Matsu Ito Asai

Born October 17, 1892, Matsu (“Pine Tree”) Ito came from hardy farmer stock in Kisosaki Mura, in the region of Kuwana, Mie Prefecture, Japan. Her family must have accepted, or at least tolerated, an unusual level of independence in its women: near the turn of the twentieth century, her mother decided that long hair was a bother, and shaved off all her own hair for the rest of her life.

When Matsu was eighteen, a neighbor lady asked her to go to the United States to marry a stranger, the lady’s son. The girl refused—twice!—and was not compelled by her parents to submit. But when the neighbor came a third time, and got down on her knees and pleaded, Matsu ceded.

It was 1911 when she took a boat to Seattle with thirty-nine other picture brides, and met her husband-to-be, Sagoro “Sam” Asai, a 1904 immigrant to the U.S. who had worked on the railroad and saved his money to buy forty-seven acres of cheap, marginal land in Hood River. He had been one of the first ten Japanese to settle in the Hood River valley, and after seven years, his fruit trees were ready to yield their first crop, so he wrote his mother to find him a suitable wife.

Sagoro and Matsu would be married for fifty-six years until her death. She would bear eight children, all at home in the Hood River farmhouse, and all but one delivered by her husband. Matsu typically worked in the orchards throughout each pregnancy, went home to bear the child, and the next day strapped it on her back to return to work in the orchards. Matsu never had any health or medical care in all those years, except when she developed a tumor in her abdomen that was misdiagnosed for a time as a pregnancy, and complications during her eighth and final pregnancy. 

On a visit to Japan shortly before World War I, her oldest child, a daughter named Masako, was left in the old country at the bidding of in-laws, much to Matsu’s regret. Masako eventually would die with two children during the U.S. bombing of Nagoya. Masako’s first son, however, had been kidnapped and adopted out by in-laws, so he survived the war and was tracked down and reclaimed by his “American” grandfather Sagoro Asai.

Two of Matsu’s sons, Tot and Masaaki (“Half”), would fight in the Pacific theater in the U.S. Army —Half was underage when he sought to enlist and had to cajole his resistant father into signing his approval. Matsu and the rest of the family were taken to the Japanese-American internment camps in Tulelake, California and Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Eventually, all five sons served in the U.S. military.

On April 20, 1945, the Asais were the first Japanese-American family with children to return to Hood River and face the post-war prejudice and vitriol, and they not only stayed but prevailed. Though Matsu had no more than two years of schooling, and never learned English well enough to pass the naturalization exam (which wasn’t legally available to her before she turned fifty-nine, in any case), seven of her eight children obtained at least some college education and youngest son Itsu (“Dick”) earned a PhD in chemistry.

Her 19 grandchildren became accountants, pharmacists, a dentist, a doctor, and a writer in the Hood River, Portland, Albany, and Vancouver areas, as well as farmers of the Hood River homestead. Toward the end of the first decade of the twenty first century, twenty-three great-grandchildren were nearing adulthood (several in medical or law school), and two great-great-grandchildren had joined the family.

Mrs. Matsu Asai died on June 12, 1967, at the age of seventy-four, and was interred at Idlewild Cemetery in Hood River.

A modern American might think Matsu Ito Asai had led a miserable life, but, says her youngest daughter Mitzi Loftus, “My mother always felt that she was a total success in life, because she did everything that was expected of a wife and mother in that time, and she did them well.”