Топаз тұтқындық лагері: Америкалық жапондықтардың тағдыры

The Topaz War Relocation Center, also known as the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz) and briefly as the Abraham Relocation Center, was an American concentration camp in which Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants who had come to the United States from Japan, called Nikkei were incarcerated. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, ordering people of Japanese ancestry to be incarcerated in what were euphemistically called "relocation centers" like Topaz during World War II. Most of the people incarcerated at Topaz came from the Tanforan Assembly Center and previously lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. The camp was opened in September 1942 and closed in October 1945. The camp, approximately 15 mile (24 km) west of Delta, Utah, consisted of , Topaz has been referred to as a "relocation camp", "relocation center", "internment camp", and "concentration camp", and the controversy over which term is the most appropriate continued throughout the late 1990s. In a preface to a 1997 book on Topaz written and published by the Topaz Museum, the Topaz Museum Board states that it is accurate to refer to the camps as a "detention camp" or "concentration camp" and its residents as "prisoners" or "internees". on the West Coast of the United States to leave their homes. About 5,000 left the off limits area during the "voluntary evacuation" period, and avoided internment. A smaller camp existed briefly a few miles north of Moab, which was used to isolate a few men considered to be troublemakers prior to their being sent to Leupp, Arizona. A site at Antelope Springs, in the mountains west of Topaz, was used as a recreation area by the residents and staff of Topaz.

Most internees came from the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a warm summer Mediterranean climate, with moist mild winters and dry summers. Topaz had an extreme climate, located at 4580 feet (1396 m) above sea level in the Sevier Desert. A "Midlatitude Desert" under the Köppen classification, temperatures could vary greatly throughout the day. The area experienced powerful winds and dust storms. One such storm caused structural damage to 75 buildings in 1944. Temperatures could reach below freezing from mid September until the end of May. The average temperature in January was Spring rains turned the clay soil to mud, which bred mosquitoes. Summers were hot, with occasional thunderstorms and temperatures that could exceed In 1942, the first snowfall occurred on October 13, before camp construction was fully complete.

Topaz contained a living complex known as the "city", about 1 square miles (3 km2), as well as extensive agricultural lands. Within the city, 42 blocks were for internees, 34 of which were residential. Each residential block housed 200–300 people, housed in barracks that held five people within a single room. Families were generally housed together, while single adults would be housed with four other unrelated individuals. Residential blocks also contained a recreation hall, a mess hall, an office for the block manager, and a combined laundry/toilet/bathing facility. Each block contained only four bathtubs for all the women and four showers for all the men living there. These packed conditions often resulted in little privacy for residents. Barracks were built out of wood frame covered in tarpaper, with wooden floors. Many internees moved into the barracks before they were completed, exposing them to harsh weather. Eventually, they were lined with sheetrock, and the floors filled with masonite. While the construction began in July 1942, Rooms were heated by pot bellied stoves. There was no furniture provided. Inmates used communal leftover scrap wood from construction to build beds, tables, and cabinets. Some families also modified their living quarters with fabric partitions. Topaz contained two elementary schools: Desert View Elementary and Mountain View Elementary. Topaz High School educated students grades 7–12, and there was also an adult education program. The schools were taught by a combination of local teachers and internees. Topaz High School developed a devoted community, with frequent reunions after internment ended, and a final reunion in 2012. Sports were popular within the schools as well as within the adult population, with sports including baseball, basketball, and sumo wrestling. Cultural associations sprung up throughout the camp. Topaz had a newspaper called the Topaz Times, a literary publication called Trek, and two libraries which eventually contained almost 7,000 items in both English and Japanese. One teacher at the camp art school, Chiura Obata, was allowed to leave Topaz to run classes at nearby universities and churches. Internees were also sometimes permitted to leave the camp for recreation. A former Civilian Conservation Corps camp at Antelope Springs, in mountains 90 mile (145 km) to the west, was taken over as a recreation area for internees and camp staff, and two buildings from Antelope Springs were brought to the central area to be used as Buddhist and Christian churches.

