Presumed Guilty

Jaime Winston BS ’22, Marketing & Communications

The United States forcibly relocated Yukio Shimomura when he was 7 years old. A former Wildcat, Shimomura returned to Weber State last April to speak about the two and a half years of his childhood at Topaz War Relocation Center, near Delta, Utah.

He showed family photos taken before the camp — his parents young and in love, him goofing off with his older brothers, the time he was a sunflower in a school play.

Then he discussed how life changed as the U.S. went to war with Imperial Japan.

Wartime paranoia — not evidence — painted all people of Japanese ancestry, including those born in the United States, as possible traitors.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, resulting in the incarceration of West Coast Japanese residents without due process. About two-thirds of those placed in 10 inland relocation centers were natural-born citizens.

Digital media major Andrew Kyed listened to Shimomura’s story, thinking of his own family.

“My grandmother was interned at Topaz,” he said. “She must have been in her mid 20s, so, she was pretty much in the best years of her life, and it was all taken away.”

An American Family

The Great Kanto Earthquake shook Japan to its core.

The magnitude 7.9 quake struck the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area at lunchtime on a late summer day in 1923, according to Encyclopædia Britannica, bringing more than 140,000 estimated deaths, fires and a tsunami that destroyed 155 homes.

The earthquake also shattered Japan’s economy. Shimomura said this convinced his father, Toshinaga, to accept his sister’s offer for immigration sponsorship. Together with Shimomura’s mother, Taka, and grandmother, Natsu, he settled in San Francisco.

Toshinaga and Taka soon welcomed two sons. Their third, Shimomura, was born in 1935.

While his brothers, Kenichi and Saburo, were also given Christian names, Jacob and Samuel, Shimomura didn’t receive one. “You know, I’ve always wished I had an English name, like John,” Shimomura laughed, reflecting on how difficult “Yukio” was for other Americans to pronounce.

Taka worked as a seamstress, and Toshinaga was a travelling salesman. Though living on minimum wage, “the family was happy,” Shimomura said. “I was riding my scooter up and down the streets, and my brothers were in the Boy Scouts.”

Life changed for the family after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. “Bystanders went with the flow, and the flow was panic against Japanese,” Shimomura said.

Executive Order 9066 resulted in Japanese Americans being placed in temporary detention centers, referred to as assembly centers, and from there, being brought to more-permanent camps. Shimomura calls those second locations “concentration camps,” which he writes as an improper noun to distinguish them from the Nazi-controlled camps of Europe.

In his book, Concentration Camps: North America, historian Roger Daniels wrote that shortly after the executive order was issued, a series of Congressional hearings were held in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles to gain a cross section of community opinions on the matter. “The overwhelming majority of the witnesses supported, unequivocally, the necessity of getting all Japanese, alien and citizen, off the Coast,” he wrote.

This included all six residents of the Shimomura household.

The family was given boards and nails to build boxes for their belongings and told to bring only what they could carry, including bedding, toiletries, clothes and silverware.

They were first brought to live in barracks at Tanforan Assembly Center, the site of a horse racing track in San Bruno, California. Others were housed in converted horse stables.

“The tough part was that they just washed out the stables and put linoleum on the floor,” Shimomura said. “You can imagine, the many decades of racing that they had at the stables, the amount of urine and manure that had gone through the floor; all of that was seeping up.”

While living conditions alone were a health hazard, Shimomura said he couldn’t imagine what those with chronic illnesses faced without advanced medical services.

“Most of the time, people with chronic illnesses passed away early,” he said.

Behind Barbed Wire

The family boarded a train for Utah months later.

At Topaz, the living area covered one square mile, surrounded by barbed wire fencing and guard towers. Shimomura remembers covering his face as he slept to avoid breathing in the dirt blowing in through the floorboards of his family’s barracks.

The barracks were divided to house six families, and noise travelled easily. “If anybody was ill, you heard the moaning and groaning,” Shimomura said. “The humorous part of the whole thing is that over 300 kids were born in the camp, so... the procreation process still happened.”

Shimomura attended Desert View Elementary at Topaz, and still has his third-grade class picture. He remembers playing hide-and-seek and kick the can with friends.

He also recalls all of the similar clothing styles at the camp, since most clothes were ordered from the Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs.

Residents could obtain passes to shop in Delta, and a dry goods store and co-op for services and supplies were established, added Jane Beckwith, founder of Topaz Museum. “The most unusual service was importing fresh fish from the coast to sell in Delta and at the site,” she said.

Beckwith said leaving Topaz for college or a job required applying and waiting for clearance.

In her book Jewel of the Desert, historian Sandra C. Taylor wrote “The apparent tranquility was due in part to the establishment of the institutions of community life — schools, self-government, a newspaper, public health services, churches, and an opportunity for work, self-improvement and recreation.”

Despite efforts to portray a normal life, residents of the camps were still prisoners.

