"Topaz Stories: Remembering the Japanese American Incarceration" (Season 3, Ep. 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast, Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Dept. of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fixed, I hope this is the place. If you subscribe to this podcast, or if this is the first time you've listened to us, I hope you'll go back and listen to the dozens of other prior episodes. Please also rate and review Speak Your Piece on iTunes, Google, and elsewhere. Today on Speak Your Piece, we'll be learning about a curated digital exhibit, Topaz Stories, Remembering the Japanese American Incarceration. This is a collection of thought-provoking personal memories of survivors or descendants of survivors of the Topaz Relocation Center, a concentration camp for Japanese Americans here in Utah during World War II. Volunteers from the Friends of Topaz, which was established to support Utah's Topaz Museum, located in Delta, Utah, have gathered the stories, exhibited them in California, and planned exhibits in Utah as well at the Utah State Capitol. This was to occur in 2020 It has been postponed because of COVID.
I'm hoping in the future we may see this wonderful exhibit in Utah. Now, last month, the Topaz Stories team launched a website, topazstories.com, where each week three stories will be shared over the following months. Just take a minute, right now, if you would please, write this down, Topaz Stories, that's topazstories.com.
If you'll please write that down. Some of these stories you'll hear today will be released later in the series. We hope you'll go to this website, this wonderful curated site, and read more stories.
My two guests today are members of the Topaz Story Project Team.
First is Ruth Sasaki who gathered and edited many of these stories, and Jonathan Hirabayashi who was the graphic exhibit designer and also contributor to Topaz Stories. Good morning, Ruth, and good morning, Jonathan.

**Ruth Sasaki** (2:46)
Good morning, Brad.

**Jonathan Hirabayashi** (2:47)
Good morning, Brad.

**Brad Westwood** (2:48)
So good to have you here. Ruth is a Sansei or a grandchild of a Japanese-born immigrant, immigrants. She was born and raised in San Francisco after World War II. Her short story, The Loom, won the American Japanese National Literary Award. And her collection, The Loom and Other Stories, was published in 1991 by Grey Wolf Press. This book will be listed in the show notes. Two of her stories were aired on NPR's Selected Shorts, a wonderful public radio program offered here in Utah in 90.1 NPR, Utah, every Sunday night. A short film was also made of her story, American Fish. She is the editor of the Topaz Stories Project. Her mother's family, including her grandparents, mother, aunts and uncles, were incarcerated in Tanfaran Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, and then in Topaz outside of Delta, Utah during World War II.
My second guest is Jonathan Hirabayashi. Born in 1946, Jonathan's first 10 years involved his family owning and working on a Utah farm near American Fork and Pleasant Grove in Utah Valley. What was then two small farming communities. In 1956, his family returned to California, Santa Clara Valley. After college graduation and service in the US Army, Jonathan returned to school and received a BA in art.
Then after a five-year tenure as a graphic designer for the Oakland Museum, he established his own firm designing and fabricating exhibits. Both of my guests have deeply interesting lives and professional careers. We will include their bios in the Speak Your Piece show notes.
Once more, thank you for both of you being here today.

**Ruth Sasaki** (4:49)
Thanks for inviting us, Fred.

**Brad Westwood** (4:52)
Ruth, we'll be talking about the larger story, the unconstitutional treatment of Japanese Americans and about the Utah Topaz Camp. But first, can you tell us a bit about how this project came about and why you have chosen this time, almost 80 years after the events in question, to share this story?

**Ruth Sasaki** (5:12)
Sure.
As you mentioned, this project was begun by some of the founding members of the Friends of Topaz, including Anne Tamaki Dion and her family network, Ken Yamashita, and then others, Barbara Saito, Kimi Kodani-Hill, and Kei Yatabe. They were very active in the early years raising money for the museum. And I think the project started from a desire to preserve their own family stories. Jonathan and I are actually the newest members of the team. And I was invited to join at the end of 2018 Jonathan came on board in early 2019 to help us prepare for our first exhibit in the San Francisco Bay area. My own motivation, I had actually also started writing down some of my family stories. And it was especially after the death of my aunt, Keo, who died in 2015 at the age of 102 She was a great storyteller. And but most of her stories were about the very vibrant Japanese American community in San Francisco before the war, not so much about the camps. I was really fascinated by those stories because that culture no longer existed by the time I was growing up in an integrated neighborhood in San Francisco. And the stories were like pieces of a puzzle that reflected a culture, almost like a civilization that no longer existed.