In 1943, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) issued all adult internees a questionnaire assessing their level of Americanization. It was entitled "Application for Leave Clearance". Questions asked about what language they spoke most frequently, their religion, and recreational activities. Participating in judo and kendo were "Japanese" activities, while playing baseball or being Christian were considered "American". Two questions asked prisoners if they were willing to fight in the US Armed Forces and if they would swear allegiance to the United States and renounce loyalty to the Emperor of Japan. Many Japanese born Issei, who were barred from attaining American citizenship, resented the second question, feeling that an affirmative answer would leave them effectively stateless. Some Issei volunteered to join the army, even though there was no enlistment procedure for non citizens. Others objected on other political grounds. In Topaz, nearly a fifth of male residents answered "no" to the question about allegiance. Inmates expressed their anger through a few scattered assaults against other inmates who they perceived as too close to the administration. In response to the questionnaires, some Nisei formed the Resident Council for Japanese American Civil Rights, which encouraged other prisoners to register for the draft if their civil rights were restored. Internees went on strike protesting the death and surrounding secrecy. They held a large funeral for Wakasa as a way to express their outrage. In response, the administration determined that fears of subversive activity at the camp were largely without basis, and significantly relaxed security. The military decided that officers who had been at war in the Pacific would not be assigned to guard duty at Topaz.

After Topaz was closed, the land was sold and most of the buildings were auctioned off, disassembled, and removed from the site. Even the water pipes and utility poles were sold. In 1976, the Japanese American Citizens League placed a monument on the northwestern corner of the central area. In 1982, Delta High School teacher Jane Beckwith and her journalism students began to study Topaz. She spearheaded the creation of the Topaz Museum Board in 1983, which oversaw the Topaz Museum, which initially shared space with the Great Basin Museum. Funding from the Japanese American Confinement Sites organization enabled the Topaz Board to construct its own museum building in 2013.

Using a smuggled camera, Dave Tatsuno shot film of Topaz. The documentary Topaz uses film he shot from 1943 to 1945. This film was an inductee of the 1997 National Film Registry list, with the added distinction of being the second "home movie" to be included on the Registry and the only color footage of camp life. Topaz War Relocation Center is the setting for the 2007 film American Pastime, a dramatization based on actual events, which tells the story of Nikkei baseball in the camps. A portion of the camp was duplicated for location shooting in Utah's Skull Valley, approximately 40 mile (64 km) west of Salt Lake City and 75 mile (121 km) north of the actual Topaz site. The film used some of Tatsuno's historical footage. In addition to Tatsuno's Topaz, Ken Verdoia made a 1987 documentary, also entitled Topaz.

Yoshiko Uchida's young adult novel Journey to Topaz (published in 1971) recounts the story of Yuki, a young Japanese American girl, whose world is disrupted when, shortly after Pearl Harbor, she and her family must leave their comfortable home in the Berkeley, California suburbs for the dusty barracks of Topaz. The book is largely based on Uchida's personal experiences: she and her family were interned at Topaz for three years. Julie Otsuka's novel When the Emperor was Divine (published in 2002) tells the story of a family forced to relocate from Berkeley to Topaz in September 1942. Each of the novel's five chapters is told from the point of view of a different character. Critics praised the book's "precise but poetic evocation of the ordinary" and "ability to empathize". In his poetry collection Topaz (published in 2013), Brian Komei Dempster examines the experience of his mother and her family, tying the history of persecution and internment to subsequent generations’ search for a 21st century identity.

Much of the art made by detainees at the camp depicted life there, and survives. Drawings and woodcuts by Chiura Obata and Matsusaburō (George) Hibi are among the most prominent. Some of it is collected in The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942–1946 by Delphine Hirasuna, and has been exhibited in Topaz and at the Wight Art Gallery.