In February, I happened to sit next to a Japanese woman at a Day of Remembrance program in San Francisco. She was Kyoko Nozaki, visiting from Japan. We began talking, and I discovered that she was Japanese American, and a camp survivor. In April, I traveled to Kyoto to hear her family’s story.
Born in Watsonville, CA in 1909, Tsutomu Tanigawa (“Storm” to his friends) did not consider himself very Japanese. He loved American movies, preferred meat and potatoes to Japanese food, and preferred a cool swim in the river to attending Japanese language school. That did not prevent the U.S. government from sending him to a DOJ detention center in Bismarck, ND because of his responses to the so-called “loyalty questionnaire.”
Kyoko, Tsutomu’s daughter, tells the story of how she did not see her father again until they reunited on the USS Gordon in December 1945, having opted to repatriate.
We are honored to share her story, “The Man Who Loved Marilyn Monroe and Baseball.”
The Topaz Stories Team
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Media Coverage:
Watch “Utah Historians Run Exhibit on Japanese American Internment,” abc4 News, 2/19/2025).
Read “Utah Once Said ‘Never Again’–Do We Mean It? Deseret News, (2/26/2025).
Read “Topaz Stories Exhibition: A Way to Remember the Past.” SUU News, 2/7/2025.
Read ‘Topaz Stories’ exhibit travels Utah showing human side of WWII internment (KSL.com, May 24, 2024)
Read ‘Topaz Stories’ mines the history of a Japanese American internment camp (ParkRecord, May 18, 2024)
Read Remembering Japanese American Internment–Day of Remembrance (Rosie the Riveter Trust blog, March 24, 2024)
Read Internee’s story told with ‘Topaz Collages’ (Wheel of Dharma, Vol. 5, Issue 3, March 2023).
Watch Topaz survivors tell their stories (abc4 News, 4/22/2022) (This video appears to have been taken down, and abc4 has not responded to inquiries as to why.)
Listen to the “In the Hive” podcast with interviews with Ann Dion, Jonathan Hirabayashi, and Topaz survivors Jeanie Kashima and Joseph Nishimura (KCPW, 4/28/2022)
Read How a Utah exhibit about Topaz Camp looks to find empathy in ‘an ugly stain on American history (ksl.com, 4/22/2022)
Read “Topaz Stories rise from the dust,” (Department of Culture & Community Engagement, 4/2022)
Listen to KQED Forum, Day of Remembrance interview with Ruth Sasaki, 2/15/2022
Listen to Max Chang and Ruth Sasaki interviewed (KRCL RadioActive, 2/9/2022
Read On Topaz Stories and ‘Authentic Voice’, the Discover Nikkei interview with Ruth Sasaki (10/14/2022)
Listen to Remembering the Japanese American Incarceration on Brad Westwood’s “Speak Your Piece” podcast featuring Ruth Sasaki and Jonathan Hirabayashi (6/2/2021)