In 1924, while passage of the Immigration Act cast Eiichi and his colleagues in Japan into despair and disappointment, Japanese immigrant families in the United States were making lives for themselves with courage and forbearance. The immigration issue had entered a new phase and the era of the Nisei had begun. They were busy opening up new paths for their lives with no need to rely on backing of their parents’ homeland. In the late 1920s and 1930s, their worldview and lifestyles were growing far apart from the nationalism that was then intensifying in Japan.

Nishiyama Sen (1911–2007), pioneer in simultaneous interpreting of English and Japanese and well known for his interpreting for NHK during the live telecast of the Apollo landing on the moon in 1969, spent his boyhood in Salt Lake City, Utah. The 1910s and 20s was the time during which anti-Asian racial discrimination grew intense, culminating in the enactment of the Immigration Act in 1924 that shut the door on immigration from Japan. He was a Nisei, or second-generation Japanese, the population of which was growing in various parts of the United States at that time. Unlike in California at that time (around 1925), in Utah students of Japanese heritage were apparently attending public schools.

Nishiyama was in the seventh grade when one day his class went swimming at a heated pool, an appealing feature of a newly built municipal gymnasium. Like his classmates he was in high spirits. The gatekeeper to the pool allowed all of them entry except for Nishiyama, insisting that the white students were allowed to swim in the pool but not Japanese. The teacher who accompanied the students was embarrassed and tried his best to negotiate with the gatekeeper, but without success. Nishiyama had to give up swimming and went home alone.

When he went to school the following day, he was immediately called to the principal's office. The principal, a middleaged woman, sincerely apologized to him, saying how sorry she was that her country could allow such discriminatory treatment. After she heard what had happened, she said, she was so disturbed that she couldn't sleep all night. The school had just decided that from then on it would never use that pool again and instead use another pool where Nishiyama could enjoy swimming like everyone else.