Utah bill proposes annual commemoration date for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII

This photo of a historic photo on display at the Topaz Museum shows new arrivals coming to the Topaz Internment Camp near Delta, Utah in 1942, June 11, 2018 | Photo by Reuben Wadsworth, St. George News

SALT LAKE CITY—Sen. Jani Iwamoto has introduced a bill proposing Utah set aside a day each year to commemorate a dark moment in American history.

A Day of Remembrance Observing the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II bill, officially designated as SB 58 in the 2022 Utah Legislature, would make Feb. 19 the annual commemoration date, the same day President Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 80 years ago.

On Feb. 19 1942, with the stroke of a pen, Roosevelt authorized the removal of 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast and their relocation to camps in several states, including Utah.

The order, which came less than two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, was fueled by fears Japanese Americans might aid Japan by serving as saboteurs or spies. Those targeted, two-thirds of them American citizens, had as little as four days to sell their property at fire-sale prices.

Iwamoto, who introduced SB 58 onto the senate floor on Feb. 1, said the commemoration would keep an important event from receding from memory.

Sen. Jani Iwamoto | Photo courtesy of the Utah Senate, St. George News.

“These innocent people were displaced and incarcerated, forced to leave their property behind, causing turmoil and grief, simply because of their ancestry,” she said to the gathered legislators.

Iwamoto, assistant minority whip, discussed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which saw the U.S. government apologize for perpetrating “a grave injustice” against Japanese Americans. Surviving former prisoners were each paid $20,000 in reparations.

“Day of Remembrance lets us vow to remember and recommit to our charge of safeguarding the civil rights of all Americans, so that what happened to Japanese Americans will never happen again,” she said.

Iwamoto also spoke about how she helped clear the name of the most famous prisoner at Utah’s Topaz War Relocation Center.

Fred Korematsu fought against internment orders and then became a fugitive in Oakland, California. He was captured in May 1942, jailed and sent to Topaz. In 1944, he took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the constitutionality of the internment of Japanese Americans.

Four decades later, Iwamoto was undertaking an internship after her first year of law school at UC Davis when she joined a legal team working to revisit Korematsu v. the United States. They worked after-hours to overturn Korematsu’s conviction, on the basis that important information – a study showing Japanese Americans posed no security risk during the war years – had been omitted during the original case. The conviction was overturned.

“I remember him saying, why should I be incarcerated? I’m a U.S. citizen,” Iwamoto said in a phone interview with St. George News.

Utah resident Melissa Inouye also spoke in favor of SB 58. She shared the story of her grandparents, who were working as farmers and grocers in California when they were forced to abandon everything and head for Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming.

“This incarceration is part of our legacy,” Inouye said. “As a mother now of four children, and a mother in Utah, it’s really important that my kids and all of their peers at school learn about this period in history.”

Iwamoto said she feels the bill is especially vital today, especially when Asian hate is on the rise.

“History, unfortunately, repeats itself,” she added.

Iwamoto, a Democrat representing Utah’s District 4, doesn’t just work on racial justice causes. She’s sponsored a slew of bills this year, with aims ranging from curbing street racing to water conservation. Still, it’s “part of her heart” to represent minorities.

“Since George Floyd, everything was sharpened for me,” she said to St. George News. “I represent the district and the state, but I also represent my communities of color.”

SB 58 has received a favorable reception, passing unanimously in the Senate, and, as of Tuesday afternoon has had its first reading by the House and has been passed to the House Government Operations Committee.

Topaz War Relocation Center, Utah’s Manzanar

Manzanar, located at the foot of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, is the most well-known Japanese internment camp thanks to Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir “Farewell to Manzanar.”

This photo of a historic photo at the Topaz Museum shows residents of the internment camp harvesting crops on a farm near Delta, Utah between 1942-1945, June 11, 2018 | Photo by Reuben Wadsworth, St. George News

Utah had two such sites, most notably the Topaz War Relocation Center. Established in September 1942, the camp was located in a remote stretch of desert near the town of Delta. The 640-acre camp, which had a maximum population of 8,130, held mainly Japanese Americans who’d been relocated from California’s Bay Area.

The camp consisted of drafty barracks made of pine planks covered with tar paper. There was no running water and little insulation from the summer heat, often in excess of 100 degrees, or winters where temperatures plunged to 20 degrees below zero. Frequent dust storms buffeted the prisoners, and dirt and grit made its way into the barracks.

Internees tried to make life as normal as possible. Children attended school and there were sports teams, music ensembles and a camp newspaper. Some internees were allowed to leave for work, college or to join the military. Security features like barbed-wire fencing, a guard tower and military sentries, however, made it clear residents of the camp were prisoners.

This was underscored by an incident in April 1943 when internee James Hatsuku Wakasa, 63, was walking his dog near the camp’s perimeter fence and was shot and killed by a military guard. Bystanders said he was unable to hear the guard’s warnings. The guard insisted Wakasa was trying to escape. An official inquiry deemed the killing a “justifiable military action.”

