Memory  /  Longread

The Recollector

How the Wakasa stone, a memorial to a Japanese man murdered in a Utah internment camp, became the flash point of a bitter modern dispute.

Topaz authorities ignored the monument at first, but in a letter dated June 8, 1943, John McCloy, assistant secretary of war and a fierce proponent of Japanese segregation, asked Dillon S. Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, to make sure the Wakasa memorial was removed: “I can see a real objection to any action which permits monuments of this character to be erected. Wakasa’s death arose as a result of justifiable military action and it seems most inappropriate that a monument be erected to him.”

Soon after the exchange, Topaz director Charles Ernst assured Myer that the memorial had been destroyed and forgotten and there would be no record of the stone: “[Everything is] torn down,” Ernst wrote, “and the rocks which were used in its construction… completely removed from sight.”

For many of the internees, that was the end of the Wakasa saga. The erasure would be repeated two years later with the razing of all ten internment camps. In a sense, Arlene Tatsuno told me, the physical leveling of Topaz was a clearing of the slate. Life had to go on.

But memories have a way of coming back. In July of 2021, the Wakasa memorial, supposedly torn down eighty years prior, awakened from its desert slumber. In a final act of defiance, instead of destroying the memorial, the Issei had buried it, leaving behind a simple diagram with its coordinates. The map, drawn by an internee named George Shimamoto, made its way to the National Archives in DC, where Nancy Ukai found it.

I tried to talk to Ukai about her discovery, but in April 2023, right after I saw her at the ceremony for the eightieth anniversary of Wakasa’s death, she stopped communicating with me. One thing, however, was clear the last time we spoke: coming across that map had made her tingle with excitement. She was grateful for the physical discovery of the memorial stone, for Burton and Farrell.

Little if anything could have prepared her for what came next: Beckwith, a white woman, getting there first, unburying the monument, and taking it to a museum. The Issei’s hands were the last to touch the Wakasa stone before it disappeared for almost a century. Beckwith’s hands were the first to touch it again, after all that time.

After a left turn on Route 6, the reality of Delta starts to sink in again: dry brush on both sides of the road; the town of Lynndyl, the hundred-­car freight trains; high-voltage towers lined up, each in a wide stance, gripping power cables that crackle for miles along the expanse of the Utah flats.