The young, second-generation Japanese immigrants (Nisei) relocated to the Topaz Mountain Internment Camp during World War II faced a unique challenge. Born in American to the children of Japanese immigrants, they were forced to negotiate between being legal citizens and being seen as outsiders. After Pearl Harbor in 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 creating the Military Exclusion Zones along the Pacific Coast. The order pushed 120,000 Japanese out of their homes and into internment camps, including Topaz. The intention was to protect America against any immigrants whose allegiance was still with Japan. The youth were directly confronted with the issue in the form of the Loyalty Exam. Two of the questions read, “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?” and, “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America . . . and foreswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power, or organization?” These questions were the basis of the “Yes-Yes” and “No-No” groups that caused division among their age group and all within the camp.

The forced relocation led Japanese young people like Miné Okubo and Yoshiko Uchida to turn to art, journals, and letters to compile the effects the movement had on Japanese family structure and their own dreams of education or social advancement. These forms of communication expressed a worry for their people, confusing and hurt over being sent to internment camps, and the desire to still support the America they had been born into. This extended into subsequent post-war Sansei generations as well. R. A. Sasaki, a third-generation San Franciscan, captured this desire in her short story American Fish. The main character, Mrs. Hayashi, is asked by an old acquaintance, Mrs. Nakamoto, why Mrs. Hayashi’s parents stayed in the United States after Pearl Harbor. Mrs. Hayashi answered simply, “I guess they knew that we, I mean my brothers and sisters and I would never want to go to Japan. I mean we were born here. We belonged here. And they wanted the family to stay together.”

Despite their circumstances, Japanese-American youth held on to the hope of an America that offered opportunity. They created from scratch, along with teachers and administrators, a successful school with limited resources. In fact, many of the students complained in interviews later in life about the lack of credible teachers and resources. The draw to a world they had grown up in, like Yoshiko Uchida who continually applied to go to college while in Topaz, highlighted the difficult situation these Japanese Americans were in. They believed in a nation who could give them everything, but were left to wonder why they were building their own prison walls when they were more than willing to fight for the nation that they were both “born” to and “belonged” in.

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Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, President Roosevelt issued executive order 9066, calling for the relocation of Japanese Americans living within the U.S. Following this order, ten relocation camps were created within the United States; eight located in the western region, two in the south. The differences in conditions of camps in the west versus the south can be effectively illustrate by comparing the Topaz Internment Camp near Delta, Utah, to the the Jerome and Rohwer camps, located in the southern Arkansas delta region.

Residents of both Topaz and the Arkansas camps experienced great hardship when faced with climates drastically different from the temperate California environment. The extreme desert temperatures at Topaz frequently fluctuated between below freezing at night to over 90 degrees in midday, which inflicted great hardship upon its residents who were exposed to the elements in partially completed barracks. In central Utah desert, internees were required to perform labor essential to cultivate agriculture in their barren, dusty environment. One resident described this when he stated, “They made cowboys out of the Japanese.”

While Utah internees faced hardships in the form of weather extremities, the plight of Arkansas internees was attributed primarily to their miserable swampy environment; one that was unfamiliar to California natives. The locations of the Jerome and Rohwer camps were outliers to the western location of the other eight camps. These camps were built due to the availability of land that had been abandoned by landowners who were overwhelmed at the prospect and draining and clearing the unrelenting swampland. This feat was left to Japanese internees, who were tasked with the responsibility of draining and clearing the land (Ward).

Japanese internees in Utah and Arkansas also experienced drastically different experiences concerning interactions with those outside the camps. The presence of internees in Arkansas presented a unique problem to the racially stratified Jim Crow South. The sudden appearance of a new ethnic minority in a society previously separated into primarily black and white races, was the source of confusion and objection among many native residents. Fierce prejudice arose among many Arkansas natives, including Governor Homer Adkins.