One Topaz resident, James Hatsuaki Wakasa, was killed by a guard after coming too close to the perimeter fence. Shimomura’s cousin, who was incarcerated at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, suffered from ulcers and died after being diagnosed with “stomach problems.” Another of his cousins, also detained at Heart Mountain, went blind due to eyesight issues Shimomura suspects weren’t properly cared for by the camp.

The Shimomura family was allowed to leave Topaz in November 1944. On Jan. 2, 1945, the U.S. revoked its Japanese relocation orders.

They settled in Ogden. Shimomura played football in junior high and high school and generally felt accepted by peers. “The only problem I had was asking a girl on a date,” he said. “Parents didn’t like to have their daughter go out with Japanese.”

After graduating from Ogden High School in 1953, Shimomura joined the U.S. Army. Following his service, he earned his airplane mechanic license at the Northrop Aeronautical Institute. He married his late wife, Chizuko, in 1958, and began studying part-time at Weber State while working as a ramjet engine technician. He later attended Utah State University, and earned his bachelor’s degree in manufacturing engineering in 1965.

While acknowledging blemishes in the country’s past, he said he’s proud of the freedom the United States offers and that he was able to serve in the military.

If there’s a lesson from his incarceration, he said it’s to advocate for any ethnic groups the country labels “the enemy"; it could happen again.

Today, he has three children and five grandchildren. He lives in Morgan Hill, California, about 70 miles south of where his family left their home in San Francisco.

Fleeing Home

Linda Oda BS ’67, Weber State professor emeritus of education, has dedicated her career to improving education in Utah, but her family’s arrival in the state was never a choice. While more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were placed in relocation camps, others fled their homes beforehand to protect their families, including her parents.

Oda said her father and uncle were leaders in Los Angeles’ Japanese community, making them potential targets for the FBI following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

When word came that authorities were looking for her uncle, the two began searching for a place to move their families. Her father, Kunimatsu, soon returned to Los Angeles to gather their families and all the belongings they could fit in two cars bound for Utah.

Kunimatsu abandoned the lucrative five-story apartment building he ran, and with his wife, Norma, and Oda’s two older siblings, moved into the Corinne Buddhist Church with seven other families. He worked at a cannery in Perry, Utah, and, later, opened a grocery store.

The family later welcomed Oda, the second youngest of four children.

While her parents escaped incarceration, most of Oda’s extended family went to camps, including her aunt, late WSU emeritus professor of English, Mildred Miya BA ’66.

After World War II, the family moved to Ogden, where Oda’s father opened Kay’s Market, a grocery store on 25th Street. Sadly, prejudice lingered. She recalls hearing people being called “Japs” while in town. “I think our parents and our families suffered, but the community stuck together,” she said. “And that was really, really, really important.”

One snowy morning in 1961, tragedy struck when an intruder entered the store, stole $100 and beat her father who died later that day. While completing her education, Oda and her siblings were left to balance caring for her mother, who had suffered a stroke, with minding the store.

Like Shimomura, Oda’s history strengthens her advocacy.

As administrator of the teacher quality program for Davis School District, she worked with fellow educators to write curricula about the Japanese American experience during World War II for elementary, middle school and high school students. She has been a professor, teacher, administrator, governor’s director of Asian Affairs, and, now, a volunteer with WSU’s Peer Mentor Program, and she has advocated for marginalized groups in each role.

Once while supervising for a student teacher, a young boy saw her face and mockingly yelled “Ching chong Chinese!” Oda sat down with the student, told him that her grandparents immigrated from Japan, helped him find Japan on a map, and discussed the culture with him.

“You need to make people understand that you are a person, too,” she said. When she returned for another visit, the boy drew a picture for her and wanted to be friends.

Why We Remember

Today, the land where Topaz was built appears barren. A closer look, however, reveals rusty nails, utensils and even the remnants of pathways those inside once walked.

As many who still remember grow older, Kyed explained, the World War II Japanese American experience is “something that we need to talk more about.”

Kyed attended Shimomura’s presentation at the Wildcat Theater with his Japanese language instructor, Tomono Adachi, who learned about Topaz on a trip to the site in 2019.

“I didn’t research before I went,” she said. “I thought they only brought Japanese nationals to the camp, but they put American citizens in the camp, too. I was shocked.”

She has arranged for Japanese language students and Japanese international students to tour the site and nearby Topaz Museum twice, and plans to continue the trips annually.

Adachi’s students often worry it could happen again; she agrees.

“We have to educate people not to make the same mistakes,” she said.

Yukio Shimomura in 2022, photo by Karen Jimenez

A portrait of the Shimomura family taken at the Topaz War Relocation Center, May 1944

Children at the Raphael Weill Public School in San Francisco recite the Pledge of Allegiance in April 1942. Soon after, according to The New York Times, Hideno Nakamoto (left), and Yoko Itashiki (center), were sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center before they were detained at Topaz War Relocation Center. Yukio Shimomura also attended the school.

Photo by Dorothea Lange, provided by the Library of Congress