Albert Saijo
| Albert Saijo | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 4, 1926 Los Angeles, California |
| Died | June 2, 2011 (aged 85) Volcano, Hawaii |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | American |
| Ethnicity | Japanese American |
| Alma mater | University of Southern California |
| Literary movement | Beat Generation |
Albert Fairchild Saijo (February 4, 1926 — June 2, 2011) was a Japanese-American poet associated with the Beat Generation. He and his family were imprisoned as part of the United States government's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, during which time he wrote editorials on his experiences of internment for his high school newspaper. Saijo went on to serve in the U.S. Army and study at the University of Southern California. Later he became associated with Beat Generation figures including Jack Kerouac, with whom he wrote, traveled and became friends.
Saijo's first solo collection of poetry, Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, was published in 1997. A second collection, Woodrat Flat, was published posthumously in 2015. Saijo was also the author of The Backpacker (1972), a short book on backpacking, and Trip Trap (1972), a collection of haiku co-authored with Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch. Saijo died in 2011 in Hawaii, where he had lived since the 1990s.
Saijo was born in Los Angeles, California on February 4, 1926, to Satoru and Asano Miyata Saijo. His parents were Issei, first-generation immigrants to the United States.
His father, Satoru, was born in 1878 in Kumamoto Prefecture, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1900. Satoru was bilingual and had been educated in Japan and the United States; in the U.S. worked as a domestic servant before attending Kenyon Theological Seminary at Kenyon College and Drew Theological Seminary at Drew University. He was employed in Cleveland, Ohio by Albert Fairchild Holden, after whom he later named his second son, Albert Fairchild. Satoru was active in the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and later started his own congregation, but left the church in the 1930s to become a poultry farmer.
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