I was seven years old when my family was removed to Tanforan and put into a horse stall.
Before the War we had lived on Laguna between Sutter and Bush in San Francisco’s Japantown. I had two sisters who were much older than I was: Maggie, who was a junior at the University of California, Berkeley; and Rey, who was a junior in high school. I was only in the second grade at Raphael Weill. My dad, Hatsuki Nakahara, worked as a sales rep for a Japanese import/export company. My mom, Kita, worked as a domestic. We’d had a pretty comfortable life.
In Topaz, where we were transferred in the fall, my dad worked as a supervisor of a farm crew made up of other Topaz residents, who helped local farmers outside of the camp. My mom was a cook in the kitchen that was set up so the workers could eat lunch without having to return to camp to eat. My mom thought it would be nice for the workers to have some entertainment while they ate, so one time I remember going out to the farm to dance with some other girls who took odori lessons from Tachibana sensei in Topaz.
My dad’s work involved irrigation canals, and he began noticing the catfish that were thriving in these canals. That was where he got the idea for the fish pond.
He asked the residents of Block 20, where we lived, if they wanted a pond. They must have said “Yes” because the next thing we knew, the pond was under construction. My dad got a few other guys to help. I have no idea where they got the concrete and other materials to build it. It was right outside the Block 20 mess hall. Water undoubtedly had to be carried in buckets to fill it. Then my dad caught some catfish from the irrigation canals and relocated them (just as we had been “relocated”) to Topaz. There was even a spindly tree–a rare sight in Topaz. And so my father created a little oasis in the middle of the Utah desert.
We didn’t fish in the pond, or eat the fish. The pond was just something for us to enjoy, to give us some relief from the unrelenting desert.
My sister Maggie was in Topaz for less than a month. Shortly after we arrived, she started looking for a job, and when asked, “What do you want to do?” she replied, “I want to get outta here!” She became a live-in nanny in Millard County to a family with two children. She then attended Brigham Young University; but heard from a friend who had resettled in Chicago that there were jobs out there, so she moved to Chicago. Sister Rey soon followed.
When Topaz closed in 1945, my parents, dog Fudge (acquired in camp) and I ended up in Weiser, Idaho, on the Oregon border. This was after a brief stint in Mesa, where my parents worked in an apple shed. There was no reason to return to California–there was nothing left for us there. I went to school in Weiser and graduated from high school in 1952–at which point I joined my sisters in Chicago.
In Chicago I attended secretarial school and worked for a big insurance company. But I was eager to travel and requested a posting in Europe with the US Civil Service–but I was sent to Japan for two years. While I was working in Japan, my sister Rey decided to move to San Francisco. When I came back to the US in 1958, I decided to live in San Francisco, and that’s where I met my husband, Jack Dairiki, in 1963.
In 1971 my dad became ill and was not expected to live much longer. At that point, my mother decided that they would return to the San Francisco Bay Area so they could be buried in the Japanese cemetery in Colma. “If we’re buried in Idaho,” she said, “who’s gonna visit our grave?” I didn’t even know about the custom of ohakamairi (visiting ancestors’ graves), but I realized how important it was for my mother.
I don’t think the camp experience had any impact on my subsequent personal life. In my earlier years I never thought about it. My parents never talked about it, and I didn’t even think to ask. Much later, maybe in my late 40s, I did talk about it with other “campers.” I don’t remember what year it was, but I went to a school reunion in Weiser, Idaho. On the return home, I stopped in Utah to finally visit Topaz. I wanted to put closure to that chapter in my life.
Jack and I went to Delta, and Jane Beckwith took us out to the location of Block 20 at the Topaz site, where my family had lived.
There we found the remnants of the concrete shell of the fish pond my father had built. I stood in the middle of the impression, which was about three feet deep. My father had stood here once. His hands had shaped the edges of the pond.
I remembered a patch of sunflowers that someone planted next to the pond. We kids used to pick out the seeds and eat them.
I don’t know what happened to the fish, captive in their desert pond. The pond probably dried out and the fish died when we all left camp. No one left to feed them.
I don’t think I got closure on that visit. I went to Topaz again in 2017–but again, that visit did not really give me the closure I was looking for–and I’m not sure what will.
About the contributor: Jun Nakahara Dairiki was born in San Francisco in 1934. She was seven years old when the Nakahara family was incarcerated in Tanforan. While her two elder sisters resettled in Chicago, Jun and her parents were in Topaz for the duration of the War and farmed in Idaho when the camp closed. After graduating from high school, Jun worked in Chicago, then spent two years in Japan with the civil service. She met her husband Jack after returning from Japan and settling in San Francisco.
Copyright Jun Nakahara Dairiki, 2022. All rights reserved.
Tears well up as I read your story, Jun-san. I’ve just returned from Topaz, where I went with the Wakasa Memorial Committee to mark the one year since the local museum board dug up and dragged away the Memorial Stone our Issei ancestors had to hide. I, too, seek closure. I think our history being treated with dignity will help.
Thank you, Masako, for your kind words. I did not know there was a Topaz Stories group, but Yae Yedlosky and her family, the Kami’s and we were neighbors in Topaz; Yae told Ann Dion/Ruth Sasaki about my dad’s fish pond. And that’s this story got told.
I really would like to visit Salt Lake and the Topaz exhibit being shown in their State Capitol — but with Covid…….