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Editor's note: This article is a part of a series reviewing Utah and U.S. history for KSL.com's Historic section.
SALT LAKE CITY — Joseph Nishimura and his family lived a cozy life in Berkeley, California, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor happened.
Within months, Nishimura, then 8 years old, his parents and three older siblings had been arrested and taken to Tanforan Assembly Center in California, where they stayed the summer. They were then transferred to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, about a week after it opened on Sept. 11, 1942.
"We were among the early arrivals in Topaz," Nishimura said, reading off from the story he wrote of his Topaz experience, in front of a packed Utah Capitol rotunda Friday afternoon, adding that his father was a Methodist minister, was given a leadership position in the community.
Nishimura's story is one of about 70 collected over the past few years through the Topaz Stories Project, a series of mostly oral histories from the people who were taken by the federal government to the isolation center simply because of their Japanese heritage. And a sampling of the series is currently on display at the Utah Capitol.
Nishimura was one of a handful of Topaz survivors in attendance for an event celebrating the exhibit, though it was on display during the legislative session. Gov. Spencer Cox, who wasn't in attendance, signed a proclamation declaring the day the official opening of the exhibit. Michael Mower, the senior advisor of community outreach and intergovernmental relations, refers to Topaz and the nine other similar camps in the U.S. as "an ugly stain on American history."
"How fitting it is that since it was a government action, we're here in a government facility today to say never again and never forget," he added.
Topaz opened about a half-year after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. More than 11,000 people, many from the San Francisco Bay area like Nishimura's family, were sent to the facility. It housed 8,000 people at its peak before it closed on Oct. 31, 1945, and was briefly Utah's fifth-largest city, according to the Utah Division of State History.
Congress eventually passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that formally apologized to the thousands of Japanese Americans relocated during World War II. Utah also passed a bill earlier this year making Feb. 19 an annual day of remembrance of all the people who were wrongly incarcerated.
But the origin of the exhibit goes back to the creation of the Friends of Topaz about a decade ago. Then, in 2016, amid a rise in hate-related incidents in the country, the Topaz Stories Project began as a way to humanize people who are targetted through racial or ethnic fear, said Ruth Sasaki, an editor of Topaz Stories. It remains a volunteer project to this day.
She initially hesitated to participate in the program because she never lived in an internment camp herself; however, as she saw more people who once lived in Topaz die in recent years, she decided to join the project in late 2017 to make sure the stories from the camp, like Nishimura's, aren't lost forever.
Sasaki gathered information, interviewed survivors and, in some cases, even ghostwrote the stories in the collection. What she found were all sorts of recollections.
"It was very meaningful to me," she said, as dozens of people, including survivors, shuffled around the gallery behind her. "I want the world to understand what happened to us, not just in historical terms, facts and figures, I wanted (readers) to understand the human cost in very personal terms. These were very ordinary people — two-thirds of them were American citizens — and it disrupted their lives."
Sasaki is also the child of a family that was incarcerated throughout the war. While her aunt told stories all the time about the "vibrant" Japanese community in San Francisco before the war, her mother never really brought it up. If she ever did, it came through casual references.
I want the world to understand what happened to us, not just in historical terms, facts and figures, I wanted (readers) to understand the human cost in very personal terms.
–Ruth Sasaki, editor of Topaz Stories
Nishimura's story comes across the same way. Most of his recollection isn't about his time there but how his family, one by one, escaped the Utah desert. He wouldn't leave until he, his mother and one of his siblings left in March of 1944. The federal government gave them $25 apiece and they purchased one-way tickets out of there.
That escape wasn't a pleasant memory, though. When they made it to Chicago, they didn't go much farther at first because they weren't allowed to continue on a train to New York because the route went through Canada and Canada banned people of Japanese descent from entering the country at the time, Nishimura said. They had to wait for a train that would go through Ohio instead.
"That was our first inkling that, although we had left Topaz, it would be with us for a long time to come," he said.
The relevance of the Topaz Stories Project is even more prominent since the rise of violence against Asian Americans during COVID-19, Sasaki adds. She hopes that people will come to visit the exhibit, which will remain at the Utah Capitol for the rest of the year.
She also hopes people, especially school teachers, visit the website to read the various stories of life at Topaz, stories that aren't included in textbooks that offer a window in what the experience was like for the people who lived at Topaz.
"I'm hoping (visitors) will relate to these people, feel empathy," she said. "Empathy is like a bridge that (connects) differences and the problem for Asian Americans right now in American society is people see us as 'the other. I'm trying to individualize us, humanize us and make people realize we are all human beings."
