Archaeology or Exclusion? Brandon Shimoda on Saving a Japanese American WWII Monument

One evening, many years ago, but not so many years ago, a Japanese man, out for a walk in the American desert, saw a “rare and unusual flower” on the far side of a barbed wire fence, and, leaning closer to look at the flower, was shot in the heart.

The Japanese man had lived in the United States for forty years, but was not a citizen, because he was born in Japan (Takahama, Ishikawa), and Asians could not, at the time of the man’s murder, become citizens of the United States. He was one of 8,130 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans incarcerated in Topaz, a concentration camp in the Sevier Desert of west-central Utah, and one of the more than 125,000 who were incarcerated in prisons and camps throughout the U.S. It was April 11, 1943, seven months since the camp opened (September 11).

James Hatsuaki Wakasa, sixty-three, was alone. He had no family. He had dinner with a friend in the mess hall that night—the stoves, dark brown with rust, are still there—then went for a walk along the southwestern edge of camp. The fence, four strands of barbed wire held up with tree limbs, is still there.

Later, the friend he had dinner with (Karl Akiya) visited the site and saw, on the far side of the fence, an “unusual flower.” He speculated that Wakasa was reaching through the fence to pick the flower when he was shot. That is one of many stories.

Another story is that Wakasa was walking his dog. Another is that he was running after the dog. Another is that the dog got caught in the fence. Another is that the dog was not his, but a stray. Another is that he was collecting stones.

The Japanese man had lived in the United States for forty years, but was not a citizen, because he was born in Japan (Takahama, Ishikawa), and Asians could not, at the time of the man’s murder, become citizens of the United States.

In her memoir, Desert Exile, Yoshiko Uchida writes that Wakasa was looking for “arrowheads, trilobites, or unusual stones.” In her YA novel Journey to Topaz—a fictionalization of Desert Exile—Uchida writes that Wakasa was “reaching for an interesting stone.”

“Many of the children were told that Wakasa was looking for a flower or a fossil,” said TT Takemoto, in an interview about their film Warning Shot (2016), which takes a Rashomon-like approach to telling the story of Wakasa’s murder. The camp newspaper, the Topaz Times, reported that Wakasa was crawling under the fence to escape, “and because he was an elderly man he didn’t know what he was doing,” said George Shimamoto, Issei. 

In her memoir, I Call To Remembrance, Toyo Suyemoto writes that “the old man, in the habit of strolling along the fence for exercise, had no intention of escaping.” “He couldn’t have been trying to escape,” writes Kiku Hughes in her graphic novel Displacement. “He knew as well as any of us that there’s nowhere to go out there.” Beyond the fence was desert. Beyond the desert, mountains. Beyond the mountains, a cruel and uninviting country.

The shot that killed Wakasa was fired from three hundred yards away by a white man in a guard tower. Wakasa may or may not have seen the white man, but he knew he was there. The guard may or may not have called out, may or may not have fired a warning shot or shots.

Wakasa may or may not have heard the man calling out, the warning shot or shots. That he was deaf is another story. There was wind that evening. The wind is still there.

The shot that killed Wakasa was at least the tenth shot fired by guards at the Japanese Americans in Topaz, which may or may not mean that the first nine shots missed. The guard, Gerald Philpott, was a teenager, nineteen. He claimed that he “hollered” at Wakasa four times, that Wakasa, looking directly at him, “turned and started to climb the fence,” so he “fired one shot to frighten” him. With a thirty-caliber rifle. To have shot Wakasa at three hundred yards, Philpott must have been holding him very tightly in his sights.

He was court-martialed and tried for manslaughter. A jury of military personnel found him not guilty. He was acquitted anyway. The camp population, withheld from the truth of its own execution, was not made aware of this. “Particulars and facts of the matter were never satisfactorily disclosed to the residents,” writes Miné Okubo in her graphic memoir, Citizen 13660.

Philpott’s charge sheet lists fourteen witnesses: ten military police officers, three War Relocation Authority [WRA] officials, and Tsune Baba, Nisei, and the chairman of the community council. The youngest witness (not listed) was likely Ron Kiino, who was three. He was playing with a friend beneath Guard Tower 8 when he heard shouting above and looked up. Later in life, when people asked what he remembered about camp, Kiino said, “the wind, the sand, the liver, and the shooting.”

