by Ruth Sasaki and Lisa Nishimoto Kunze
On September 24, 1944, two middle-aged Asian men were wandering in the vicinity of the Little Drum Mountains in Utah when they made an unusual discovery.
That they were even there to begin with was an unusual circumstance.
A year and a half earlier, Akio Ujihara, a graduate of Polytechnic Engineering College in Oakland, had been living in Los Angeles. After Executive Order 9066, Ujihara was detained in Manzanar, a War Relocation Authority (WRA) detention camp in Southern California, before being transferred to Topaz in January 1944.
Yoshio Nishimoto had been operating a boarding house in Stockton, California before the forced removal. From the Stockton Assembly Center, Nishimoto’s family initially moved to Shelley, Idaho, where he worked as a foreman of a work crew on a dry farm while his wife, Yae, cooked for the workers. But it was seasonal work, and when the work dried up, Yae and the children entered Topaz in March 1943, with Yoshio following in July.
With no previous training, both men had joined the Topaz Lapidary School, one of the many activities organized to help prisoners endure the long hours/months/years of their confinement. And so they met, and were wandering about the Little Drum Mountains that day, about 16 miles west/northwest of the detention camp, in search of stones used to make jewelry.