or another, they are called Kibei.

JC: Do you speak and write and read Japanese?

SN: I speak Japanese. I speak Japanese enough to be able to conduct business when I go to Japan and be able to order food at the restaurant, and, but writing has gone down the hill. I can write katakana, hiragana which is the alphabet type, but kanji is very difficult for me. I can't remember. But there are a lot of Niseis who are very fluent in Japanese, writes very well, especially those who were there for four or five years, went to school there. But you see, with the war did a lot of things that wasn't in the plan and the Japanese really were thinking, the immigrants, thinking of coming here, making some money and returning to Japan like a lot of Chinese did. But what happened is the children grew up. They didn't want to leave, you know. All of a sudden, and then the war came and that was the end. That's why they sent the children over there and telling the children that we're going to be coming back and so on. You just go to school and stay with grandpa and grandma and so on. That's the story, but the war changed all that.

JC: I was going to ask you, so if the war hadn't happened, what would have been different for the Japanese American community?

SN: Well, I think a lot of them may have returned to Japan, taken the children, a lot of them would. But there were many families, not hundreds, but many families, as Mary's uncle, Mary's uncle, took the whole family and returned after the war ended saying that Japan won the war.

JC: I don't understand.

SN: Well, you did. And soon after he returned, returned back there, he died with pneumonia because the food was so bad, see. There was no food at all in Japan, and there were, I don't know, a boatload of these families went back and took all the children and so on. So Mary's cousins, you know, all went over to Japan.

JC: What was the motivation for going back? I mean --

SN: She, he thought that Japan won the war. There were hundreds of Japanese who, you know, went that way, a little bit and thought that Japan won the war. And, you know, he was in a separate camp all the time because he was considered a dangerous alien. He was in a place called Crystal Springs or something like that in Texas. I can't remember the name exact, and the ones that want, the Isseis who were considered, you know, a danger were, they weren't dangerous, but they thought they were dangerous.

JC: And they thought they were --

SN: They were the leaders. They were the community leaders. That's another thing that helped my father being separated from the Japanese community, never participating. They didn't even touch him except for his business, and they checked out his business and that's it. But if he was a community leader and so on, my father would have been in a bad situation, been put away.

JC: So you had the one community leader who you say went, had some mental problems because of that. What was the general experience of those community leaders who had been in separate camps, isolated like that? Do you know?

SN: Most of them came back. I think it was all right. Some were bitter about it. I don't know people at firsthand. All I know firsthand, about Mary's uncle.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

JC: How do you think your experience has differed from families who did end up in a camp? What kind of, do you think that's influenced your outlook?

SN: I think so. I don't blame anyone being very bitter of being put into a concentration camp. I mean, there is no way that you can say that the person was happy being in there, incarcerated in a very bad place. Mary, my wife, says the sandstorm and so on, just the food was such a horrible... it really was a bad experience, you know, and she was so glad she was able to get out of there, but her sisters stayed there. The brothers eventually came out afterward, out of the camp, but the mother and father stayed there right to the end until they closed the camp and then moved to, back to Los Angeles.

JC: Why did some people leave and some people stay in the camps?

SN: I think if you want to go out to work or something like that, you were able to do it, leave. I think most, I think you got a place to go to and so on, I guess outside of the California area, I think it's all right, but a lot of the people just stayed. I think that that would be something to ask those people who stayed and ask, "Why did you stay when you could have gotten up and moved somewhere else?"

JC: When you were talking about your family moving, what kind of reaction was there among, with the Caucasians in the community? Were people saying, you know, "Get out of here," to you personally or were they saying, "Look we'll do anything we can to help you," did people offer help or only --

SN: I can't remember, but I think there were -- our clerk that worked for my father for years was very helpful. Her name was Saunders, Mrs. Saunders, Mr. Saunders. Mrs. Saunders was an accountant, and she worked in the store. And I didn't bring this up, but she, we let her run the store like her own store, made money off the store and did very well because, you know, and then with the promise that when we came back that she will give the store back to us, and that's what she did, just the store. I think my father was, he was always very nice to her and to the help there. And so she was very nice for the four years, ran the store until we returned.

JC: So once again, your connection, your close connection to the American community benefitted you during that time because you had someone you could trust.

SN: Right. I'm quite sure that it was good that she kept it and then, you know, people who leasing the property to us allowed us to keep the store there.

JC: Was that unusual?

SN: Well, a lot of places, I'm quite sure a lot of people kicked out their tenants, took it away, then rented to other people. I'm quite sure that went on.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

JC: What are your thoughts about the reparation, and does that make any difference? Does that have an impact?

SN: It was just nice to have money. That's all I could say. I think it was, it's not a large amount of money, but it was certainly, it certainly was helpful for many to feel that they were compensated for their sufferings and many of them, I know we suffered, but I have to think that some people really suffered very, very badly, lost a great deal. We could lose some because we were well-off enough to be able to take the loss; but for others, a loss was just wiping them out completely. To those people, war, the evacuation was very bad, bad thing to happen to them and not knowing what to do. We were lucky that we had Mrs. Saunders to take care of it. And also, I already told you about the other merchandise, the wholesale merchandise we had from Japan was taken care of by Mr. Nichols. His name is A.J. Nichols, and he was our salesman. And he's the one that sold all the merchandise to Seaside, agate people, took the agate polishing machine and polished the merchandise. [Laughs]

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

JC: If you can imagine -- I'm putting you into a funny place, but if you can imagine that there was another eviction order today -- how do you imagine you might react or your kids would react?