The variations in the story of Wakasa’s murder—which, in the maelstrom of disinformation and the withholding of evidence, began to flow almost immediately—have become part of the story, but, aside from the perverse, parlor game aspect of trying to guess what Wakasa was doing, why does it matter?

The variations reproduce what Jackie Wang calls a “guilt-innocence schematization.” If Wakasa was trying to escape, he was guilty. If he was looking at a flower—deaf, with dog, etc.—he was innocent. If Philpott thought Wakasa was trying to escape but Wakasa was reaching for a flower, then it was Philpott’s misunderstanding that ended Wakasa’s life, not Philpott’s racism, its endorsement by the camps, and its reinforcement of the racism of white America. “Innocence,” Wang writes, “is just code for nonthreatening to white civil society.”

Two Issei men, members of the camp’s landscaping crew, found a two-thousand-pound stone, gathered smaller stones and a bag of cement, and erected a monument for Wakasa. Where did the stone come from? Did it fall from the sky?

The Issei must have summoned it from the void left in the absence of their friend and brother, one ton, the weight of their feeling. The monument was made to console Wakasa’s spirit, give it a place to rest, and give to the community a ritual grave. The stone was imbued with the perspective of eternity.

That is where it came from: the ancient lake, deep space, eternity. The stone would outlast everyone, would transcend the memory of those who were there, and those who came after, and would see Topaz and its eventual ruin beyond the end. But eternity came quick. The government ordered that the monument be destroyed. A few days later, the two-thousand-pound stone was gone.

“Stone of mystery, death, / of deep space and reconciliation,” writes Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan in her poem “Tale of the Black Diamond.” When the monument disappeared, it transmigrated into the realm of collective imagination, became legendary.

In its absence and irretrievability, the grave was no longer delimited by the fence or Topaz or the desert or Utah. The grave became the United States, the most general and the most specific reminder of why the Japanese Americans were incarcerated and what could happen to them on any given day in or outside of camp.

And yet the stone was not absent, it was not irretrievable, because it had not, as it turned out, been destroyed. When the Issei were ordered to destroy the stone, they dug a hole in the ground, and buried it.

Many years later, but not so many years later, a descendant of Topaz, Nancy Ukai, discovered in the National Archives a map, hand-drawn by George Shimamoto, that diagrams the exact location of Wakasa’s murder. It shows the fence, a floodlight pole, the guard towers to the north and south of where Wakasa was walking; it records the distance between Philpott and Wakasa as nine hundred and forty-three feet, six inches; it notes that there was a “mild westerly wind,” and that Wakasa was found face “up, his body pointed north, legs folded beneath him.”

It felt like Shimamoto, by recording every detail and the distance, down to the inch, was treating the loss of life with respect,” Ukai said. “It was its own memorial.”

Ukai’s parents were incarcerated in Topaz. The first time she heard about Wakasa was when she was 10, at the dinner table. Her mother was talking about Topaz when her voice suddenly changed. “They didn’t have to kill him!” she shouted. Ukai was startled. “I remember thinking, why is she getting so emotional, why is her face getting red?”

She included the map in an essay, “The Demolished Monument,” which she published as part of 50 Objects/50 Stories, a storytelling project she directs. In September 2020, two archeologists, Mary Farrell and Jeffrey Burton, visited Topaz. They brought Shimamoto’s map (from Ukai’s essay), a three-hundred-foot measuring tape, and a chaining pin. “We were hoping to find maybe a few fragments of concrete,” Farrell said.

They started from the footings of Guard Tower 8. 943 feet, 6 inches later, they found a stone sticking up, just slightly, from the dirt. “The smooth stone, lying face down, measures about 4 feet long by 1½ feet wide,” they wrote in an article for Discover Nikkei. “Its thickness is unknown: it rises less than 3 inches above the ground, but is massive and seemingly unmovable.”

“What did you feel when you saw it?” Ukai asked Farrell.

“I thought, oh my god, this is it, this is where Mr. Wakasa died, this is where his friends put up a monument, and…I’m sorry, it makes me emotional just to think about.”

A meeting was called to discuss what should be done with the stone. Topaz survivors and descendants, archeologists, the National Park Service, and members of the Topaz Museum—fifteen miles from Topaz, in the town of Delta—agreed that it should remain in the ground. I asked one of the archeologists, Koji Lau-Ozawa, why.

