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• 1 media/Masomi Yano - Transcriber Editor.jpg 2020-04-17T17:02:55-07:00 Introduction 21 The Topaz Times & Incarcerated Journalism image_header 2021-01-24T13:30:15-08:00

  “WELCOME TO TOPAZ”, blared the headline of the lead story in the inaugural issue of the Topaz Times. Set against the backdrop of the illustrated valley landscape atop the front page, the newspaper’s name floated above the ground together with a gemstone labeled “Jewel of the Desert” [See Figure 1]. A cover story penned by Project Director Charles F. Ernst urged those reading to brace for difficult challenges ahead, and to seek encouragement in the historical triumphs of American frontiersmen in the readership’s new home state of Utah. The U.S. government was mindful of the community’s needs, assured Ernst; in preparing for their arrival, officials had taken stock of all “those opportunities you [residents] desire in the fields of religion, employment, education, health and recreation.” A neighboring piece on the front page recorded a stirring message from one of the community’s most prominent spiritual leaders: Reverend Taro Goto. In his statement, Reverend Goto boldly proclaimed the miraculous birth of “the City.” Topaz, wrote Goto, was “the sum total of dreams, deep thinking, courage and faith … a living personality …  born of the great Mother America,” while residents of “the City’ were no less than “pioneers” in the great American tradition, “blazing the road into the wilderness of our social frontiers.” As they shuffled off the heavily guarded blackout trains, out onto the platform at Delta Station in Utah, many disoriented and disheartened Japanese Americans read these words. The earliest arrivals to Topaz in September, 1942 were met with a lack of basic infrastructure, an overwhelmed administrative apparatus, and incomplete living quarters with paper thin walls that did nothing to shield them from the harsh stings of dust, wind, and cold; their community newspaper, however, had been months in the making. 
  
  
  
  
  The Topaz Times was a camp newspaper published from September 17, 1942 to March 30, 1945 at the Central Utah Relocation Center, a World War Two Japanese American incarceration camp. The incarceration camp was named “Topaz” after nearby Mt. Topaz by War Relocation Authority (WRA) administrators in an effort to embellish the drab desert landscape on which it stood, and served as a prison for more than 11,000  Japanese immigrants and their descendents from September, 1942 to October, 1945.  In addition to the messianic pronouncements penned by Reverend Taro Goto in his cover piece, the first issue of the Topaz Times also provided incarcerees with a list of administrative staff, details regarding the development of the camp school system, and a rather uninspiring map of the labyrinthine camp.  
  
  From the beginning, the Topaz Times - like its counterparts in Wyoming (Heart Mountain Sentinel), Idaho (Minidoka Irrigator), and the other camps - was designed to function as what Takeya Mizuno calls an “information channel” between camp administrators and incarcerated Japanese Americans. The WRA’s “Administrative Instruction No. 8,” adopted after months of deliberation in October, 1942, spelled out the agency’s desire for camp newspapers to “serve a valuable purpose in communicating official information to the evacuees and in maintaining morale in the relocation center.” Mizuno details five core regulations housed in the official policy document, which details that: 1) newspaper staff would be recruited from the incarcerated population and paid by the WRA; 2) papers would remain subject to “supervision” of the Project Reports Officer and Project Director at each camp; 3) journalists would enjoy “the maximum freedom of expression short of libel, personal attack, and other utterances contrary to the general welfare”; 4) issues would be produced by the cheapest process available (generally mimeograph); and 5) no advertising would be allowed. First and foremost, the staff of the Topaz Times were pressed by the administration to print information and directives which Project Director Charles F. Ernst and his administration wished to disseminate to the incarcerated population. Topaz administrators’ anxieties regarding the camp’s public image - along with their Orwellian vocabulary - were on full display in “Words,” a blurb printed in the first issue of the Times: “Here, we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal Police; Residents, not Evacuees; and last but not least, Mental Climate, not Morale.”But the newspaper was not just a repository for policy memos authored by the WRA. 
  
  
  
  As E. J. Friedlander has aptly demonstrated, Paulo Yokota, the editor of Jerome’s Denson Tribune exercised a quite remarkable degree of editorial license and press freedom during his long reign at the helm of the paper. From his position, he was able to launch polemics against the “moral and intellectual decay” afflicted on Japanese Americans by the camp system, Lieutenant General - and major proponent of incarceration - John L. DeWitt’s opposition to the resettlement of Japanese Americans on the West Coast after the war, and a Tennessee senator’s call to strip citizenship from Japanese Americans. These acts revealed that the enforcement of protocols and application of WRA  “supervision” to the camp newspapers was uneven, and that newspaper staff at certain camps were able to carve out room for their own voices in the folds of publications like the Topaz Times. Although John D. Stevens once described the Topaz Times as a “pro-administrative” rag and “not a very interesting publication, with few editorials …”, such generalizations underserve what is a rich and expansive archive of Japanese American life in American concentration camps. Incarcerated Quotidian is an attempt to prove this assertion wrong and showcase the Times as an extremely valuable newspaper in which incarcerees recorded their experiences, bore witness to their struggles and chronicled the history of the camp as a lived space. The anonymous "Tami's" diary entry from the January 16, 1943 issue of the Times illustrated how some incarcerees viewed the newspaper as a platform for recording their experiences of Topaz; of leaving behind traces of their lives for future generations to piece back together. 
  
