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, has 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.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-30/column-one-she-was-a-test-case-for-resettling-detainees-of-japanese-descent-and-unaware-of-the-risk?_amp=true