Despite the compliance of states housing the other camps, Adkins staunchly refused to allow Japanese students to enroll in Arkansas universities, and in many cases refused to allow internees to work on projects outside of the camp (Ward). When referring to the prospect of Japanese working outside the camp Adkins once stated, “I don't mind them leaving to work in other states, but as a matter of policy I am not going to recommend that Japanese work in any capacity in this state." Adkins’s commitment to confine internees in their camps was a prejudiced policy not replicated at Topaz, where students were allowed to attend outside universities, and many workers were granted release to work in areas surrounding the camp in areas as far away as Provo.

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Executive Order 9066 placed over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry into internment camps like the one at Kooskia. Signed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, it went into immediate effect. Along with internment and work camps like Kooskia, there were concentration, isolation, and prison camps where the government kept Japanese people from the rest of the U.S. population. The camp of Kooskia, however, was different from other interment camps.

Whereas other camps contained both Isei (first generation Japenese immigrants) and Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans), the internees of Kooskia were not American citizens but all resident aliens. Therefore, the United States government treated them as prisoners of war and their conditions and treatment were governed by the Geneva Convention. The internees also displayed a healthy amount of knowledge concerning their rights under the Geneva Convention, surprising the administrators at Kooskia. The internees there had more freedoms and privileges than any of the other internees in the other camps. For instance, there were no barbwire fences or guard towers because the location was quite remote, allowing the workers to walk about freely.

The Kooskia Scrapbook held at the University of Idaho documents these men working and building a life for themselves. The men not only worked, but they also played, relaxed and had plenty of leisure time and activities to fill that time. They could participate in several different sports available to them. There was softball, wrestling, foot racing, and table tennis. Other non-physical competitive activities were board games like checkers and go, a Japanese version of chess. Other recreational activities included boating, fishing, hiking, and more cultural activities like drawing, woodworking, stonecrafting, and weaving. They also read books and magazines, wrote letters and poetry to their families and each other, and they had access to movies. A last part of recreational living was the mixture of musical instruments available to the internees to play. These activities attest to the internees ability to make the best of a bad situation. What is not pictured in the scrapbook, however, are the pain, suffering, and inherent injustice that these and other internees faced.

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On February 19, 1942, in response to Pearl Harbor and rising anti-Japanese sentiments in the United States, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed the creation of military exclusion zones and to relocate all persons who were to be excluded from such zones. This meant that all Japanese Americans living in places like California were to be forcibly removed from their homes and sent to special camps created throughout the United States. One such camp was created in the middle of Idaho. Named the Minidoka Relocation Center, this camp housed approximately 10,000 people throughout the course of the war. It cost over $5 million to construct.

Before being relocated, each family had to report and register themselves. Tags identified families and luggage alike. Suitcases stretched, filled with entire family histories and traditions. Tarpapered barracks and a landscape of dust and sagebrush welcomed the first arrivals to Minidoka, remembered one internee at Minidoka. The executive order only required the most basic essentials be provided.

The camp itself was kept in better condition than many other camps of the sort. It served as a pseudo-town, with a small governing body (comprised of military personnel), two elementary schools, a high school, a gym, a skating rink, many baseball diamonds, farms, livestock, stores, a hospital, salons, a library, a fire station, and various other types of employment. Internees generally got along well with their captors, though as the war continued, tensions rose as the reintroduction of the draft troubled many residents. Sports were popular to help relieve stress, especially baseball and basketball. While not as luxurious as their previous homes, the Minidoka camp provided for most of the basic needs and the camp administration attempted to create an environment that still felt like a normal town.

Suspicions festered and discouraged “enemy language” journalism. Paranoia surrounded any individual with Japanese heritage without regard to their civil liberties. To attempt a semblance of normalcy, the camp produced a weekly newsletter, the Minidoka Irrigator, to inform and update detainees on camp activities. Detainees performed weddings, graduation ceremonies and created their own sports teams inside barricaded walls topped with barbed-wire. War hysteria played a dominant role in the actions of camp authorities in charge of producing camp newsletters.

