Masaharu Saito

Baker Company, 100th Battalion, 442nd RCT

 

Masaharu “Bull” Saito was born on January 20, 1923, on the Leilehua Plateau, an upland agricultural region in Central O‘ahu outside of Wahiawā. His parents, Masanari and Tei Saito, were pioneering plantation owners from Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, who helped to turn pineapple into Central O‘ahu’s most valuable crop.

Masaharu graduated from Leilehua High School in 1941 and began working at the PX (Post Exchange) at nearby Schofield Barracks, where he befriended many of the GIs recently arrived in Hawai‘i from the U.S. mainland. On the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, he had arranged to borrow his older brother Masaaki’s car to take his GI friends on a tour around the island. Those plans vanished as the sound of airplane engines and explosions announced an attack. In the opening minutes of the raid, he recalls watching bombs drop on Wheeler Field — the army airfield adjacent to Schofield Barracks — part of an effort to destroy aircraft on the ground and prevent them from scrambling to defend Pearl Harbor from imminent attack. World War II had already been raging overseas for years, but Masaharu had just witnessed the very first bombs strike American soil. 

In the aftermath of the bombing, Japanese Americans found themselves treated as potential threats. Despite being American citizens, nisei were classified as 4-C “enemy aliens,” a designation that marked them as ineligible for military service. The military-issued ID Masaharu used to work on-base at Schofield was reissued, with his photo encircled in a thick black ring. He was barred from working at the PX. 

Masaharu’s mother, Tei, was fiercely protective of her children and forbade her sons from volunteering to fight. Masaharu’s younger brother, Etsuo, tried anyway — slipping away to enlist in the newly formed 442nd, the segregated Japanese American unit drawn from Hawaiʻi and the U.S. mainland. He was turned down on medical grounds because of a preexisting heart condition.

On January 20, 1944, the U.S. government reopened the draft for nisei, effectively ending the 4-C “enemy alien” exclusion. Japanese Americans were now eligible to serve in the war effort, even as many were still incarcerated in wartime camps on the U.S. mainland.

In 1944, Masaharu was drafted to meet the Army’s growing manpower needs and sent to Camp Fannin in Texas, where he trained as a replacement for units already fighting overseas.

After their training at Camp Fannin, Masaharu and his fellow replacements were held back from being shipped off to the front in New Jersey after a measles outbreak. When they finally began making their way to the European Theater, Masaharu crossed paths with some of his GI friends from the Schofield Barracks PX in the lobby of New York’s Penn Station, some 5000 miles distant from where they had become friends on O‘ahu. 

Masaharu landed in Marseille, in Southern France, a replacement for the 100th Battalion late in the European campaign. He entered combat in Italy and fought in the North Apennines-Po Valley push, when the 100th/442nd was sent back into the rugged mountains to crack the Gothic Line — a heavily fortified German defensive belt — by moving at night and launching a surprise pincer attack at dawn to seize key ridgelines and gun positions. After that breakthrough, the campaign became a driving advance toward the Po Valley, aimed at cutting off the last German escape routes. This culminated in the official surrender of German forces in Italy on May 2, 1945. 

Victory in Europe was declared on May 8, 1945, when Germany’s unconditional surrender brought war in Europe to an official close. The men of the 100th Battalion took on occupation responsibilities in Europe: guarding prisoners and helping to hold together a fragile order in a landscape still marked by ruined buildings and displaced civilians. He carried back small, vivid remnants of that period. One of those keepsakes was a Walther PPK, taken as a trophy of war from a German SS officer — decades before the pistol became widely recognized as James Bond’s signature sidearm in Ian Fleming’s 007 world.

Masaharu’s return to Hawai‘i in 1946 unfolded with an official celebration at ʻIolani Palace, honoring the 100th Battalion and 442nd soldiers for what they had done overseas. When finally seeing her son returned home safely from the war after two long years, his mother Tei silently wept. 

The family gathered at the palace was met with a homesick request. After years away, Masaharu wanted the comfort of musubi — rice wrapped in nori — especially the kind filled with ume (salted plum). Tei had gotten up early to make musubi and sushi rolls, and the family ate together on the palace grounds.

After the war, Masaharu took advantage of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 — the so-called “GI Bill” — to pay for trade school, training as an electrician at Honolulu College. Masaharu started as an electrician at Dole Plantation, where large-scale agricultural operations depended on constant maintenance of irrigation pumps and processing equipment. His work ranged between present-day Mililani (which was then covered in pineapple fields) and Pūpūkea on the north shore. Mid-career, he shifted to working with the City and County of Honolulu at the Waipahu Incinerator, built in 1970 on Waipahu Depot Road as the main power plant for Central and West O‘ahu. He retired as head of its electrical department and was presented with a gold retirement watch from Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi.

Participation in Club 100 became central to Masaharu’s life outside of work. Over the years he served as President of the club’s Rural Chapter — representing the stretches of Oʻahu beyond urban Honolulu — at least a dozen times, and he was a familiar hand behind the chapter’s shinnenkai (New Year’s celebration). 

In his free time, Masaharu is an avid gardener and horticulturalist. The family property in Wahiawā is home to three varieties of lychee tree, three varieties of avocado, and multiple types of persimmons, which produce hundreds of pounds of fruit annually. His anthuriums have regularly received best-in-show awards in local competition. Masaharu grows dozens of orchids—honohono, stanhopea, and vanilla among them—with vanilla’s long vines running hundreds of feet along the back of his property. Both vanilla orchids and the Melipona bees that pollinate them are native to South America. In the absence of these bees, he hand-pollinates the flowers with a toothpick to produce his own vanilla pods. His garden yields eggplant, heirloom tomatoes, green beans, Chinese chives, green onion, and edamame. He also tends a Hilo White pineapple—prized for its pale, sweet, low-acid flesh. Over the decades, his strain of bronze mignonette lettuce (an heirloom variety dating back to 1898) has become celebrated in its own right.

[Submitted by Cory Johnson, grandson of Masaharu Saito (1/12/2026)]