Remembering Topaz: WWII Utah internment camp was barbed-wire prison for Japanese-Americans

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Correction: Tats Koga was the father of Steve Koga, an Ogden resident and board member of the Topaz Museum. A story Friday misspelled the father's name.

Steve Koga may never know exactly how his parents met when his mother was at Topaz. After all, like many Japanese-Americans, she never talked much about her wartime internment at the western Utah camp.

But it was Sumiko Kido's marriage to Tats Koga, a Japanese-American farmer from Ogden who delivered produce to Topaz, that allowed her to leave the camp a year before it closed in 1945. It is uncertain, though, whether it was a Buddhist minister or a friend of the family who arranged the marriage, playing the traditional Japanese role of baishakunin.

The young couple spent their entire courtship inside the camp's barbed-wire fences, attending movies in the recreation hall or taking long walks across the parched west desert soil - at least that's how Steve Koga imagines it today.

On Saturday, Koga will be among dozens of descendants of Japanese-American internees - and some of the survivors themselves - to visit Topaz for a special ceremony marking its recent recognition as a National Historic Landmark.

The distinction - shared by fewer than 2,500 locations nationwide, including 12 other Utah sites - comes at a time when fewer and fewer of the survivors of the World War II internment camp remain to share their stories.

Some will join Saturday's pilgrimage to show their children and grandchildren a terrible scar on U.S. history.

They will share memories of a period when basic human rights and constitutionally protected rights were suspended in favor of racist paranoia, leading the U.S. government to confine 110,000 Japanese-Americans - two-thirds of whom were American citizens - simply for sharing the ancestry with those who attacked Pearl Harbor.

Most former internees, like Koga's mother, generally avoided discussing the topic with their children, Koga says, explaining that for many Japanese-Americans, it was more important to integrate into U.S. society than to point fingers.

As Buddhists, his parents, who died more than a decade ago, also believed in letting go of the past and living in the present.

Koga doesn't second-guess his mother's silence. But he has learned to educate himself about the issue. A member of the Topaz Museum board, he has become the de facto family historian, although he says the issue still is not often discussed among his seven siblings.

He looks forward to visiting Topaz on Saturday with his sister, Bountiful resident Maya Chow, who never has been to the site, and her two kids, Keith, 18, and Samantha, 12.

"We all like to know where we came from and our little histories. I wish I did know many more details [of my mother's life]," Koga says. "Part of the problem [was] mine and my siblings. We just didn't know the right questions to ask. If I could ask her now, I would get every little gritty detail."

Today, Utah youths - related to former internees or not - probably have their greatest opportunities to learn about Topaz in school. Although it might be discussed for only one class period in seventh-grade "Utah History" courses, 11th-graders study the topic as part of a civil-rights theme that spans the entire school year, says Pam Su'a, Jordan School District's social-studies specialist.

Topaz "absolutely is an important topic. Understanding what . . . devastating impact can happen when we don't understand other cultures . . . will prevent this from happening in the future," Su'a says. "That is what education is about. We want our students to learn lessons from history."

In the past decade or so, class lectures on Topaz have expanded, thanks to more publications about the camp and a new readiness to talk about the travesty since then-President Reagan apologized for internment in 1988, Su'a adds.

This spring, Jordan School District sent 3,000 high school students to a screening of "American Pastime," a filmed-in-Utah drama about Topaz internees and their baseball team. The students were prepped in Topaz history before watching the movie.

The film has sparked an interest in Keith Chow, Steve Koga's nephew. When asked what he wants to see first when he visits Topaz, he responds, "the baseball field."

Chow, who graduated this year from Bountiful High, was only 6 when his grandmother died. He doesn't have many memories of her, and most of what he knows about Topaz, he learned in his American history class - or from his Uncle Steve.

The 18-year-old does know this about Topaz: "It was unfair."

rwinters@sltrib.com

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