“Excavation and removal are by their nature irreversible and destructive acts,” he said. “You can’t un-ring that bell.”

Lau-Ozawa’s grandparents and great-grandparents were incarcerated in the Gila River concentration camp, on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona; much of his work is devoted to close reading the site. He reiterated the “oppressive forces” that resulted in the stone being buried, and invoked the Issei’s “touch and interaction with the soil and stone,” which he felt when he visited. “I was able to stand next to it and lay my hand upon it,” he told me.

In July 2021, the Topaz Museum, without informing survivors, descendants, or the Japanese American community, hired a local backhoe company to remove the stone and relocate it to the museum. “Remove” and “relocate” are resonant, triggering words. Present were two videographers, the Senior Officer of the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, those museum board members who lived close enough (i.e., neither of the two Japanese American board members), and the museum’s director.

No archeologists were present. A proper excavation might have included setting up a grid, documenting the surface of the soil, screening for artifacts, collecting soil samples, measuring, photographing, cataloguing everything. The stone was dug out with shovels, then pulled with a forklift and chains into the excoriating light of the twenty-first century.

Fragments of stone and pieces of concrete—the monument’s original base, maybe—broke off. The stone was dragged across the sand, wrapped with a yellow rigging strap, and placed on a piece of carpet on a wooden pallet. The site of Wakasa’s murder was left unmarked, the hole in the ground—five feet deep—backfilled with dirt.

That night, the director of the museum, Jane Beckwith, sent out an email. Subject line: “Rock.” “Just a quick report on this morning,” the email began. “It only took a couple of hours to remove the dirt and pull the stone out of the hole,” she wrote, adding that “a small piece flipped off.” The last line of the email: “The crack was not a factor.”

“I was crying,” Ukai said, about the email. “I didn’t expect it to have this physical effect on me,” as if her mother’s emotions from the dinner table a lifetime ago were, in that instant, released. Ukai replied to the email.

I was stunned to learn that you lifted the Wakasa monument this morning. You appear not to understand that the place where a member of our community was murdered, and where that crime was memorialized by camp inmates, was desecrated at the time by the WRA. In a similar way our agency and our ability to be involved has been taken away from us once again.

Satsuki Ina, a writer, filmmaker, activist, and psychotherapist specializing in community trauma, who was born in the Tule Lake concentration camp after her parents were relocated there from Topaz, also replied.

You have robbed us of a precious moment in time. So heartbreaking to know that you would not consider the meaning of such a moment for all of us survivors and descendants to be a part of a powerful healing experience to uncover the painful burden we carry about our family’s suffering.

Masako Takahashi, an artist born in Topaz—her father was the editor of the Topaz Times, and her mother wrote for it—who runs the Takahashi Foundation, a charitable organization that supports the Japanese American community, replied too. She had offered to fund, through the Foundation, a proper excavation, including a spiritual healing ceremony. The museum declined.

In her email, she noted the “special opportunity” that the stone’s unearthing had produced, and urged the museum to include Japanese Americans in telling its story. “Why not invite Japanese Americans to communicate about what it’s been like to be Japanese American?”

“An opportunity for survivors, descendants and all those in the Topaz and civil rights community to experience a
powerful chance for healing has been lost forever,” Ukai continued in her email. “The memory of James Hatsuaki Wakasa deserved better.”

Four days later, the director responded. This time her email was co-signed by the museum board. “We understand your concerns and deep feelings,” the email began. The description of the removal was more comprehensive, expressed more concern. There were numerous assurances that the removal and relocation were executed profession- ally and according to the advice of archeologists. The last paragraph of the email began, “Since the rock is safe….”

Safe from what? From whom? Did the museum think that the stone, buried for seventy-eight years, was unsafe, and had finally—dragged, cracked, a small piece flipped off, now exposed—achieved the protection it needed?

In August, in a letter to Ina, Takahashi, and Ukai, the director introduced into the story of the stone’s removal and relocation a concern that had not, until then, been expressed: that the stone, newly discovered, its coordinates revealed, was in danger of being vandalized or destroyed, and that that was the reason why it had to be removed right away. In the letter, the director cited examples of vandalism around Topaz, bullet holes in stop signs, tire tracks running off the road.

