Column One: She was a test case for resettling detainees of Japanese descent — and unaware of the risk
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.
— 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.
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.
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. Her father and mother — Shigehisa “Harry” Takei and Ninoe Takei, first-generation Issei — had started several game concessions along the pier, where patrons pitched baseballs at milk bottles, tried to hook wooden fish in a pond, and shot corks at candy bars on a shelf. They lived in a two-story house at 64 N. Venice Blvd., between the beach and the Grand Canal.
Esther was at home on Dec. 7, 1941, when she heard the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio. Her parents were working on the pier, and it took her three hours to summon the nerve to leave the house and join them.Esther’s parents had the money and family connections to return to Japan, but they had no intention of leaving their new country.
worst fears. The military was gearing up to expel “enemy aliens” from the West Coast, even though federal officials had investigated the Nikkei for years and determined they would be loyal to the United States in the event of war with Japan. But Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Command, advised Roosevelt that no person of Japanese descent could be trusted.
Esther Takei, front and center, at the Granada War Relocation Camp newspaper, for which she wrote a weekly column and drew a cartoon called Ama-chan. The Takeis moved into Block 6E, next to the sewage plant. As in Santa Anita, Esther made new friends and found a job, this time working as a dental assistant for a Dr. Nagamoto. But the weather was oppressively hot in summer and cuttingly cold in winter, with heavy snow. She was cooped up in the barracks, disaffected and restless, her life on hold, her parents set back to zero.
Esther Takei and her mother, Ninoe, at the Granada War Relocation Center in 1944, moments before Esther boarded a train to Pasadena to become the first Japanese American to return to the West Coast from a war relocation camp. Esther was excited about the challenge, though not fully aware of the potential danger; for all its bleakness and drudgery, the camp had largely spared her from the hatred outside.
The warm welcome was short-lived. The next morning, newspapers tipped off by the editor of the campus newspaper published articles about her arrival — including the address of Anderson’s home. The story was then picked up by Stars and Stripes and published in papers around the world. Esther Takei, 19, shortly after returning from a war relocation camp in Colorado to attend Pasadena Junior College, now Pasadena City College.
Kelley, the anti-Japanese crusader, held a protest of the board on Sept. 26 and said he would take court action if it didn’t heed his demands. Supt. Sexson stood his ground. “When I’m wrong I’ll admit it, and I was wrong,” Kelley said. “That Dillon Myer fellow convinced me.”Anderson sent a report to Maj. Gen. Bonesteel, who later told him that Esther’s experience persuaded him to approve widespread West Coast resettlement in January 1945, a year before he had planned to.Her parents arrived in Pasadena from Grenada in the spring of 1945, only to find they had lost everything that they hadn’t left with Anderson.
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