Topaz: The Fifth-Largest City in Utah

In September of nineteen forty-two, trains began arriving at a dry lakebed in Millard County, in the middle of the Utah desert, nearly sixty miles from the nearest interstate highway. The people who got off the trains had not chosen to come here. They were Japanese Americans, the majority of them from the San Francisco Bay Area, removed from their homes, jobs, and communities under Executive Order nine thousand sixty-six signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in February of that year. Sixty-five percent of them were American citizens by birth.

The camp they were brought to was called the Central Utah Relocation Center. The people who lived there called it Topaz, after the mountain visible nine miles away. At its peak, Topaz held eight thousand one hundred people. The total number processed through the camp between September nineteen forty-two and October nineteen forty-five was eleven thousand two hundred twelve. That made it, for three years, the fifth-largest city in Utah, a city of tar-paper barracks on an alkaline flat at four thousand five hundred feet, where dust storms arrived without warning and winter temperatures dropped to well below zero.

The internees built what community they could. They organized a city council, published a newspaper called the Topaz Times, held art classes, grew gardens in the alkaline soil, and ran a school. The artist Mine Okubo, incarcerated at Topaz with her brother, spent her years of confinement drawing. The memoir she published in nineteen forty-six, titled "Citizen Thirteen Thousand Six Hundred Sixty," her camp identification number, remains among the most direct accounts of what incarceration looked like from inside.

In April nineteen forty-three, a sixty-three-year-old man named James Wakasa was shot and killed by a guard near the camp's perimeter fence. The War Relocation Authority ruled the shooting justifiable. More than two thousand internees attended the memorial held for him.

Reparations of twenty thousand dollars per surviving internee were authorized by the Civil Liberties Act of nineteen eighty-eight, more than forty years after the camp closed. None of the people incarcerated at Topaz was ever charged with or convicted of espionage or sabotage. The Topaz Museum opened in Delta, Utah in twenty seventeen. Most drivers on the interstate pass within an hour of this place without knowing it existed.