Densho Digital Archive - Joe Saito Interview (denshovh-sjoe-01-0010)

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AC: So when did your father and mother come to the United States?

JS: Well, I don't recall when my dad first came. He was a soldier in the Japanese army at one time, and he came in, after the Japanese-Russian war was over. He didn't go to Vladivostok or any place up there, but I remember him talking to friends who did go up there and somebody telling him about the suffering they went through, the tough winter up there, the soldier. But my dad, I don't know whether he served out of Japan or not, but he's, I don't know how many years he served. He came here in, well, it must've been around, he came to Hawaii first, around, it must've been 1910 or afterwards. My mother, he went back to Japan and got married, and my mother arrived in Seattle sometime in 1916. And my dad came to Hawaii and then he came to Seattle, and I don't know, I don't have any, we don't have any record. And I have to tell you, that's one thing that my folks didn't talk much about, their experiences getting married or how they did it. We have pictures of them, but none, nothing really significant about how they went through the marriage process and everything. And we have a friend down in Milwaukie today who, she's almost, she's in her nineties, Mrs. Endo, and she comes from the same place -- there's a, what's his name, one Endo who is active in the Nisei Vets in Portland... anyway, it's his mother, and she came from the same place as my mother came from. We learned more about my mother's background from her than we ever did from my mother. My mother didn't like to talk about her background, so there's something that wasn't too pleasant, whether she was married once and ran away or, and came home... I just don't know.

Anyway, my mother is my mother. She raised the three of us. She had her first, she came in 1916, her first child was stillborn, would've been a daughter. Then my youngest brother, Paul, he was a twin and he, his twin died at an early age, six months or something like that, buried in Portland. So we just, we don't have any history of our folks. We know where, at least my wife and I have been to, I think, her family's grave plots and my mother's and my dad's cemeteries where the family members are buried. We tried to inquire when we were in Japan about our grandparents and stuff; nobody, either didn't want to talk about it or didn't have any information. I have a, apparently I had an uncle who went to Peru, and we never saw or heard of him, but we heard once from one of his, who would, somebody who would be my cousin or my nephew, from Peru, and he wrote us a letter and we responded and never heard from him again. And maybe when we went to Japan, maybe I didn't do things right 'cause things kind of died off again, so we haven't had any communication. And my wife's people are, she doesn't hardly have any. So neither one of us have any communication with our... but, now I don't know whether this is wrong or right for us to feel this way, but it doesn't bother us, because if some people want to be associated with their background clear to the pilgrims and Revolutionary War, well that's fine, but we can't because the system in Japan wasn't that good. If you were on the wrong side of a losing team they burned all your records, apparently. That is the way I understand it, and I don't know. You probably know, having lived in Hawaii, probably know about what goes on in that kind of respect than I. As far as I'm concerned with my life, I just feel like whatever my parents or grandparents, they gave me what they gave me, and beyond that, there's no point in me trying to figure out what they did or how many horse thieves or anything, because I will be judged by the Lord on what I've done. And that's why I'm, my life has, since World War II, has been what I've made of it. And so that's why I consider this part the most important. You like to hear about everything that happened... [Laughs]

AC: We're gonna get to it. We're gonna get to it.

JS: Alright, fine.