Violence had brought the old man here, and violence would take him away. The blue mountains rose as he walked through the desert in the fading evening light. The powdery soil of an ancient lakebed sank beneath his feet. The man’s name was James Wakasa, and he was a prisoner of the United States.
It was April 1943, and the world was at war. Sixteen months earlier, Japanese planes attacked an American naval base in Hawai’i. As a wave of bitter, anti-immigrant fury swept the country, President Franklin Roosevelt responded by ordering the mass removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Thousands of people — immigrants and U.S. citizens alike — were forced to leave their homes and taken to 10 remote federal prison camps, mostly in the Western U.S. The president said it was necessary for national security. A congressional commission would later call it an act of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”
Wakasa, a 63-year-old immigrant and a chef in San Francisco, was sent east to Utah. There was a camp there, deep in the Sevier Desert, ringed by mountains and surrounded by barbed wire fences. Armed military guards patrolled the perimeter, sometimes shooting at incarcerees who tried to escape or failed to halt when ordered. The camp was called the Topaz Relocation Center.
That Sunday evening, the old man walked out along the edge of the camp as he often did with his dog in the evenings. Clouds had covered the sky earlier, darkening the desert, but now the sun broke through, dipping low over the mountains.
Across the desert, an American soldier sat in a guard tower overlooking the camp. His name was Gerald Philpott, and a year later, he would go on to serve in Germany and become wounded in combat, earning a Purple Heart. He was not quite 19 years old.
Philpott saw Wakasa walking along the fence. He called out a warning, ordering the old man to move away from the wire — four times, he later said. The young man raised his rifle and fired.
A single bullet flashed through the air as the gunshot rang across the desert. It sliced through Wakasa’s chest, tearing his spine apart. The old man dropped to his knees and fell backwards, dead. Blood ran from his body and stained the dusty ground, soaking through layers of antediluvian soil. The sun had not yet set.
SEVENTY-TWO YEARS LATER, Nancy Ukai stood in a quiet room surrounded by oak bookcases at the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. It was 2015, and Ukai, a historical researcher and former journalist, was there to learn about James Wakasa’s life and death.
Ukai was a child when she heard the name for the first time. During the war, her mother and father were sent to Topaz, too. They were there the evening Philpott shot Wakasa, a day before Ukai’s half-brother was born. Ukai recalled how her mother, Fumiko, turned an angry red one night at the family dinner table in Berkeley, California. “They didn’t have to kill him,” Fumiko said.
That memory sat in the back of Ukai’s memory for decades. It was there when she moved to Japan, seeking a deeper connection to her family’s roots, and worked as a reporter in Tokyo. It was there when she moved home to the Bay Area and joined efforts to preserve the history of Topaz and the other camps. Eventually, it brought her to Washington, D.C., to learn more about Wakasa.
A thick paper folder lay before her. She opened it.
Federal officials kept detailed records on almost everyone they imprisoned, including Wakasa. They noted how swiftly the military police seized his body and removed it from the camp. The records included a copy of the press release the camp officials published, which accused Wakasa of trying to crawl through the fence and escape, despite federal records showing that the bloodstain left by his body was three to five feet away from the fence. They added that, after the shooting, heavily armed soldiers began patrolling the camp with gas masks and submachine guns.
The file held information on Wakasa’s life, too — lists of his belongings, including his chef’s hat, an alarm clock and a picture of Abraham Lincoln — along with statements from other incarcerated people who remembered him. One clerk at the camp’s legal office said Wakasa was stubborn and spoke out freely. Wakasa had visited the office regularly to file paperwork, demanding that the state of California pay him the unemployment insurance he said it owed him after he’d faithfully contributed to the fund before incarceration. “He knew what his rights were and would not leave any stone unturned in his efforts to obtain” them, the clerk wrote.
To Ukai, the report read like a poignant eulogy for the old man. “He became more of a person to me when I read that,” she said.
Then Ukai uncovered a series of letters between Topaz officials and the Roosevelt administration in D.C. They sounded alarmed: After the shooting, they said, a group of Wakasa’s fellow prisoners — landscapers and Issei, first-generation immigrants like Wakasa — raised a monument of concrete and stone at the place where he died.