SN: I think number one, the number one, much order so that we have our political connections, so I don't worry about those things, but that was the number one fault. I mean, if the war took place let's say four years later where the Niseis were older now, you see, could have gone to the, yelled at the city council about taking away the license. We could yell at the people and had more contact with white people, all right. It would have been different, but we were all too young when it happened. Because we were American citizens, you know. I think that had a lot to do, if we were four to six years older, you know. We were mostly teenagers, okay, at that time, teenagers or less, and that would have made a big difference. You can be, did they incarcerate the Germans and Italians, no. Only rabble rousing Italians were put into camp. But that is one big, I always believe that that today, something like that would never happen against the Japanese Americans because we are too well entrenched here and so on. That would be, that would be just, it would be and so on. Okay. We have today the Arab, the Arab situation where they want to, there was talk at the very early time that they were going to incarcerate all the Arabs in the city, anybody who was an Arab. Of course, they got lots of Arabs who are in very influential positions that would never let that happen because after all Mr. Atiyeh is 100 percent Arab.

JC: Do you imagine the Japanese American community coming to the defense of the Arabic community if something like that would happen?

SN: Oh, yeah. But to incarcerate all the Arabs, it's just, which I know it wouldn't happen.

JC: So you're talking, you spoke about having a voice, and it seems right that the voice got lost. The older generation didn't have a voice yet, and the younger generation wasn't ready to --

SN: Right, right, exactly. Very few minority, not minority, very few Japanese Americans were old enough to make a big protest out of it. Min Yasui was one that did, and he is, of course, very well-known for what he did. The word is not just brave, but he was a kind of person that was smart, intelligent, knew what he was going to do, knew what the consequences were. He went there to defend himself. I really think that there was, we should have been a -- there should have been a much larger group of grown Niseis that would, you know, would be no evacuation whatsoever. Of course, everybody says what happened in Hawaii. Well, it's so obvious. The army depended so much on the Japanese labor because otherwise, if you would incarcerate everybody in Hawaii, the whole economy will collapse, and they had to have that economy to keep the army going and so on. That made the big difference. I think also, you see, the number of volunteers of 442nd came from areas, the larger numbers. The 442nd came mainly from areas where the Niseis were more integrated into the community. And that's why very high percentage in Portland, very high percentage in Seattle area, lower percentage down in Los Angeles on percentage base of numbers.

JC: And they were a squadron? The 442nd was a squadron or a --

SN: It was a regiment, 442nd regiment and completely volunteer group and a lot of more people from Hawaii. Of course, a lot came from Hawaii. But I'm saying, on the mainland, the areas where, so, up north, the Niseis were much more, getting much more integrated with, because smaller population and so on in the economy. That's what's very interesting. The biggest group came from the Seattle area, Portland was second.

JC: Did you ever have to take the "loyalty oath"?

SN: No.

JC: Who had to take that and who didn't?

SN: The ones who were in the camp.

JC: Only those in the camp?

SN: Yeah.

JC: What's the logic of that? I don't understand that.

SN: Well, you see, they have this, I don't know. Somebody wanted to make sure that they had all "loyal" people in the camp and to take out the ones who were "disloyal," and they were sent to Tule Lake, the hardcore people.

JC: So could you have been a "disloyal" American in Salt Lake City and gotten away with it?

SN: Yeah, I think so because they didn't come and make you take the loyalty.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

JC: So I think we're coming to the end of the interview.

SN: All right, fine. Good.

JC: I'll ask you once again if there's anything that we've left out or some juicy story that we've forgotten about or anything else that you'd like to say before this ends.

SN: My experience in going to New York was very good. It was very, very enlightening. I learned a lot, met another kind of population, very heavily, heavily, a very diverse place. There, the first time I saw a lot more blacks than ever before, many Jewish people, large Jewish community, and had opportunity to work there a while, a short time at Federated Department Store place and learned that windows dressers are all gays. No, really. Window dressers at Lord and Taylor were all gays and worked with them and learned about gays, gay people and men. Gays are men. They had a staff of, they had a staff of twenty-four people working on doing window dressing and do it once a week. Have you ever been to Lord and Taylor? You know their window, okay. They do it once a week, and there is one woman working there, and she's the secretary to the head window dresser, and so what I did was clean the mannequins. Mannequins were not, mannequins in those days were paper mache, so they got dirty very easily. So I had to clean those and the mannequins, and I ran upstairs around and so on. When you run upstairs, you got to tell the guards that you are coming up there to get it because they have these boxers, not boxers, what's the other vicious dog, guard dogs?

JC: Dobermans.

SN: They have the Dobermans running all over the department store every night because you know why, people sneak in and stay behind in the department store to steal something out of the store. The man was there telling me, "Go and get this hat," or get this or that. I was a gopher in doing that, and you work the middle of the night. And then at the end of the day, end of the night, it would be about 4 o'clock, 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning, these, all these gay men would put women's hats on, shawls or something, and dance around.

JC: So there was a lot of diversity in New York and a lot of tolerance in New York?

SN: I worked in a post office, and I can't imagine the bundles of Reader's Digest. I tell you, I had to pick up those big sacks of Reader's Digest and sort them out, Reader's Digest. After that, I never wanted to see a Reader's Digest in my life. [Laughs] Because it came down from New York in trucks, they are published in New York, sent out all over the world. So I had a lot of, I think that I'm very fortunate that I had a lot of experience in doing so many different things in my life, so that helps, that helps.

JC: Sam, thank you very much for this interview.

SN: Okay.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.