On the windswept plains of eastern Colorado, dust storms rattled the barracks of the Granada War Relocation Center, driving grit through the cracks, bending sapling trees, blotting out the sun. It was 1944, and Esther Takei didn't understand why she had to be languishing there, alienated by the only country she knew.
The internment camp was surrounded by barbed wire fences and eight machine gun towers. When her family took walks at night, they were hit by floodlights, as if they were criminals. Esther wanted nothing more than to return to California to start college.
That opportunity arrived sooner than expected. On a hot, listless day in the dog days of that summer, an old family friend named Hugh Anderson had come in on the train from Los Angeles with news. The federal government had given him the go-ahead to bring a single Japanese American student back to Southern California to enroll in college. It was a test case for the resettlement of all the detainees of Japanese descent, and he thought Esther, 19, would be a perfect candidate.
The nation was starting to envision the end of the war. Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were all on the retreat.
But anti-Japanese sentiment was unabated and withering, and hatred extended to the Nikkei in the United States _ in ways it did not for Germans and Italians. Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Americans had read daily headlines about "Jap" atrocities while tens of thousands of American men were killed in the Pacific theater. The Japanese immigrants and their U.S.-born children were bound to be targets of deep-seated rancor.
Anderson, a Quaker accountant who had worked at the incarceration camp in Poston, Ariz., explained to her parents that Esther would enroll at Pasadena Junior College while living with his family in Altadena.
Her resettlement would gauge the public reaction and, if all went well, lead the way for tens of thousands more to return to the West Coast.
Her parents agreed to let her go, putting their fears aside. They needed to show the nation their people's humanity, and their loyalty. But when Esther boarded the westbound train a few weeks later, her father had a moment of panic: Am I sending my daughter to her death?
The roundup and incarceration of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast _ 62% of them American-born citizens _ during World War II is a chapter of American history now roundly viewed as a betrayal of the country's ideals, an inhumanity driven not by military necessity, but by racism, paranoia and greed. In California, some of the first to lobby for their removal were white farmers who coveted their land and wanted them out of the market.
The lesser known part of the story was the rutted road to resettlement. Families that had been here for decades and thrived before the war _ many turning marginal farmland into some of the state's most productive soil _ returned to find little was left for them. Most had to start from nothing, in the most hostile of times.
Esther Takei Nishio, the first to make that journey home, died in October at her home in Pasadena at the age of 94.
Like so many others of her generation, Nishio (her married name) did not dwell on the indignities of her past. She lived a quiet life in Pasadena, working as an executive secretary, doting on her husband, raising her son. She was loved for her easy grace, humor and gleeful laugh. When she sat down for an oral history interview with the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 1999, she hadn't told the story of her return to California in more than three decades. Beyond her family, her account is known mostly to small circles of scholars and survivors of the mass incarceration.
"Even at our church, a lot of people didn't know what she had done," her son John Nishio said. "They heard it the first time at the memorial service."
Her experience _ documented here from two oral history interviews, World War II-era news articles, archived correspondence and interviews with her son _ illuminates a seminal moment of Los Angeles and California history, American race relations and civil rights. Nishio helped lead her people home to a bewildering new reality in the country that betrayed them.
"She was a kind of parallel to the first African Americans who integrated white universities in the years after World War II," said Greg Robinson, a history professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal who has written extensively on the relocation camps. "She ran the risk of attracting bigotry and perhaps violence, and her success helped open doors for other Nisei."
