After we purchased a lot in Delta, the mayor, Gayle Bunker, championed our cause to construct a complex of buildings that would stretch along Delta’s Main Street. However, that plan continued to be modified until 2012, when the Topaz Museum Board held one of many pilgrimages to break ground for the current museum, which was completed in May 2014. The museum opened in January 2015 with a wonderful exhibit of artwork done at Topaz in the Topaz Art School, an institution led by Chiura Obata and Matsusaburo Hibi. The Topaz Art School exhibit was popular, and we received an encouraging number of visitors. With the generosity of donors, we went forward with the museum we had been planning since 1994. That exhibit was finished—sort of—by the July 2017 grand opening that brought 500 visitors to Delta for a day of celebration. If you visit the museum, you might be able to sense the complexity of the deeply troubling history of Topaz. We hope you will be convinced that we all have an obligation to prevent anything like it from happening again.
In June, Jane Beckwith3 took my wife Suzie4 and me to the detention site. Not much remains but the concrete footings of the barracks that housed over 11,000 Americans.5 Out there, I imagined my mother6 and father7 and their families walking on the dusty, hardpan clay and wondering “how in the world did we end up behind barbed wire and surrounded by guard towers?” My parents have passed—as well as most Americans confined in Topaz, including Fred Korematsu—so it occurs to me that, at least for today, I am their voice. So for me, speaking to you is a profound honor because it allows me to tell Jane Beckwith, the museum board, the people of Delta, the National Park Service, the Friends of Topaz Committee, the many public and private funders, and all of you who have labored for many years—so generously donating your time and treasure—just how important your vision and your achievement are. Of course this museum shines a light on a dark chapter of American history, but it also stands
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Thank you, Bill. It’s a pleasure to be introduced by Bill [Sugaya], who I know from community work in San Francisco and who has done so much to make this museum a reality.1 I’d also like to acknowledge [two people present here today] distinguished member of the Utah Senate, Jani Iwamoto, a long-time friend and unfaltering voice for justice and the environment, and Leigh-Ann Miyasato, an attorney who, like me, served on the legal team representing Fred Korematsu in reopening his 1944 Supreme Court case for refusing to be incarcerated.2
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When people constructed houses on the site itself, the Topaz Museum Board mounted a campaign to buy the 640 acres in parcels of 417 acres, then six, then 100. By working with the Conservation Fund, we now own all of the site with the exception of six acres. In 2007, the National Park Service designated the property a National Landmark, the thirteenth in Utah.
By Donald K. Tamaki
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Friends interested in Topaz helped create a 501(c)(3) organization, and we began asking for donations, saying we wanted to build a museum but having no concept of how to make that happen. Once the National Park Service began its Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program, we wrote a grant to design the museum. All the time the collection kept growing, with original artwork, furniture made at Topaz, shell jewelry, lanterns cast from cement, and more unusual artifacts.
Topaz Museum Grand Opening Keynote Address July 8, 2017
U H Q
I started over the next year. I was learning as much as my classes from my students and the artifacts that filled the big silver trunk in the closet.
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