We bring you our final story of 2025.
Once upon a time there were four brothers in Salinas, CA. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, followed by a short stay in Walerga “Assembly Center,” the brothers were separated: two of them were sent to Topaz concentration camp in Utah. The second oldest repatriated to Japan via Tule Lake and Ft. Lincoln in Bismarck, North Dakota. And the youngest, Masaru Matsuura, embarked on a 4.5-year government-sponsored package tour of four WRA, DOJ, and INS detention camps.
As a child, Masaru’s daughter, Shoko, communicated with her stoic father through their mutual love of LEGO®. Decades later, Shoko, with help from her sister Yoko, tried to piece together the life of the quiet, hard-working man whose WWII defiance followed him for the rest of his life.
I remember Mr. Matsuura, although he was rarely home when I went over to play with Yoko at the Matsuura’s Richmond District home in San Francisco; he was always working. People often sneer at the Richmond District for being “colorless, bland, without character.” But those of us who grew up there understood that, to many of our parents’ generation, it was a refuge.
Read Shoko Matsuura Umekubo’s tribute to her father,” Town Hall,” on our Topaz Stories website.
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)
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)