Topaz: Utah's Wartime City in the Desert

Seventy-five miles from the nearest highway interchange, in the Sevier Desert near a town called Delta, Utah, there was once a city that held about nine thousand people at any one time, eleven thousand two hundred twelve in all over its three years of operation. It had a newspaper, a school, a post office, and a hospital. It had a fine-arts program. It had a perimeter fence and guard towers.

The city was called Topaz. Between September nineteen forty-two and October nineteen forty-five, it was the fifth-largest city in Utah. The people who lived there had not chosen to be there. They were Japanese Americans, the majority from San Francisco Bay Area communities, removed under Executive Order nine thousand sixty-six after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The government called the facility a War Relocation Center. The internees called it home because they had no other choice. They built their own community within the one-square-mile grid of tar-paper barracks: organized a city council, published the Topaz Times, grew gardens in the alkaline soil, taught school, and held art classes. The artist Mine Okubo, incarcerated at Topaz with her brother, spent the years of her confinement drawing. The graphic memoir she completed and published in nineteen forty-six, "Citizen Thirteen Thousand Six Hundred Sixty" (her camp identification number), remains one of the most direct documents of what incarceration looked like from inside.

In April nineteen forty-three, a sixty-three-year-old man named James Wakasa was shot by a guard near the perimeter fence. The War Relocation Authority ruled the shooting justifiable. Internees held a memorial for Wakasa attended by more than two thousand people.

Reparations of twenty thousand dollars per surviving internee were authorized by the Civil Liberties Act of nineteen eighty-eight, forty years after the camp closed. The Topaz Museum, opened in two thousand seventeen in Delta, holds oral histories from internees and their families. Most drivers on Interstate Fifteen pass within an hour of where this city stood without knowing it existed.