From September 1942 to October 1945, 11,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry — the majority American citizens — were involuntarily moved to the Topaz War Relocation Authority Camp. The camp was about fifteen miles northwest of Delta, Utah. These photos show the site of the camp as it exists today.
Most of the internees were from the San Francisco Bay Area. They were sentenced, without trial, to live in a remote area where daytime summer temperatures climbed above 100 degrees and nighttime winter temperatures could drop below minus 20.
Entire families were relocated and assigned to live in rickety barracks, which used tar paper for insulation. “Block 4,” shown in the photo above, was one of thirty-four “residential blocks” at Topaz. Each residential block included twelve barracks, each one divided into six apartments. Some of the barracks were unfinished when people arrived, lacking, for example, actual windows to fill the window openings.
Each block also included latrines for men and women, a recreation hall, a mess hall, and four showers for men and four bathtubs for women. People lived in these conditions for three long years, until late 1945.
Between 110,000 and 120,000 people were held at camps such as Topaz. During the 1980s, the U.S. government passed legislation authorizing a payment of $20,000 in reparations to each survivor of internment. President George H. W. Bush made a formal public apology.
Those steps followed a government report titled Personal Justice Denied, which found little evidence of disloyalty by American citizens of Japanese descent and concluded that banishment to the camps was the result of racism. At the time, however, each individual had to find a way to cope with what was happening.
One of those individuals was Chiura Obata, who before relocation was a faculty member in art at the University of California, Berkeley. During his internment, he drew on his professional experience to organize an art school, shown below, at which sixteen instructors taught over 600 students.
Obata himself painted throughout his internment. His work from that time was displayed recently in the exhibition “When Words Weren’t Enough” at the Topaz Museum, at 55 Main Street, Delta, Utah, on Route 50. The painting shown just below was painted on October 9, 1942, less than a month after Obata arrived at Topaz.
How could he do it? How could he paint works such as these and at the same time create an art school, while dislocated to an unforgiving environment far from the familiarity of his home and career?
Here’s what he said:
“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. I hold that statement as my aim, and as I have told my friends and students, the aim of artists.”
– Chiura Obata, 1946, quoted in Topaz Moon
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This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Chiura Obata, Delta Utah, Highway 50, japanese internment, route 50, topaz internment camp, Topaz Museum, utah on January 4, 2017. Edit
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