On February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066, was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, authorizing the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent and Japanese immigrants living on the west coast of America. Less than 10 weeks after Pearl Harbor more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up, stripped of their rights, property, belongings, jobs, and in some cases separated from their families and interred in 10 inland detention camps in six western states and Arkansas. In 1988 the U.S. Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which officially apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation noted that the government’s actions in 1942 were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
The internment of Japanese American citizens in those camps is a dark stain on American history.
One of those camps was named Topaz, located near Delta, Utah. Topaz, like other camps, has been referred to as a war relocation center, relocation camp, relocation center, internment camp, and concentration camp, and the controversy over which term is most appropriate continues to the present day. It was originally called the Central Utah Relocation Center, a name abandoned when it was realized the acronym was pronounced “curse.” It was briefly named Delta for the closest town until the Mormon residents of that community objected to their town being associated with “a prison for the innocent.” Topaz was named for a nearby mountain and eventually was home to 9000 Japanese Americans and covered 31 square miles, most of it used for agriculture, and was the 5^th largest community in Utah at the time.
Among its citizens/internees were David Tatsuno and his entire family. David, a devoted family man who had been (and would be again after the war) a prominent businessman and civic leader in the San Francisco Bay Area, was also an avid home movie buff. Things like movie cameras, still cameras and short-wave radios were not allowed in the internment camps and Tatsuno left his movie camera with a friend before leaving the Bay Area. Tatsuno was put in charge of the camp’s co-operative where his superior, Walter Henderick, was both a sympathetic man and a home movie buff. Breaking the law, Henderick arranged for Tatsuno to receive his camera in Topaz.
The rest, truly, is history, American history as recorded by one who lived it. “Topaz” is the only 8mm film inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Film Archives besides the Abraham Zapruder film of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.