Baseball provided a popular distraction, and helped to maintain a sense of normalcy in the unusual circumstance. Children attended school, often taught by people who had attended college, and teenagers graduated from high school. Adults worked and farmed, though almost always for much lower pay than the accepted minimum wage of the time. The internees farmed and tried to help end the agriculture shortage. Coupled with Mexican braceros, they comprised the majority of the labor force in the state of Idaho during the war. Most of the people living there were US citizens and had lived most of their lives in the U.S. This contrasted to the older generation, called the Issei, who felt betrayed and humiliated by the country that they had grown to love. However, the Nisei, the first-generation Americans, felt obligated to prove their loyalty by joining the armed forces when called to fight against the land of the fathers. Thus, in 1944, the War Department began the draft and allowed interned Japanese Americans to serve. Many of them would form the 442nd Regiment, which would become an “all Nisei unit.” 1,000 people from this camp served in the World War and 87 died in combat, representing one of the highest rates of service in the various internment camps and the highest number of casualties from all the internment camps. These soldiers generally served exceptionally, and were valuable assets to the US military corps.

The end of the war eliminated the need for the camp, and it was closed on October 23, 1945. The government removed most of the buildings in the camp quickly, and the land was granted to returning veterans in a post war lottery. In 1952, the Soil Conservation District organized a “Farm-in-a-Day” experiment, designed to demonstrate the most efficient farming techniques and to create more interest by homesteaders in the surrounding farmland. The land was used mainly for agriculture for the next few decades before being remade into a historical site, recognizing the poor treatment of Japanese-Americans. Today, only a few remade buildings and some signs commemorate this episode in Idaho’s history.

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The Leupp Isolation Center’s creation was the result of events that happened thousands of miles away. On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, beginning a surprise blitz throughout the Pacific. Many in the nation, including government officials, feared a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. In this climate, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which created zones of military exclusions and enforcement of military decrees, including the internment of American citizens of Italian, German or Japanese descent. Federal officials placed 120,000 citizens and residents of Japanese descent from the West Coast into ten camps, located in western states.

The government created the War Relocation Authority(WRA) to govern the internment camps. Naturally, the uprooting and imprisonment of so many people, including American citizens, resulted in troubles in the new camps. Resentful of the extralegal imprisonment, many of the relocated citizens rebelled against camp authorities. Many of the camps experienced a degree of civil disturbances. In December of 1942, a clash between inmates and guards at Manzanar Camp in California resulted in two deaths and several injuries. Such disturbances led officials to create separate penal camps for such “troublemakers.” Although originally meant to deal with the supposed ringleaders of the riot, the camp’s population expanded as the WRA did not tolerate any opposition from the prisoners. Thus, authorities could send dissenters to a camp for infractions that ranged from organizing inmate protests to calling a white nurse “old maid.” In 1943, the government held such “security risks” in an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Moab, Utah.

However, officials decided to later move the group to Leupp, Arizona, and house them in an abandoned Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school. The BIA named the school after Francis Leupp, Theodore Roosevelt’s head of the BIA. Originally built in the 1920s, the school had housed 500 students, though in 1942 it closed because it sat on a floodplain. Renovated in April of 1943, 150 military policemen staffed the camp, guarding a peak population of around eighty prisoners.

The camp proved short-lived. In late July 1943 Camp Administrator Paul Robertson replaced Ray Best. Robertson recognized the illegality of the incarceration of the internees. Thus, he immediately began the process to close the camp. By December 1943, the penal camp shut down and the prisoners relocated to Tule Lake Isolation Center, a new isolation center. In 1944, the WRA returned the land to the Department of the Interior. In 1945, authorities eventually released Japanese internees, after the end of the war. Little remains of the camp today beyond the ruins of the school building. The guard towers, fence, and other school buildings no longer stand.

