Burnside Rare Books

[Japanese Internment] Archive of Documents from the Central Utah Relocation Center [including] The Topazette, The Topaz Times, [and] Topazu Taimuzu

Katayama, Taro [Managing Editor]; Susan Nail [Collection of]

Topaz, UT: The Topazette, The Topaz Times, 1942-1943.

Archive of documents from the Central Utah Relocation Center, known as Topaz. From the estate of Susan Nail, daughter of the camp's Military Police company captain, who attended Topaz High School for her senior year. Includes 5 issues of the high school newsletter and other high school ephemera, ration books for the Nail family, newspaper clippings, and 15 issues and extras of the camp newsletter The Topaz Times, plus several duplicates. Overall Very Good with light toning and light to moderate edgewear; multiple Topaz Times issues may be incomplete and one lacks part of front sheet.

Items include:

- 5 issues of the student newspaper, including the inaugural issue published as Topaz Times Jr. on December 23, 1942. The paper was immediately renamed The Topazette via student vote. The other issues were published the following year and are dated February 13, May 17, May 31, and June 24. The newsletters are in most respects typical of their kind, full of gossip, humor, and sports coverage, though the war and forced evacuations cast their shadows. The June 24 issue marks a change from mimeographed letter-sized or tall sheets to a properly typeset tabloid format: "The Topazette staff congratulates itself for getting out the first printed paper in Topaz, outdoing the Topaz Times, for instance. The printing was done at the Chronicle Publishing Company of Delta."

- 3 school bulletins from June 1943. One contains the news that Pat, Don, and Susan Nail are no longer attending the school. At the beginning of June, their father's company (the 319th Military Police Escort Guard Company) had been assigned to duty at Manzanar, and the family relocated.

- Ticket to the Topaz City High School Inaugural Ball. February 12, 1943.

- Undated map of Topaz issued to high school students.

- Susan Nail's high school diploma in a leatherette folder, a lock of blond hair tucked behind the certificate. Also included are 3 photocopied pages from the student yearbook with photographs of faculty members and graduating seniors, including Susan Nail, though the yearbook itself is not present.

- Invitation to the inauguration ceremony of the Community Council of Topaz, held January 14, 1943 and attended by Governor Maw of Utah.

- Schedule for the above ceremony (sums in pencil to upper margin) and translation of Professor Obata's address. Chiura Obata was a noted artist who taught at Berkeley from 1932 to 1954, interrupted by his forced removal from California. He directed the well-attended Topaz Art School and created numerous paintings and prints of his own. “In any circumstance, anywhere and anytime, take up your brush and express what you face and what you think without wasting your time and energy complaining and crying out," he wrote. Obata drew on the beauty of his bleak surroundings, using an airbrush to render the infamous dust storms as something magical.

- Letter issued by the Project Director to all residents on June 11, 1943, warning of the consequences for "cowardly attacks" on Professor Obata and Reverend Mr. Taro Goto. Obata came under fire for his close cooperation with camp authorities and willingness to sign a loyalty oath, and a physical assault put him in the hospital. His life at risk, the artist was released from camp and eventually managed to continue his successful career after its unjust interruption.

- 8 ration books issued to Captain Donald Robin Nail, his wife, and two of their children. Most stamps have been used and are no longer present.

- Newspaper clipping dated January 17, 1943, with article "Utah's Strangest Community: Topaz Relocation Camp." The leading paragraph:

What do you know about Topaz, the sixth largest community in Utah? Mail clerks and telephone operators very often cannot find it. Located some 165 miles southwest of Salt Lake City is historic Pahvant valley, named after a mountain full of transparent prismatic crystals which form semiprecious stones, this strange place has a unique homogeneous population. Except for a troop of soldiers, a group of government administrators and educators, and a construction foreman and some workers, the 8500 people at Topaz are all of Japanese extraction.

The article notes that the newcomers are predominately urbanites from the Bay Area of California, some of them prominent citizens, including "a university art professor whose work is known throughout the west" (Obata). It describes the camp's functions in detail and declares that "the talk about the people of Topaz living in luxury beyond that of the average American is unfounded." The author acknowledges the camp's hardships but plays them down, and he defends the relocation program as a wartime necessity.

- 2 items from the 1970s: pictorial map "Fossils, Pottery, Arrowheads, Petroglyphs: Topaz and Surrounding Area," cut along centerfold and taped, and a Salt Lake Tribune newspaper clipping about the camp's history. The tone is very different from the article published thirty years earlier in the same newspaper.

- 15 issues of the camp newspaper, The Topaz Times, published in English and Japanese. Issues are not guaranteed to be complete; they were commonly 8 pages, but there was some variation. A notice in the May 20 issue begs for a mimeograph technician and announces that "today's edition has been cut from the usual 8 pages to 6 pages because of the lack of helpers." Dates and page numbers as follows: November 20, 1942, 2 pp.; February 9, 1943, 6 pp.; March 16, 2 pp.; March 17, 2 pp.; March 27, 10 pp. (lower 1/4 of first sheet torn off); April 6, 8 pp.; April 8, 9 pp.
April 10, 10 pp.; April 12, 2-page extra about the killing of James Hatsuaki Wakasa; April 13, 8 pp.; April 16, 1-page extra "WRA Gives Assurances" in the wake of Wakasa's killing; April 20, 4 pp.; May 15, 4 pp., Japanese language section only; May 20, 6 pp.; May 29, 15 pp.

- Also included are the following duplicates: 4 copies of May 20 issue; First sheet of Japanese portion of May 15 issue; 6 pages of May 18 issue; 2 copies of April 16 extra; April 13 issue.

The papers record births and deaths, cultural and religious activities, sports results, community and job opportunities, and news from around the camp. The biggest story of 1943 was the April 11 shooting of James Hatsuaki Wakasa by a guard, one of seven deaths by gunfire that took place in the relocation camps during the war. The 63-year-old was walking close to the west fence and likely didn't hear the challenge of the sentry who shot him from a distance of about 300 yards. The news was announced in the April 12 extra: RESIDENT KILLED. The report was based on information from the Military Police and stated that the victim was attempting to crawl through the fence, but investigators sent by the U.S. State Department and Spanish embassy reported that the body was five feet within the fence.

The sentry's wrongdoing must have soon become clear, because the following day's headline was "M.P. Sentry Arrested; To Be Court-Martialed." That was a little premature; Private First Class Gerald Philpott was found Not Guilty at his court-martial trial. The Topaz landscaping crew built a monument to Wakasa but was forced to take it down.

The tone of both the adult and student newspapers is determinedly upbeat, though that is undoubtedly due in part to censorship from the camp authorities. One schoolboy, writing "What I Dislike about Topaz," mentions only the dust storms, though the confinement, overcrowding, and poor food must have been strongly present in his mind, along with the killing of one of the camp's inmates. And what did Susan Nail, the M.P.'s daughter who shared a classroom with teenage prisoners, think of all this? She and her brothers were able to leave before high turnover and increasingly inexperienced teachers led to their school's deterioration.

Chiura Obata told his students: "We will survive if we look to the mountains for inspiration and forget the sands at our feet." The prisoners' determination to survive is evident in this moving archive, preserved for decades by someone who was briefly there. Item #140948100

Price: $9,500