Just outside Delta, Utah, the wind never really stops. It whips up alkaline dust that gets into everything. Your teeth, your food, the cracks in the barracks walls. This is where the US government built the Central Utah Relocation Center, known as Topaz, in 1942. Over 11,000 people of Japanese descent, mostly US citizens from the San Francisco Bay Area, ended up here. They lived behind barbed wire. Guards watched them from patrol towers with searchlights. The army threw up 626 flimsy, tar-paper barracks to house them. In the winter, temperatures plummeted below zero, freezing the water in their wash buckets. Summer brought blistering 106-degree heat.
People tried to build a life anyway. They organized schools, grew vegetables, and even dug out a makeshift pond. Chiura Obata, a famous artist from UC Berkeley, started an art school with dozens of instructors. But anger bubbled just beneath the surface. In April 1943, a military guard shot and killed James Wakasa, an elderly chef, near the perimeter fence. The administration claimed Wakasa was escaping, though he was actually just walking his dog. The killing sparked massive strikes. Then, the War Department issued a "loyalty questionnaire" that tore families apart. Question 28 was the worst. It asked internees to swear unqualified allegiance to the US and forswear loyalty to the Japanese Emperor. For citizens stripped of their rights and locked in a desert cage, this felt like a cruel joke.
Today, not much stands. Local farmers bought most of the barracks after the war, dragging them off to use as chicken coops or storage sheds. But concrete foundations still remain. Rusting nails, broken sake bottles, and bits of colorful linoleum litter the dirt. These small, dirty artifacts tell the real story. Topaz became a National Historic Landmark in 2007, protecting the square-mile site from further destruction. It is a physical scar on the Utah desert. Rights can vanish overnight.
- T Walker