Ukai searched the file for pictures of the monument but found nothing. The letters grew increasingly worried. Just months earlier, military police had opened fire into a crowd at Manzanar, another detention center in California. They shot 11 people and killed two. D.C. officials feared the Japanese government would use the shootings to justify abusing American prisoners of war.
The Roosevelt administration pressed Topaz officials to destroy the monument. Under pressure from the officials, incarcerated Japanese American community leaders told the workers who built it to tear it down.
Ukai left D.C. and traveled home to California, the new information still sinking in. The monument in Topaz felt important. To her, it was a symbol of both the violence that people had experienced there and their refusal to stop fighting for their civil rights. The monument‘s destruction showed how that resistance had been silenced.
But Ukai had other projects to work on. Among other things, she was preparing to publish an online history project on the incarceration, 50 Objects. James Wakasa and the demolished memorial slipped to the back of her mind.
Then, in the hot summer of 2020, a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd. Across the American South, nearly 100 monuments to Confederate leaders like Gen. Robert E. Lee were torn down as protesters rose up to demand racial justice.
As Ukai watched, those events stirred her memories of a Japanese American monument that the government thought was too dangerous to exist. She started writing an article about her research and the story of Wakasa’s killing.That September, she published it on the 50 Objects website. At the top of it, she put a photo illustration of a pile of dust.
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the mountains in rural eastern California, two married archaeologists took notice.
It was a low moment for Mary Farrell and Jeff Burton. The pandemic was at its height, and churning wildfire smoke choked the skies above their tiny town in the Owens Valley. Burton was also going through chemotherapy, which left him feeling weak and tired.
The two white archaeologists had spent parts of the 1990s roaming the American West together — particularly Burton, who worked for the National Park Service. Farrell, who was then employed by the U.S. Forest Service, often went with him when she could get off work. Their mission was to document what was left of the Japanese American detention centers. The sites were scattered across the Western U.S., and many had been sold or given away by the government after the war.Burton traveled to all 10 of the camps to see what was left. They recorded what was still standing and the foundations of what had been torn down. Eventually, they wrote a landmark report that recommended designating all 10 camps as historic sites.
After their son Dan was born, those expeditions became family road trips. On the way to the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming, they stopped at Yellowstone. After cataloging remains at Tule Lake Relocation Center, they would visit the fossil parks nearby.
I knew what that felt like — that odd blend of family vacation time and disturbing history. In 2013, I piled into my own family’s car along with my grandmother, parents and sister. We drove north from California for hours. When we finally stopped to stretch our legs, we were standing at Minidoka, the southern Idaho detention center where my grandmother and her family were imprisoned during the war.
“It just felt very American,” Farrell said when we first spoke in 2023. “Great beauty and great stories. And also, great tragedy.”
That was decades ago, though. In the years since, the two archaeologists had moved to the sleepy town of Lone Pine.Burton was still at the National Park Service, but Farrell had retired from the Forest Service and joined the staff of a small nonprofit.
When they read Ukai’s article, they were intrigued — especially by one document. It was a hand-drawn map of the place where Wakasa was killed. Ukai found it at the National Archives and included it in her piece. The sketch showed the fence, the bloodstain and its distance from the guard tower. Burton and Farrell wondered if any fragments of the monument were left. They decided to head to Utah.
“It feels a tiny bit like an Indiana Jones movie,” I told Farrell. “Unfortunately, we are not at all like Indiana Jones,” she said kindly. “We’re much more boring and tedious and bureaucratic.”
The drive to Topaz took just over seven hours. By the time they arrived, the sun was tilting lower in the sky. The archaeologists laid out a tape measure and began walking along the desert plain, stepping over thorny sagebrush shrubs.
It didn’t take long. There, along the line of their tape measure, was a giant stone, many times larger than anything around it. It was almost entirely buried, with just one face breaking through the dusty soil. A few chunks of concrete were scattered nearby. It was less than 20 feet from the place where James Wakasa was killed.
ALTHOUGH THE ARCHAEOLOGISTS were standing on a historic site, they were also technically on private property. Fifteen miles away sat the organization that owned that property: the Topaz Museum.
