The expanded Topaz Stories Exhibit, which was scheduled to open in the Salt Lake City Utah State Capitol Building on June 6, 2020 and run through December 18, will be postponed due to the coronavirus situation. All plans are in limbo, so will keep you posted on updates.
About the new exhibit
Nine new stories were added to the exhibit, and eight of them (along with 58 stories from the 2019 exhibit at J-Sei) passed the review by the Capitol Preservation Board. The lone censored story, written by yours truly, was, ironically, about censorship of some of the darker aspects of camp life. Illustrated by Berkeley artist Tanekyuki Dan Harada’s haunting oil painting, “Barracks,” it touched on “the other stories” that people did not talk about. If I can clear permission to publish the reproduction of Dan’s painting on this website, I will share the story with you. (The painting is in the permanent collection of the Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco.)
About the new stories
Setsuko Ogami of San Mateo writes about “The Topaz Japanese Library” organized by her father, Shichinosuke Asano, who was the Japanese-language editor of the Nichibei Shimbun in San Francisco before the war. Sets was encouraged to write about her father by her friend (and fellow Topaz survivor) Yae Kami Yedlosky, whose memoir was excerpted for the Topaz Stories project. Sets and her daughter Joyce visited the exhibit in September and left her story with Jill shiraki at J-Sei, so I contacted Sets in October and drove down to San Mateo to meet her. Kaz Iwahashi, one of the “four friends” in Yae’s memoir about Topaz, is an acquaintance of mine, so she came with me to see her friend. In her story, Sets mentions that her dad carved a sign for the library from scrap wood, and that, at the end of the war, he sent it to a friend who was working in the East Asian Library of Columbia University. On an impulse, I emailed the library, explaining who I was and asking if they still had the sign–not really expecting a reply. I received a response two weeks later. The Japanese librarian apologized for the delay in responding, but she had gotten the staff photographer to take several photos of the sign to send to me. Set’s dad’s friend (to whom he had sent the sign) was Miwa Kai, who had resettled from Topaz during the war and ended up working at the Starr East Asian Library until retirement. The sign is still there in a place of honor. Further eerie discoveries: Miwa Kai was the aunt of Susan Kai, who is the wife of our exhibit designer, Jonathan Hirabayashi! It’s experiences like this that make me realize how we’re all connected.
Norm Hayashi and his wife Gayle came to our Topaz Stories Workshop at J-Sei in October of 2018 and, serendipitously, ended up in my small group to brainstorm and share memories or family lore of Topaz. Norm (I later discovered) was part of the East Bay nursery Hayashi family. He was a very young child in Topaz, and had fragments of memories, which I noted down, sensing deeply buried emotions that, if tapped in the right way, could yield powerful images. In followup communications by email, I encouraged him to write down any more details or memories; but, although retired, he was busy with family, the holidays, and other retirement pursuits of a full life. In February I circulated a “last call” for story drafts in preparation for the upcoming exhibit at J-Sei (opening on June 1), and didn’t hear back from him. Then, in May, I received a packet from Norm and Gayle with a few photos, a written description of some of the memories he had recalled at the workshop, and a somewhat apologetic message about why it had taken him so long to respond. The photos were stunning. So many of our stories do not have photos because of the prohibition on cameras in camp; so Norm’s photos were a real treasure. I pieced together his own words, from his written account and his message, to create “Every Little Moment”—one of my favorite pieces in the collection.
After Jonathan Hirabayashi came on board the Topaz Stories Committee in March of 2019, he mentioned that a cousin had a story about Boy Scouts in Topaz. I encouraged him to “get” the story. Jonathan had attended the Topaz Stories Workshop the previous fall and submitted his own story of his parents’ courtship in Tanforan. Because we were by then busy preparing for the J-Sei exhibit, nothing happened until late 2019, at which time I received a draft from Nancy Hirabayashi, with the assistance of her daughter, Linda, about her husband, Irvin, who had been a Boy Scout before and during the war. Although we may never know what factors motivated Irvin to become a “no-no boy,” the fact of his journey from true-blue Boy Scout to “resister” to (eventual) war veteran, recounted in “Alternating Currents”, was one I thought well worth sharing with the world.
The Topaz Stories Exhibit was a terrific vehicle for spreading the word about our project and reeling in more stories. One of the stories that came in (to committee member Kay Yatabe) was Ben Takeshita’s story about performing in mess-hall dramatics in the Japanese language when he was a teen in Topaz. Kay sent me the draft and I arranged to meet Ben and his wife Fumiko for tea at the Natural Grocery Store Annex. Ben has a fascinating story (which he shares every month at Rosie the Riveter Theater in Richmond). His brothers were Kibei and so the whole family ended up in Tule Lake after Topaz, branded “no-nos.” His story for the exhibit, “A Star is Born,” is a lighter take on one of his most memorable experiences while incarcerated in the Utah desert.
The Utah exhibit of Topaz Stories adds poetry to the story collection. Two of the three poems included are by Bay Area artist David Izu. David, whose mother was incarcerated in Poston, AZ, is the creative genius behind Nancy Ukai’s 50Objects.org website. I signed on to be a consulting editor just so I could get one of their business cards designed by David (just kidding; but if he had created them before I joined the project, it would have been a definite motivating factor). A day or two before Satsuki Ina, Nancy and I flew off to Lawton, Oklahoma in June 2019 to join 23 other Japanese Americans in a protest against the impending incarceration of migrant children at Fort Sill, David emailed us best wishes. He attached a poem, “Doll with Eight Band Aids”—a contemplative reflection on Ibuki Hibi Lee’s doll that she was holding while awaiting “evacuation” in the famous Dorothea Lange photo. I was amazed and replied, “A poet, too!” After returning from Fort Sill, I got in touch and asked Dave if he would allow us to include his poem in our Topaz Stories collection. He agreed and said he had more. So we are proud to include his “doll” poem as well as “In the Shape of a Heart”—the imagined story behind a heart-shaped shell pin created in Topaz.
On the subject of poetry: One of the most exciting finds this time around was a collection of free-form haiku written by Senba (Tamesuke Harada), an Issei incarcerated in Topaz. I met his stepson, Berkeley artist Taneyuki Dan Harada, when he donated one of his oil paintings to the Topaz Museum in the fall of 2018. At that time, he shared with me a memoir, and gave me his permission to excerpt it for our collection (“The M.P. Building—Topaz”). In October 2019 I facilitated an interview between a curator from SF MOMA and Dan, and after the curator left, Dan went into another room and brought back a few pages bound in a report cover. He had found free-form haiku written on loose pieces of paper by his stepfather in camp and translated them. I selected three (“Horses, Shadow, Moon”) that were Topaz related and Dan gave me his permission to use them. This is the only piece in the collection written by an Issei! Many thanks to Dan Harada for sharing them with the world.
Jonathan was working overtime on his cousins! “Untitled, by Saburo Tamura” is another submission from the Hirabayashi extended clan, this time on Jonathan’s mother’s side. Meri Mitsuyoshi writes about her grandfather and the painting that hung in her grandparent’s bedroom throughout her childhood. On a pilgrimage to the site of the Topaz camp as an adult, she recognized the landscape as the one depicted in her grandfather’s painting.
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