The phone call to Tom Shiokari came last July. The news was unexpected. But after almost 70 years, a wrong was to be set right and a dishonorable chapter in the history of the Antelope Valley's Japanese American community rewritten.
Dayle DeBry, director of marketing and historical research at Lancaster Cemetery, was on the line. A memorial erected in 1938 to honor Japanese citizens who had lived and died in the Antelope Valley was finally going to be restored.
It had been vandalized during World War II. What was left of the monument, including the base and a middle block engraved with the names of 13 Japanese families who installed it, had sunk into the soil and stood less than half its original size -- a sad testament to ignorance.
Now it was to be replaced with a new obelisk, handcrafted in India from pearl white granite.
"I was just taken aback, because I figured it was an issue that was pretty much dead," said Shiokari, 81, whose stepfather Teiji "Fred" Kobayashi contributed money toward the original memorial.
Jimmie Nishimoto's father also helped to pay for the initial memorial, which featured a white granite obelisk almost 8 feet high.
"I didn't think anything would come of it," said Nishimoto, 88, of the efforts to restore the cemetery centerpiece.
Today, at Lancaster Cemetery, something will most definitely come of it. At least 60 first-generation Japanese Americans and their families are expected to be honored and presented with gifts as the memorial is unveiled and rededicated.
"We are trying to right something that was done wrong to Japanese Americans, to their heritage, their community," said DeBry. "I hope that we can express that we are truly sorry for the wrong that was done to them. Restoring the monument will be symbolic of that."
The Nishimotos and Shiokaris were among 13 Japanese immigrant families, most of them alfalfa farmers, who established a thriving community on the west side of the Antelope Valley in the early 1900s.
"They had the best farms and were able to produce what other farms in the area couldn't," said DeBry. One family became the region's main celery producer for Safeway supermarkets, DeBry said; while another advised to the area's leading onion farmers on how to produce the best crop. A story in a 1941 edition of the Ledger-Gazette newspaper described how Antelope Valley businessmen and farmers "applauded" the efforts of Japanese farmers to produce green vegetables "which they thought would improve the valley much faster and better."
