The ghosts of Topaz are stirring again.
A crowd gathered at the very spot last week. Taped off in pink, on the western boundary of what many consider an American concentration camp, was a 78-year-old crime scene.
The investigators this time weren’t in olive drab, carrying rifles. They were archaeologists from the National Park Service with ink and paper and cameras, hovering above an indentation in the desert floor.
Close by a man named James Hatsuaki Wakasa was shot to death in 1943 while walking his dog. To be sure, his slaying was a final indignity resting atop a pile of them.
Wakasa’s death at age 63 drew thousands to a funeral held in captivity.
The bereaved weaved paper flowers into funeral wreathes. Headlines proclaimed “MP Kills Jap Trying to Flee Center.”
Wakasa was cremated. The boy playing soldier who killed him with a single shot to the chest was exonerated. Official propaganda flowed freely.
Back then his fellow prisoners celebrated Wakasa’s life with an unauthorized, 1,000-pound rock monument. They were later ordered by camp administrators to destroy it.
They buried it instead.
And it was lost for almost 78 years before it was found again. A stroke of luck and a map tucked away in the National Archives led to its rediscovery.
Archaeologists found it peeking above the cracked desert floor last year, a stone communique from the other side, offering a concrete connection between the living and the dead.
The find should have been carefully excavated. Then promptly celebrated.
Instead, the rock artifact’s secretive removal in July by the Topaz Museum in Delta uncovered generations of emotions tied not just to Wakasa’s death but to the pain and loss and mistreatment experienced by those who shared his common experience, the descendants of those incarcerated by a fearful culture at the height of a world war.
It all still lies just beneath the surface.
Last Tuesday at the museum, a coterie of Japanese Americans, some born at Topaz, gathered around where Wakasa’s monument now sits outside on a wooden pallet behind the museum.
The National Park Service professionals were there, introducing themselves ahead of a deep dive inspection of the stone, its burial site, and data collection that if all goes as planned will lead to a report sometime in January.
The museum board invited the park service to perform the task, hoping also to quell the howls coming from incensed descendants of Topaz prisoners, but also to begin building a framework for future collaboration.
Nancy Ukai, who discovered a map in the National Archives that lead archaeologists to the rediscovery of the Wakasa memorial, reads from a prepared statement last Tuesday at Topaz Museum.
Nancy Ukai, a member of the recently formed Wakasa Memorial Committee, who found the map that led to the monument’s rediscovery, read from a prepared statement.
The outrage was palpable.
“This stone represents not only the most sacred object ever found at Topaz, historians are calling this memorial the most significant historical artifact of all the US WWII concentration camps for Japanese Americans,” she said. “That makes the Wakasa Monument a national monument, a symbol of racial violence, justice denied and the literal burying of history.”
Ukai used the moment to demand transparency from the Topaz Museum, to release all of its photos and video from the monument’s removal.
Justin Henderson is the Heritage Partnerships program manager for the National Park Service’s Intermountain Region. He spoke after Ukai on Tuesday, introducing specialists on his team and explaining how the park service supports all types of historic preservation efforts, from landmarks to rock art, on public property and private.
“We are here because the Topaz Board invited us to the site to help… that’s what we are here to do today, provide technical assistance,” he said. “That technical assistance is going to take the shape of a cultural resource condition assessment. Over the next two days we are going to be collecting a lot of baseline data about the stone and the site it was removed from.”
Henderson said he hopes to deliver a roadmap for how best historic resources at Topaz, including the monument, can best be protected in the future.
“It’s humbling to be a part of this process and help inform the stewardship of these resources,” he said.
The next day Ukai and other members of the Wakasa Memorial Committee joined the park service team, museum board members and assembled media at the taped off site where the giant rock was removed.
A short musical and religious ceremony was held.
Buddhist Rev. Jerry Hirano presides over a prayer service Wednesday at the Topaz relocation camp site outside Delta. The service commemorated the memory of James Wakasa, who was killed in 1943 by a military police sentry while he walked his dog.
Mark Izu played from a Japanese mouth organ. Reverend Jerry Hirano performed a Buddhist prayer service with incense and white flowers to be laid at the base of a nearby cross. Flowers made of paper were attached to a barbed wire fence that separated the spot from a dirt road crossing the area.
One by one attendees paid their respects to Wakasa’s memory, bowing before an altar arranged by Hirano and laying a white flower near the cross. Hirano noted Wakasa was a Christian. But he also noted the special place Topaz has in the hearts of American Buddhists.
“Topaz was the site of the formation of the Buddhist Churches of America, in English. It wasn’t called Buddhist Churches of America. But ‘churches’ was picked because it sounded less alien and threatening,” the Salt Lake City-based reverend said. “That began here.”
Hirano says he visits Topaz every summer. The last time he witnessed a group at the site was during the 75th anniversary of the camp’s 1945 closure.
Masako Takahashi, who was born in Topaz, shared some of her feelings after the ceremony. She said she was asked how it felt to be back at Topaz and said she had mixed emotions.
“On the one hand I am thrilled to be here. And yet enraged to have to be here. And thankful that you are here with me,” she said.
Of the monument, she shared harsh words about how it has been treated thus far, calling it an insult. But the stone memorial also served as “concrete evidence of the injustice and the daily threat of wanton murder our families faced everyday they were confined at Topaz and other concentration camps.”
Masako Takahashi, who was born at Topaz, is seen here last Wednesday near the site of the Wakasa memorial’s removal at the Topaz camp site.
Later, during an interview with KUER NPR Utah, Takahashi explained how she for many years thought little of Topaz or of the hardship faced by Japanese Americans during WWII. The older generations, she said, were stoic about moving forward with their lives after the war, of rebuilding.
“I don’t think it is unusual in the Japanese American community, parents didn’t complain or talk about it. It was like don’t complain just carry on. And then suddenly something like this happens,” she said.
Takahashi described the “cavalier” email she received from the Topaz Museum about the removal of the monument. This after Takahashi volunteered to fund an archaeological excavation of the monument herself.
“I just exploded,” she said.
Asked what the path forward could look like, Takahashi said she’d like to see the monument displayed somewhere other than at Topaz Museum.
“I think it should be in a place where it would be accessible to historians, educators, and stakeholders, other Japanese Americans…it’s not at Topaz (the camp) anymore,” she said. “It could be at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles…or it could be in the Japanese cemetery in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, which is the only Japanese cemetery in the country, and where Japanese have been buried since the 1800s.”
She said she thinks Topaz Museum forfeited any say in how the moment is handled in the future, considering the manner in which it was removed.
“We don’t want people who did that (removed the rock in secret) to be the people who do the next thing,” she said.