  
  Such an important source of insight into the day-to-day rhythms of incarceree life should not be shrugged off so easily. Pro-administration pieces and policy statements do make up a significant portion of many issues of the Topaz Times. But sitting buried in the folds of these papers, nestled between the bland WRA bulletins and rose-tinted portraits of life in “the City,” are surprisingly candid evaluations of the incarceration program’s deleterious effects on incarcerees and elusive traces of a long-lost prison camp culture. While the countless descriptive reports printed in the Times can add layers of detail to our general picture of life at the camp, the most striking pieces in the Times were those which reached beyond mere description and represented acts of witnessing on the part of victims. In scattered, yet identifiable fragments of the camp’s official record, incarcerees found their voices, shared coping strategies, bore witness to the turmoil, anguish and absurdity that permeated daily life, criticized camp conditions, and mused about the uncertain future to a sympathetic audience. Ignoring these fragments not only impoverishes our understanding of how incarceration at Topaz was experienced, but silences the voices of the incarcerated themselves.
  
  By October, 1942, for example, the Times openly printed articles about a pair of boy “entrepreneurs” who swindled new arrivals out of their pocket change by acting as guides, the successful return of the first “living item” - another boy - to his parents through the Lost and Found Department, and the following confession from new arrival Hiroshi Onishi: “I’m still confused. This place is a letdown but I think and hope it’s due to the newness and unfamiliarity of the surroundings.” The camp reflected in the Times is far from a smooth-running, centrally planned frontier community; it is a chaotic space suffused with crisis, rumors and color. Though many articles in the paper have a tendency to end on an optimistic note, less than thinly veiled criticisms are also represented - more than once in the form of cartoons illustrated by Bennie Nobori. Although the articles which appear on this site may at times include pieces with an administrative focus, its priority will be to highlight pieces which demonstrate the indeterminacy of WRA policy and the authorial voice of Japanese Americans.  
  
  
  
  The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is often told through a chronological narrative that begins with the rounding up and dispossession of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States, continues with an examination of the key events which unfolded in the camps, and ends with release and resettlement after the war. Narratives of life within the camps are often tied to seminal events, moments of conflict between administrators and incarcerees, and acts of resistance or resilience in the face of unjust imprisonment; and for good reason. These details of the history of Japanese American incarceration speak most directly to our notions of justice, equality and democracy, all of which were forsaken in the decision to imprison more than 120,000 people - two-thirds of whom were American citizens - due to their Japanese heritage.
  
  At a time when the detention camp continues to operate as a technology of state control in America and abroad,  it is crucial that not just scholars of internment, but all Americans understand the mechanics of Japanese American expropriation, the unethical policies of the War Relocation Authority, and the strategies employed by Japanese Americans to maintain their dignity, protest the deplorable conditions of their imprisonment, and survive life in the camps. I contend that we can find manifestations of all three of these strategies and more within the pages of the Topaz Times, and that both historians and also the public at large can benefit from an extensive study of the newspaper that kept the pulse of this carceral city. 
  
  This project is heavily influenced by Black Quotidian, a digital humanities project developed by Dr. Matthew F. Delmont. In the project’s introduction, Delmont writes thoughtfully about what changes in research practices in the age of the internet, large online databases, and keyword searching has done to the process of historical research. He observes, correctly, that keyword searches through vast archives can enable us to pinpoint exact information within a huge collection of digital pages, this method of research sometimes can lead us to miss the forest for the trees. Over the course of an entire year, from January 2016 to January 2017, the historian posted an article from a black-owned newspaper printed on the corresponding date in the past, along with a short commentary providing relevant historical context. After the year was finished, posts were gathered in an online, multi-media archive open to the public and supplemented with blog-style essays and multimedia collages. Delmont describes the project as an effort to “structure digital interaction as an act of joy,” and “reintroduce the elements of exploration, randomness, and surprise” into the process of historical research using digitized materials.
  
  Incarcerated Quotidian attempts to replicate this structured interaction between users and the digitized versions of the Topaz Times. For Delmont, Black Quotidian was an attempt to illuminate aspects of African American history which fall outside of the “triumphant or tragic” binary that dominates much of our historical knowledge of the subject and to capture the “everyday pleasures and sorrows of black lives.” Incarcerated Quotidian seeks to do the same for Japanese Americans incarcerated at Topaz, adding more texture to our collective memory of this period, place and people. Incarcerated Quotidian is currently posting daily, and you can follow the project on these social media pages: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram. 
  
  Sources

  • Takeya Mizuno, "The Creation of the 'Free' Press in Japanese-American Camps: The War Relocation Authority's Planning and Making of the Camp Newspaper Policy," Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Volume 78, Number 3 (2001): 503-518.
  • E.J. Friedlander, “Freedom of Press Behind Barbed Wire: Paul Yokota and the Jerome Relocation Center Newspaper,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 4 (1985): 310 
  • John D. Stevens, “From Behind Barbed Wire: Freedom of the Press in World War II Japanese Centers” Journalism Quarterly, XLVIII (1971): 279-287. 
  • Patricia Wakida, "Topaz Times (newspaper)," Densho Encyclopedia.