The museum is a locally run private nonprofit in Delta, the closest town. Much of the town’s main street feels old and lived in, but the museum stands out with its boxy shape and metal-and-glass design. A plaque in the foyer names the museum’s founder: Jane Beckwith.
Beckwith and the museum’s board of directors trace its history back to 1982. Many in town, they said, knew little about Topaz. Passersby used the small sign that acknowledged the camp for target practice. “I knew all about World War II,” said Scott Bassett, a white elementary school teacher who grew up in Delta and serves on the museum’s board. “I could recite the battles and the gates and their generals’ names. But I had no clue what had happened right in my own backyard.”
Beckwith, a high school journalism teacher and white Delta resident, wanted to change that.In 1982, she and her students began a class project about Topaz. They explored the wartime connections between the town and the prison camp and interviewed Delta residents who had worked there.
At the same time, across the country, thousands of Japanese American survivors, energized by the civil rights and antiwar movements, were demanding that the federal government answer for their incarceration. A federal commission held hearings in dozens of major cities. It found that the mass relocation policy was fueled by racial prejudice and wartime panic. In 1988, Congress passed an official apology and approved financial reparations for the Japanese American community.
Back in Delta, Beckwith started raising money for a museum. She traveled to San Francisco, to which many Topaz survivors had returned after the war, and worked with them to find grants and private donations. In the following decades, the museum’s organizers received over $1.5 million in grants from the National Park Service and the state of Utah, along with hundreds of thousands in private donations. They started buying up the land where the former camp had stood. In 2007, the Topaz site was declared a national historic landmark — a place essential to understanding American history. Many praised Beckwith’s efforts.“People should know about this,” she told the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2011. “Topaz still has much to teach us. But it must be protected, or it will disappear.”
But others had questions about the museum. In 2014, a small group of Topaz survivors and their descendants were invited to read the text of some of the exhibits the museum’s organizers planned to install. Some camp survivors and descendants worried the panels failed to capture the violence that took place. Nancy Ukai noticed that the text describing Wakasa’s killing didn’t mention that guards had been shooting at prisoners for months. “The narrative seemed like it skimmed over the horror of what happened,” she said. In response, the National Park Service halted the museum’s funding and held a series of mediation meetings. The agency also called on historical experts to review the panels, Ukai said.
(Beckwith, reached in person and by phone, declined multiple requests to speak for this story.)
The museum board agreed to rewrite the exhibits. In an interview, Bassett, the board member, said he thought the original version of the exhibit on James Wakasa was just as strong as the revised one. But “because we had federal money from the National Park Service, they required that we go into mediation,” he said late last year. “We were forced into that.” Still, the board went ahead with the rewrites. When the museum officially opened in 2017, the Utah Legislature celebrated Beckwith, calling Topaz “the crowning jewel” of efforts to remember the incarceration.
Then, in September 2020, Beckwith received an email from Burton. The two archaeologists, she learned, had visited Topaz and discovered something buried in the ground.
UKAI WAS STUNNED. She knew about Burton and Farrell’s work but had no idea they were going out to Topaz. According to her research, the monument had been demolished 80 years ago.
“I was just utterly shocked to think that it had been buried, like buried treasure,” Ukai said. “This thing that had been erased was actually still there.”
Back in Delta, though, Topaz Museum officials were more concerned about the way the monument had been discovered. Bassett thought the archaeologists should have asked for the board’s permission before doing research on the site. In an email, Burton admitted to taking a piece of concrete from the site, an act some board members saw as a violation of archaeological standards. “We were basically just treated disrespectfully,” Bassett said.
Beckwith shared similar worries in emails to state officials, which I obtained through a public records request. “What I am afraid they will do is just come and turn over the rock, film it, and do whatever else they want to do without our permission,” she wrote to Roger Roper, a Utah historic preservation officer, in October 2020.
That same month, a group of archaeologists, government officials, descendants and museum board members met to discuss what should happen next.
One of those archaeologists was Koji Lau-Ozawa, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lau-Ozawa had done his own research at a different incarceration camp, Gila River, years earlier. He felt strongly that the descendants and the museum needed to reach a joint decision before taking any further action.
