<Begin Segment 20>

MA: I wanted to talk with you about your involvement with the Topaz Museum and how that started, and your experiences with the museum.

TN: Right. I was a founding member of the museum with Jane Beckwith and several others. Actually, Leonard Arrington was on our board at the time, but Jane has devoted a great deal of her life to this project, and she lives in Delta, and usually can greet the internees who come back to Delta to visit, and she can take them out there and show them the site and show them the museum, there's a small museum in town.

MA: Who were the -- I'm sorry, how did, how did the idea originally come about?

TN: Well, I think it was mainly Jane's idea. She got, she came to me, oh, maybe twenty years ago and had this thought about establishing something for the museum, and she had been teaching it to her children -- I mean, her students all along. She is a high school teacher. And as time went on, and as I say, the internment sites became more up in the news, and she got together, oh, a half a dozen people to start the board, and it was called the Topaz Museum. And it has done some very marvelous things. The big thing is it has purchased most of the town site of Topaz... not all of it, but most of it, by and large. And we raised all the money to do that, it wasn't given to us by any means. And we published the Price of Prejudice book, and all those brochures I gave you, we did all that. And the move -- I'm not on the board right now -- but there's a movement to establish a downtown museum for the Topaz Museum, so they have a permanent site. And this museum would have artifacts and things that people can come in and look at.

MA: Would this be in Salt Lake City or Delta?

TN: No, it would be in Delta.

MA: So that's kind of the current project that the museum's working on.

TN: Uh-huh.

MA: And you, there's a monument in Topaz, is that correct?

TN: Oh, yes. In 1976 -- this was before the Topaz Museum -- but the local chapters of the JACL established a bicentennial project with the state, and part of that was to put a marker on the Topaz site as well as a marker in the city of Delta to tell people that there is a site out there that you can go and see, where the Japanese Americans were interned. And unfortunately, the marker that I designed was quite high, and it stood above the sagebrush in Delta, and it did not have an American flag. And so people just started using it as a target practice, because it was something that was tall and out there. I don't, I don't think people really understood what it was for or anything, except a few. There were a few vandals who actually went up there with a crowbar and took the plaques right off, and went up right to it, you know, twenty feet away and just shot bullets at it, and some of them actually just fell on the ground. But they were far and few between, I think most of them were just hunters that were a hundred feet away and just wanted something to shoot at. But at any rate, the marker was vandalized beyond repair, and so as a tri-chapter project, we decided to tear down the old monument and establish a new one, a low, low-lying monument that would not be used as target practice. And then we wanted to put a big American flag nearby so that people understand that we are part of America, we were not representing Japan. And I think that flag helped a lot, because in the five years or six years since we put that up, there has been no vandalism. And then in 2004, there was a lot of people concerned about the veterans, Japanese American veterans who are not honored at Topaz, and so we built a second marker, which is exactly the same size and shape, and put it about fifteen feet away from the other one. And on this marker we have about four hundred Japanese American veterans who at one time lived in Millard County, and most, of course, came from Topaz, listed on the marker, and tells about the history of the 442nd and the 100th battalion. And it's a perfect complement for the other marker.

MA: That's great.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.