Other, entirely visible and accessible memorials to Wakasa—a sign mounted on a metal post, a handwritten plaque near the camp’s sewage plant, a tree trunk carved IN MEMORY WAKASA—had not been vandalized, so why would a stone, whose location could only be known to readers of Discover Nikkei or 50 Objects, who would then have to measure out—starting where? with what?—nine hundred and forty-three feet, six inches, be at greater risk?

In September 2021, a group of camp survivors and descendants (including Ukai, Ina, Takahashi), filmmakers, and historians, with an advisory council of archeologists, scholars, artists, and Buddhist priests, formed the Wakasa Memorial Committee. They sent a letter to the museum outlining measures to “remedy” the situation, including by conducting an archeological assessment, making public the video of the stone’s removal, and apologizing for the desecration of the memorial site.

The letter referred to the removal as “crude, reckless,” and a violation of the museum’s mission, the opening commitment of which is “To preserve the Topaz site and its WWII history.”

The same month, the Friends of Topaz, a group formed in 2013 by Topaz descendants as a “direct link between the Topaz Museum and the Topaz community,” published a letter defending the museum’s actions, citing “the climate of vicious anti-Asian hate” that necessitated the immediate removal of the monument.

The climate was—and is—real and relentless, and stretches deep into even Asianless landscapes. “In its haste, however,” the letter continued, “the museum failed to notify the community in advance of the removal, thereby triggering anger and leading some to conclude that it acted with callous indifference.”

The museum’s “haste” was “unconscionable,” wrote Karen Korematsu, daughter of Fred Korematsu, who famously refused the exclusion order and fought incarceration all the way to the Supreme Court. “All incarceration sites and Indigenous lands need to be viewed as sacred,” she wrote. “Accountability and transparency are the only way to stop multi-generational trauma across all racial communities.”

What, in the context and chaos of this history, does it mean to protect a 2,000-pound stone? The WMC and the Topaz Museum each expressed their commitment to the stone’s protection, and found themselves embodying, in their ideas of how to carry out that commitment, a particular ideology—embodying, however reluctantly, a side.

The museum believed that they were protecting the stone from potential harm. The WMC believed that the museum caused exactly the kind of harm from which it claimed to be protecting it. They could not understand how people in the community could defend the actions of the museum and place the museum’s actions above the community’s interests.

Those who defended the actions of the museum could not understand how the WMC could defame the institution that was preserving their history. Because the museum was giving space to a history that was, in that remote Asianless place, otherwise likely to be lost, to criticize the museum threatened the already precarious nature of Japanese American memory and amounted to an act of disloyalty—to the museum, and to the community.

A rift runs through the community, always threatening, perennially, to break it. The rift was formed during the war and widened along the question of loyalty—how loyal the Japanese Americans were to the United States, a system to which the community, in allegiance or dissent, was bound.

The question was not, of course, how loyal the United States was to the Japanese Americans; that had already been answered. The Japanese Americans being were being forced not only into proving their loyalty—through their movements, behaviors, ways of speaking, associations, and, most formally, through their responses to a loyalty questionnaire—but into a willingness to do so, at whatever length, and set against the unquestioned, irreproachable loyalty of white Americans.

Every Japanese American, from those on their deathbed to those born one minute ago, became a symbol of how much and how deeply, or how little, they subscribed and adhered to the kind of conditional, exclusionary Americanism they were being offered.

Proving loyalty became an orientation, an identity. Every Japanese American, from those on their deathbed to those born one minute ago, became a symbol of how much and how deeply, or how little, they subscribed and adhered to the kind of conditional, exclusionary Americanism they were being offered—which the collaborationist Japanese American Citizens League [JACL] was zealous to endorse.

The community was entrapped in a series of limited viewpoints and positions, in which were implied an ethics of right and wrong—ways to attend to history, to protect and preserve it, to protest and watch over it. Every Japanese American became a flag.

The pinnacle proof of loyalty was achieved in the community policing itself—people accusing each other of being disloyal, to the United States or to the community, to individuals or to the meaning and momentum of their story. The pinnacle was topped by the flag of each person growing accustomed to also policing themselves. It became a tradition, enforced by white supremacy, a system in which white people—friends and neighbors, administrators and monsters, strangers and saints—could, on the periphery, remain silent.

With a 2,000-pound stone wedged—risen—into the rift, the community was, once again, threatened by, and threatening itself with, the question—the crisis—of how best to take care of itself.

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The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda is available via City Lights Books.