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Memorializing the Dark Shadows of History
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By Christian Heimburger In the summer of 2017, two small Utah towns hosted events that commemorated controversial aspects of the state and nation’s past. On July 8, more than four hundred people gathered in Delta to witness the dedication and grand opening of the Topaz Museum, an institution committed to preserving the Topaz incarceration site and narrating the experiences of the thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans detained there during World War II. On August 5, a smaller group assembled in a restored airplane hangar in Wendover to observe the donation of a paper crane—one of around 1,300 cranes folded by Sadako Sasaki, a survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima—to the museum at Wendover Airfield. While the reception of this rare historical artifact was in and of itself significant, the location of the event—the hangar that once housed the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan—imbued the ceremony with an even deeper meaning. Although the local media provided only modest coverage of these events, their significance should not be understated. The events in Delta and Wendover are emblematic of a larger national discourse and demonstrate a profound local commitment to critically examining unsettling aspects of America’s history. This essay introduces a piece written about the creation of the Topaz Museum by its founder, Jane Beckwith; a speech delivered in Delta by San Francisco attorney Donald K. Tamaki; and a speech given in Wendover by Edwin P. Hawkins, Jr., the former director of the Japan-America Society of Hawaii.
Japan’s attack on the U.S. Naval fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, set in motion a series of events that eventually led to the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States, as well as the decision to develop and later detonate an atomic weapon over two cities in southern Japan. Alleging that Japanese spies in Hawaii had facilitated the attack, a January 1942 congressional report referred to as the Roberts Commission report fanned the flames of wartime hysteria and reshaped the public’s view of Japanese Americans.1 Shortly after the Roberts Commission report was made public, western politicians, citizens, and journalists began calling for radical action.2 Some U.S. military leaders—especially the commander of the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt—pushed to remove all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast based on “military necessity.”3 On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the creation of military defense zones along the West Coast where “any and all persons may be excluded.”4 In reality, only those of Japanese ancestry were targeted. Racial prejudice was an important factor in that decision. “While Pearl Harbor and World War II served as the spark,” notes historian David Yoo, “the concentration camps represented the culmination of decades of race prejudice.”5 DeWitt’s public statements exemplified and articulated the fears and prejudices that many Americans had concerning people of Japanese ancestry. In 1943, for example, DeWitt told a group of journalists, “The danger of the Japanese was, and is now—if they are permitted to come back—espionage and sabotage. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still Japanese.” When a reporter asked the general if he made any distinction between the Japanese, Italians, and Germans, DeWitt flatly replied, “You needn’t worry about the Italians at all except in certain cases. Also, the same for the Germans . . . but we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.”6