“Archaeology is an irreversible act,” he said late last year. “Whatever step is taken, whether it’s leaving it in the ground or excavating it, there needs to be sort of a consensus.”
The discussions drew on for months. Masako Takahashi, an artist who was born in Topaz, offered to fund a full archaeological excavation, but the board declined.
In the meantime, Burton and Farrell were preparing to publish a series of articles on the discovery on “Discover Nikkei,” an online project of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. They sent drafts to Ukai and also shared them with Beckwith and Bassett, who suggested several changes. In the summer of 2021, the two archaeologists published their series.
Three weeks later, Ukai received an email from Beckwith. It was terse and direct. The subject line read “FW: Rock.”
“Just a quick report on this morning,” it read. “The rock was much larger than it seemed, but it only took a couple of hours to remove the dirt around it and then pull it out of the hole.”
The Topaz Museum had unearthed the monument.
INFORMATION ABOUT the excavation of the Wakasa Monument is limited. Museum board members videotaped the process but declined requests to share the footage. Bassett also refused to answer specific questions about the excavation. Roper, the Utah historic preservation officer, had been present but did not respond to interview requests.
According to Lau-Ozawa, a thorough archaeological excavation of the Wakasa Monument might have looked something like this. Watching from above, a rectangular grid of string would have marked the area where the monument was buried, recording the physical location of the object in space. Slowly, a rectangular hole would appear in the earth around the stone. Researchers would then remove layers of soil with trowels and other hand tools, 10 centimeters at a time, sifting each layer to catch any stray objects and taking pictures — perhaps even using a laser to map out each layer in fine detail. The monument would gradually emerge from the center of the hole.
The actual excavation was far less precise. Photographs taken by Roper, obtained through a public records request, show a ragged hole appearing in the earth around the monument as four workers drove metal shovels into the soil, carving it away. At the center of the hole, the monument emerged: a massive, egg-shaped stone. One picture shows Beckwith reaching out to touch it with a gloved hand. Eventually, the monument was raised from the earth, held tightly by a yellow strap, like a whale lifted from the ocean. An industrial Bobcat skid-steer dragged it towards the road. In the process, a small piece of the monument broke loose
In an interview this past December, Bassett defended the museum’s actions. He acknowledged that none of those involved, including Roper, were professional archaeologists and admitted that they likely failed to grasp the gravity of the moment. Still, he argued that they did understand the importance of the monument. “Of course, this is going to sound like I’m making this all up,” he said. “But for me, it was a very emotional experience. It was a very solemn experience. We were very careful.”
In separate interviews, however, archaeologists Lau-Ozawa and Farrell said the excavation had destroyed both scientific information and an opportunity for an emotional moment for Topaz survivors and their descendants. Lau-Ozawa called it a “failure of process.”
“It was done in a way that did not allow for community input — for people to weigh in on how it should be done,” he said. “And, furthermore, it was done in a way that limits the way we can understand and learn from the object.”
Even experts hired by the Topaz Museum would later agree that greater expertise would have made a difference. “The assistance of experienced and knowledgeable professionals, such as an archeologist or a stone professional with significant insight into potential weakness or fragile areas in natural stones, would have been beneficial,” Utah masonry specialist John Lambert wrote in his report on the stone’s condition in August 2023.
Back at the excavation site, the group hoisted the monument onto a truck and drove it back to Delta. They placed the vast stone on an uncovered wooden pallet in the back corner of the courtyard behind the museum. Another piece came loose in the process. It started to rain.
UKAI READ BECKWITH’S EMAIL SLOWLY. She was shaking. Tears leaked from her eyes.
She thought about the actions of the federal government back in 1943, in the days after Wakasa’s killing — how they seized his body, controlled what the public knew and ultimately, in her view, tried to erase the memory of the killing by pressuring the camp to demolish the monument. In the museum’s actions, she saw the same patterns of violence emerging.
“It was really, really traumatic to think that something that was so precious to us was pulled out without telling us,” she said. “It was really a heritage crime.”
Ukai immediately wrote back to Beckwith. “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,” she wrote, describing the events of 1943. “In a similar way our agency and our ability to be involved has been taken away from us once again.”