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The broad narratives of American involvement in World War II include often feature the United States as the hero of the Allied powers, men old and young fighting in Pacific and European theaters of war, and the American home-front experiencing an increase in manufacturing, women in the work force, and rations to support the cause of war. America's involvement led to the Axis powers fall and saved the world from Nazis, fascists, villainous Adolf Hitler, and expanding militarized Japanese empire. This simplified plot, however, leaves out much. What great stories have we missed in our past in the name of perpetuating an overwhelmingly positive American narrative? What lessons about humanity have been sacrificed?

Topaz, Utah is the site of one such lesson. It is here that 11,212 Japanese-Americans were interned over the course of World War II, with a peak population between 8,100 and 8,300. Executive Order 9066 was signed into action by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, ten weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, and was supported by Congress through Public Law 503 and deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in the context of war. Such actions sanctioned the voluntary evacuation, then the forced removal, of West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry by the U.S. Army to assembly centers and isolated relocation centers—regardless of citizenship. This decision followed a filing of the Munson report, an investigation of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, on November 7, 1941 which included such conclusions as “[when] interview after interview piled up…the story was all the same. There was no Japanese ‘problem’ on the Coast. There will be no armed uprising of the Japanese.”

Moving to internment camps required the sacrifice of careers, properties, and constitutionally-protected rights. Those in the camps made efforts to return to some sense of normalcy; children attended school, adults were employed by the War Relocation Authorities inside camps, and some internees were even able to leave the camp for school or work. At Topaz specifically, the headquarters of the Buddhist Church of America was established, the Boy Scout bugle corps met regularly, and baseball leagues developed and grew to occupy two of the forty-two camp blocks. Not to acknowledge the irony of a love for baseball within the camps, a true American sport, in the midst of a whole-scale questioning of American-ness would be a mistake.

Most historians point to a trifecta of factors allowing the internment of an entire population in “the land of the free”—namely, racial prejudices, wartime hysteria, and ineffective government leadership. Using the sources below, reflect on the federal actions taken against Japanese-Americans. Was internment necessary? How does an event like this can uncover our own human nature? Asking such questions is not simply an attempt to poke holes in treasured American histories, but to more fully understand human experience in American history. The history of Japanese Internment at Topaz and elsewhere invites us to build empathy and understand with past and present human experience.

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Japanese internment reached its long fingers deep into the interior states of the U.S. not sparing the state of Utah. Utah's contribution to this program came in the form of Topaz. Located 15 miles from Delta, Utah, Topaz was created by the War Relocation Agency to house up to 9,000 evacuees. It would, at its peak, reach a total population 8,232 individuals, and, over the course of its life, Topaz would serve as the home for 11,212 individuals. These first groups of individuals came mostly from the Tanforan race track that had been converted temporarily into an internment camp. They were moved into the camp beginning on September 11, 1942. The camp was constructed in blocks with 34 blocks being devoted to residencies and 8 being administrative, including a hospital built on the site . Overall, Topaz appeared as a well-developed city with schools, libraries, churches, and other features of a normal community .

The lack of normalcy in this community was encapsulated by a single event in 1943. An older gentleman, James Wakasa, was killed while allegedly trying to escape from the camp by crawling under the barbed wire fence. The local newspaper reported the initial story, that Wakasa had been attempting this escape and was warned four times by the guard before he was fatally shot . However, a later report by the military showed that he had in fact been standing near the fence when he was shot. Further investigation revealed that many of the military personnel assigned to guard the camp were combat veterans and this particular guard had seen time in the Pacific, perhaps compromising his objective judgment. The death of Wakasa brought to the forefront the inherent tensions that existed within the camp between the Japanese American evacuees and the Caucasian administration. Despite efforts made within the leadership of the camp to eliminate this form of distrust, the fact that the war was still going on and Caucasian Americans were distrustful of most Japanese Americans, citizens or not, was one that could not be passed over lightly.

In a cruel irony of wartime circumstances, Utah became a place not for refugees as it had been for Mormon Pioneers in the nineteenth century, but one for prisoners of war within their own country.

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