This photo of a historic photo on display at the Topaz Museum shows the gate at the Topaz Internment Camp near Delta, Utah being ceremoniously locked when the camp closed on October 31, 1945, June 11, 2018 | Photo by Reuben Wadsworth, St. George News

Topaz was closed Oct. 31, 1945. The newly-freed prisoners were given $25 and a train ticket to start their new lives. Today, its inmates’ three-year internment is commemorated at the Topaz Museum, a site that has been designated a National Historic Landmark.

Living further from the coast didn’t spare the Japanese Americans that had settled in Utah from persecution. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, 1,500 Japanese community leaders were arrested as “dangerous enemy aliens.”  This included Iwamoto’s maternal grandfather, who had helped build the Buddhist Church in Ogden’s Japantown.

“My grandfather was taken from the home in the middle of the night, stripped and shackled, and incarcerated in Salt Lake City,” Iwamoto told St. George News. “He wasn’t born on the west side but nevertheless there was a lot of anti-Japanese sentiment.”

Iwamoto says it was devastating for Japanese Americans to see their elders and community leaders lose all their power.

“There are whole groups of people that have inter-generational stress from what happened to their families,” she said.

Nisei soldiers showed wartime valor

Despite the indignity of the internment camps, many Japanese American men joined the U.S. Army. Most of them served in the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which, given its size and duration, was the most highly decorated division in World War II. Others, like Iwamoto’s father, used their knowledge of the Japanese language and culture to aid the Military Intelligence Service.

Collectively, they were known as the Nisei soldiers, with the word Nisei meaning second-generation Japanese Americans.

In 2011, members of the Regimental Combat Team, Military Intelligence Service and the US Army’s 100th Infantry Battalion were awarded a special Nisei Soldiers of World War II Congressional Gold Medal during a ceremony in Washington, D.C. While he wasn’t up to the trip, Iwamoto’s father was able to attend a ceremony held in Salt Lake City, hosted by Gov. Gary Herbert, where Nisei veterans from Utah and Idaho were honored for their bravery.

“It was the most wonderful event,” Iwamoto said. “It was a beautiful job, unparalleled.”

Salt Lake City, Ogden were home to thriving Japantowns

Two young women pose in front of a cafe in Salt Lake City’s Japan Town, which thrived after World War II and was largely leveled during the 1966 construction of the Salt Palace | Photo courtesy of Utah Humanities, St. George News

There was a Japantown in both Salt Lake City and Ogden, established shortly after the turn of the 20th century when Japanese immigrants began to arrive in the United States, taking jobs as miners, on railroad gangs or as farm workers. After the war these epicenters of culture grew as Japanese Americans worked to cultivate a sense of community. Salt Lake’s Japantown bustled with cafes and fish markets, beauty shops and banks, gas stations and pool halls.

“It had everything. If it was thriving now, people would love it,”  Iwamoto said.

Ogden’s Japantown died down gradually as subsequent generations of Japanese Americans moved away. Salt Lake City’s Japantown came to a more forceful end. In 1966, much of Japantown was demolished to make room for the Salt Palace Convention Center. Little remained beyond the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple and the Japanese Church of Christ.

“When they did the expansion, it detrimentally impacted the community,” Iwamoto said.

Iwamoto joined with Judge Raymond Uno, a former Heart Mountain prisoner, to form the Japanese Community Preservation Committee. Thanks to the committee’s efforts, the corridor of 100 south that lies between 300 and 200 West in Salt Lake City was renamed Japantown Street in 2007. The committee also worked to create a meditation garden, dedicated to Japanese American community leaders, to the east of the Japanese Church of Christ.

Salt Lake City’s Japantown, located in the shadow of the Salt Palace, can be hard to find. Lately, a new development project has threatened to further encroach on the dwindling cultural center. The Ritchie group is building an 11-story, mixed-use complex featuring luxury apartments, hotel rooms and shops across the street from the Japanese Church of Christ.

Iwamoto and other members of the Japanese Preservation Committee are working with the development company, with Salt Lake City Corporation’s Redevelopment Agency as a facilitator, to ensure new construction doesn’t completely erase Japantown’s identity.

The city has allocated $100,000 for a plan, created by GSBS Architects and unveiled in April 2021, to enhance Salt Lake’s Japantown. The plan includes pedestrian walkways, benches and tables and widened streets lined by cherry trees to  accommodate community events like the annual Nihon Matsuri and Obon festivals. It also features new lighting, historical markers, public art and traditional architectural elements like a Japanese-inspired gateway. Funding is being sought for the $7.4 million renovations.

“We’re working toward something better. We’ve re-envisioned Japantown for the future,” Iwamoto said.

At the present, however, her focus is on the passage of the various bills she has sponsored. Iwamato is pleased with the progress of SB 58.

“Even people you wouldn’t think have stood up and supported it,” she said. “It’s important to me to make it a day. I’m not going to be here forever. I wanted it in the books that it was important as a state that we honor it every year.”

Should SB 58 pass, it will join the ranks of state-recognized commemorative periods such as Navajo Code Talker Day, Juneteenth Freedom Day, Utah Fallen Heroes Day, Utah Railworkers Day, Victims of Communism Memorial Day, Indigenous People Day and POW/MIA Recognition Day.


Check out all of St. George News’ coverage of the 2022 Utah Legislature here.

For a complete list of contacts for Southern Utah representatives and senators, click here.

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.

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