Within a day, other furious Topaz descendants began to respond. “Jane, you have robbed us of a precious moment in time,” wrote Satsuki Ina, an organizer with the immigrant rights advocacy group Tsuru for Solidarity. “So much harm has been caused by your sense of entitlement and ownership of my family’s story.”
The backlash was beyond anything the museum board had expected. Two weeks later, Beckwith issued an apology letter from the board. Beckwith blamed the archaeologists, Burton and Farrell, for sharing the monument’s location in their “Discover Nikkei” articles. She said the board had been afraid that looters or vandals would find it. “We acknowledge that the opportunity to unearth the stone in a publicized healing ceremony attended by members of the Japanese American Community was lost,” Beckwith wrote. “But the disclosure of the stone’s location had increased the risk of vandalism and damage.”
Farrell and Burton were devastated, both at the news of the excavation and the museum’s response. They were horrified to think that their article might have triggered the destructive act. They sent their own emails to Beckwith and Ukai, apologizing profusely. But Farrell said they were also appalled by the board’s actions. They should have known better and been more careful, she said.
“I’m still confused,” she said last year, still agonized. “Why did they do that? Why did they rip it out, destroying all the archaeological context, destroying the chance for healing that stone had offered?”
TO LAU-OZAWA, the museum’s actions echoed a long and troubled history.
The science of archaeology is about studying the past through physical remains. But many scientists and museums have used the practice to unjustly claim artifacts and excavate cultural sites, Lau-Ozawa said. He pointed to the example of the so-called “Elgin Marbles,” the iconic sculptures from the Parthenon that Greek officials accuse the British of stealing, which are still held in the British Museum. The Indiana Jones movies too, he said, were another example — a swashbuckling white archaeologist swooping in to seize sacred objects from Indigenous tribes in the name of protecting them. The way Topaz Museum officials had talked about safeguarding the monument, Lau-Ozawa felt, resonated with that record.
“The long history of protection, or sort of ‘the museum knows best’ kind of framing,” he said.
In response, Ukai and dozens of other descendants formed the Wakasa Memorial Committee to negotiate with the museum board over the monument’s future. In September, six weeks after the excavation, they sent a letter demanding the release of the excavation videotape and an independent assessment of the excavation site.
The next month, Beckwith responded with a letter of her own. She apologized personally and asked that descendants stop publicly criticizing the board. “I take full responsibility for the decision,” she wrote. “The Topaz Museum Board and I are committed to doing better.” Still, the board refused to release the video. The Wakasa Committee had also asked the board to consider a community archaeology project that would allow descendants and other volunteers to work alongside trained researchers, as had been done at Manzanar and other former camps. The board declined.
Not all the Topaz descendants were angry, though. Dianne Fukami, a longtime TV journalist in the Bay Area, argued that the board had done far more good over the years. “I am indebted to Jane Beckwith, a former high school teacher born and raised in Delta, who passionately dedicated countless hours for the past 30+ years to make the museum a reality,” Fukami wrote in an opinion piece for Rafu Shimpo, the Los Angeles-based Japanese American newspaper.
As the flurry of heated letters continued, the Wakasa Committee and the museum board sought help from the state of Utah. Two officials stepped in: Chris Merritt, a historic preservation officer who had worked closely with Chinese American communities in Utah to unearth the stories of railroad workers, and Jani Iwamoto, one of the few lawmakers of color in the Utah legislature at the time. Over the course of a year, Sen. Iwamoto and Merritt met regularly with the board and committee to discuss the Wakasa stone’s future.
There was one hopeful milestone approaching: That spring would mark 80 years since James Wakasa’s killing, a date that both committee members and museum officials hoped might offer an opportunity for reconciliation. The talks continued as they worked together to plan a memorial in Delta.
THE BUDDHIST TEMPLE IN downtown Salt Lake City was packed. It was a cold night in April 2023, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of Wakasa’s murder. More than 100 people, including dozens of Topaz descendants and other Japanese American community leaders, had traveled from across the country to be there, just two hours north of Delta, for the opening ceremony.
Almost two years had passed since the excavation. Things remained tense between the Museum and the Wakasa Committee. The board still refused to release the video, and the committee continued to sharply criticize museum officials. But the groups worked together to plan the event. Ukai was preparing to give a presentation on the stone, and other members of the Wakasa Committee were there, along with Beckwith, Merritt and Iwamoto. Farrell and Burton had decided not to attend; Farrell said they didn’t want to make things worse.
The crowd picked up their bento dinners and settled into the temple auditorium. Ukai’s voice echoed through the hall as she described her research and her connection to Wakasa. Merritt thanked everyone for being there. Iwamoto, who had just retired from the Legislature, described the ongoing conversations about the monument’s future.
“Everything that has led us to today, including this collaborative effort, has led to a greater understanding of the tragic murder of James Hatsuaki Wakasa,” the former senator said. “It is an honor to have this story shared so broadly, 80 years later — a story we must never forget.”
It was in the middle of audience questions that one Wakasa Committee member spoke up.
Masako Takahashi, the Topaz-born artist who had offered to fund an archaeological excavation, was sitting onstage. She turned toward the table where Beckwith was sitting and thanked the board for their work in stewarding the museum. Then she asked them to consider accepting outside help from experts at the National Park Service in deciding what to do with the monument.
“I think it was the unintended consequences of the destructive removal of the stone that we are here today, having to talk about a stone that we — some of us — honor and respect,” she said. “And now it’s cracked, broken and a kind of problem.”
Beckwith didn’t respond. But at the back of the audience, someone else stood up. It was Dianne Fukami, the journalist who had written in support of the museum. Fukami said she didn’t think it was the right time to focus on the conflict. But Takahashi cut her off. “Excuse me — this is the time,” Takahashi said. “Because we are here because of two years of work together, collaborating to be able to have a ceremony to work together towards healing.”
The room was silent for a moment. Merritt moved the program forward.
The next morning, everyone met in Delta. Buses carried the visitors out into the desert, where reverends from Utah and California held a solemn funeral service. They cleansed the land with water, fire, evergreen branches and salt. Beneath a cloud-spotted sky, over 100 mourners walked across the desert carrying paper flowers, the powdery soil sinking beneath their feet.
IT'S STLL NOT entirely clear why the Topaz Museum Board decided to unearth the monument the way they did.
Museum officials continue to argue that it needed to be protected and that they had warned the archaeologists not to publicly share its location. But Wakasa Committee members point out that the archaeologists gave Beckwith and Bassett time to review the articles beforehand. Beckwith requested other changes but left the monument’s location untouched. When asked about this last year, Bassett said he hadn’t noticed it then.
Emails between Beckwith and state officials show that Beckwith appeared to be on edge about something else. In the months leading up to the excavation, Beckwith wrote that Iwamoto and other Utah legislators had been discussing whether to take the Topaz site out of private management and bring it into the state park system, or hand it over to the National Park Service.
Beckwith wrote to Roper, the historic preservation officer, in early 2021. “It seems so wrong they don’t even have a tip of a conversation with us,” she said. Weeks before the excavation, she brought it up again. “We have so many things coming at us, it’s hard to believe,” Beckwith wrote. “The discussion about becoming part of the NPS or the State Parks doesn’t seem to be going away.”(In a statement, the Topaz Museum Board said they had since rejected the senator’s suggestions.)
Still, none of these pieces offer a clear explanation.
It is clear that there were few legal safeguards in place to stop the museum from removing the stone — even though the museum had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds over the years and was operating on land that the federal government has recognized as essential to understanding America’s past. That’s largely because the museum still owns that land, according to Lau-Ozawa. Unless there was state or federal funding involved, he said, the monument had few legal protections.
There is some evidence that federal funding may have indeed been involved. In a 2021 email made public by the Wakasa Committee, Beckwith said she had planned to use funding from a federal grant to lift the stone. Experts said that should have triggered a more comprehensive legal review, though even then, efforts to seek accountability after the fact can be complicated.
“It really is so case-specific,” Jaime Loichinger, who oversees this kind of legal review for the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, said.
The Topaz Museum Board denies that any federal funding was used during the excavation.
Farrell, the archaeologist, had her own theory about why the museum board had unearthed the stone. Like Lau-Ozawa’s, it also had something to do with Indiana Jones.
When I first began reporting this story in 2022, it was tempting to see it as an adventure movie. There was the hand-drawn map hidden away in the National Archives and the “buried treasure,” as Ukai described the monument. Early drafts of this story opened with a scene straight out of the Indiana Jones trilogy: A convoy of trucks hurtling into the desert carrying museum officials on the hunt for a long-lost treasure, clouds of dust billowing in their wake.
But when I mentioned this to Farrell back in 2023, she was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was thoughtful. Real-life archaeologists, she noted, lead lives that are far less dramatic. Still, she wondered whether that technicolor vision of archaeology and its plundering history had actually played a part in what happened to the monument.
“Maybe that explains what the Topaz Museum board did,” she said quietly. “It was a treasure and a map, and somebody was going to get it. And it was a race to see who can get it first.”
LAST SPRING, Ukai stood with a group of descendants and artists in a backyard in Berkeley, California. Between them stood a tall object made of thin wooden canes, woven together to make an oval frame. Together, they began layering thin strips of tissue and washi, traditional Japanese paper.
Slowly, the object took shape. It was a vast lantern, shaped like a tall stone.
“It was a very joyful experience,” Ukai told me recently. “This is a liberated monument made with our own hands.”
The idea of creating a sculpture, she said, came from a designer at the MASS Design Group, the architectural firm behind projects like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama and the Gun Violence Memorial Project in Illinois. When Ukai and the designer met in 2023 at a history conference about the Japanese American incarceration, the designer suggested that the community build a washi replica. Six months later, Ukai said, they did just that. She worked with a Japanese artist, Yoshinori Asai, to develop the design.
The project was also motivated by their drawn-out frustration with the Topaz Museum. Last year, the board backed out of the state-facilitated talks. Bassett told me they felt they had achieved the goal by deciding on short-term plans, such as adding an enclosure to protect the monument from the elements.
However, the long-term future of the monument remains uncertain. Topaz descendants have discussed a range of options, from donating it to the Smithsonian Institution to returning it to the Sevier Desert.In 2024, the Topaz Museum applied for more federal funding to begin a new outreach project asking for community feedback about the future of the stone. Their application was denied. Bassett said the board plans to continue with public outreach anyway.
The Topaz Museum has brought on six new Topaz descendants to guide the organization. Among them is Fukami, the Bay Area journalist who spoke up in support of the board during the memorial ceremony in Salt Lake City. Last year, the board held a public event at a conference in LA, seeking feedback about the stone. There, Fukami apologized in person on behalf of the museum board. Some descendants said they were deeply moved by her words.
Other museum officials, though, have only become more bitter about the criticism. In December, Bassett said the conversations about the monument had left him deeply hurt. “I personally feel that they would be very happy if we — all the white people in Delta — walked away,” he said. “We will never satisfy our enemy.”
In an email, Fukami and another Japanese American board member, Ann Tamaki Dion, echoed Bassett. They felt that members of the Wakasa Memorial Committee were villainizing Beckwith because she was white and not Japanese American.
Ukai was troubled by this. She worried that museum officials were losing sight of their original mission — protecting history.
“We’re going through the same history right now with demonizing immigrants and saying‚ ‘We’re going to round everybody up, put them in camps and deport them,’” she said in December. “This is bigger than them and us.”
But the lantern, Ukai said, has given her and other descendants a new way to focus on that mission. Last year, they took the lantern back to Topaz and let it shine across the desert. This year, they plan to bring it to Manzanar to remember two incarcerated people who were killed there, one year before Wakasa.
The true monument is once again shrouded in darkness. It still sits on a wooden pallet in the back corner of the courtyard behind the museum in Delta, sealed away inside a locked enclosure designed to protect it from any further damage.
Still, in some ways, Ukai feels that the monument is continuing to do what the Issei workers who built it a generation ago intended. Ever since it was unearthed, she feels, it has been carrying on its mission of standing in the way of those who want only to move forward — and instead forcing us to continue to confront the past.
This article appeared in the April 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The Topaz Affair.”
This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.