Topaz Japanese American Internment Camp Museum

08/23/2026

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08/22/2026

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08/19/2026

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Filming his own life was illegal.

Aug. 18, 1913: Dave Tatsuno was born in San Francisco. By the time World War II reached him, he was running his father’s department store, Nichi Bei Bussan, and serving as president of the San Francisco chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. He was, by every measure, a respected businessman and community leader.

Then came forced removal. Cameras were classified as contraband for Japanese Americans, one more thing to be surrendered along with radios and fi****ms. Tatsuno wasn’t willing to give his up. He handed his movie camera to a friend outside camp instead, reasoning that you can’t turn in something you don’t have.

At Topaz, his supervisor at the camp’s co-op store turned out to be a fellow home movie enthusiast, a man named Walter Honderich. Honderich didn’t just look the other way. He personally arranged to have the camera shipped to himself instead of directly to Tatsuno, so that camp officials would have no reason to intercept it. When it arrived, he handed it over with one condition: never film the barbed wire, and never film the guard towers. It was a real risk for a staff member to take, on behalf of someone the government had officially designated a threat.

Tatsuno kept to that line, and used what remained to him. Between 1943 and 1945, he documented what he could, community life, daily routines, the ordinary rhythms of thousands of people trying to live inside a place built to strip them of exactly that. He later admitted his subjects were often “hamming it up” for the camera, smiling through what the footage doesn’t show.

In 1996, the resulting film, Topaz, was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. It remains only the second amateur film ever selected, after the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination.

A man who wasn’t allowed a camera, and a staff member willing to bend the rules to help him keep it, left behind one of the only moving images that exist of what incarceration actually looked like, day to day, from the inside.

08/04/2026

Hi J-Sei friends and family. J-Sei’s event “Honor Bound Revisited: Retracing My Father’s Path with the 442nd” is just 4 days away! To get everyone excited for this special event, we are shining a spotlight on television journalist Wendy Hanamura (whose father is the main focus of the documentary) and multimedia producer, photographer & archivist Brad Shirakawa who will be sharing his research and photos with us at the event in person. Read more about them in the images attached.

The event will take place from 1:00pm-3:00pm at J-Sei, both in-person and over Zoom. Sign up *today* to register if you haven’t done so already:
https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/honor-bound-revisited-retracing-my-fathers-path-with-the-442nd and please spread the word.

This event is presented by Friends of Topaz, Topaz Museum, and J-Sei.

08/04/2026

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Not one of the senators behind Japanese American reparations spent a single day in a camp.

On August 2, 1979, Senator Daniel Inouye introduced Senate Bill 1647, calling for a commission to investigate the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. He wasn’t incarcerated. He was in Hawaii, where over 150,000 Japanese Americans lived. Fewer than 2,000 of them were ever detained.

Two of the bill’s earliest and most prominent cosponsors weren’t incarcerated either. Senator Spark Matsunaga, also from Hawaii, never spent a day in a camp. Senator S.I. Hayakawa was living in Chicago in 1942, outside the exclusion zone that defined who got imprisoned and who didn’t.

But Inouye and Matsunaga weren’t strangers to what incarceration cost. Both fought in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size. Roughly a third of their fellow soldiers came from the mainland, many volunteering straight out of the camps their own families were locked inside. Inouye lost his right arm leading a platoon in Italy. Matsunaga was wounded twice. They didn’t live behind barbed wire. They fought beside the men whose families did.

Twenty one senators cosponsored the bill in total. Conservatives and liberals. Barry Goldwater and Alan Cranston, on the same bill. Ted Stevens of Alaska signed on too, and made sure the commission would also investigate the forced removal of Aleut civilians during the war, a story most people have never heard.

One year later, the bill became law. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians spent the next two years gathering testimony from over 750 people. Its final report gave the government’s own justification for incarceration a name: race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.

That report became the foundation for the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and the reparations that followed.

They didn’t have to go behind the barbed wire to know it was wrong.

07/24/2026

https://history.utah.gov/peoples-of-utah-revisited/

ON THISPAGEBonneville Speedway (1954) NATIONAL HISTORY DAY PEOPLES OF UTAH REVISITED PEOPLES OF UTAH REVISITED DIRECTORY:Peoples OnlineResearch OpportunitiesOur HistoryContact UsBecome A PartnerOral History ProgramPEOPLES OF UTAH, REVISITED YOUR STORY MATTERS Utah is home to countless communities wi...

07/20/2026

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Inside an incarceration camp, a Sears catalog became his sketchbook.

July 17, 1934: Japanese American animator Willie Ito was born in San Francisco.

Sears catalogs were free. Sketchbooks weren’t.

When Willie Ito was incarcerated with his family at Topaz during World War II, he drew wherever he could. Old Sears catalogs became his sketchbooks, their pages filled with doodles, cartoons, and imagined worlds that helped him escape the reality around him.

After the war, Ito’s talent continued to grow. One of his biggest influences was fellow Japanese American animator Iwao Takamoto, who had also been incarcerated during the war at Manzanar. Takamoto took Ito under his wing, critiquing his artwork and encouraging him as he pursued animation professionally.

Ito eventually joined Walt Disney Studios before going on to Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera. During a career spanning more than four decades, he worked on beloved productions including Lady and the Tramp, The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Smurfs, and many others that shaped generations of childhood memories.

Few viewers knew that one of the artists behind those characters had once been a child drawing in discarded Sears catalogs behind barbed wire.

Decades later, Willie returned to the story that shaped his childhood.

Working with author Shig Yabu, he illustrated Hello, Maggie!, a children's book inspired by life inside the Topaz incarceration camp. More recently, the story was adapted into a short animated film, allowing Willie to tell a new generation about the experience that first inspired him to draw.

Read more:
quietamericans.com/willie-ito

07/11/2026

The Topaz Toddlers Art Project exhibition is now open at the Berkeley Central Library in Berkeley, California!

Join us for an upcoming public program on **Saturday, July 25 from 11 am to 1 pm, ** The Topaz Toddlers Art Project presentation will featured project director Dana Ogo Shew, with Ruth Sasaki, Dr. Ayumi Nagase, and former toddlers. There will also be a screening of a brand-new short documentary by Berkeley City College Students.

https://berkeleypubliclibrary.libnet.info/event/16734680
Berkeley Central Library, 2090 Kittredge St, Berkeley.

Hope to see you there!

Learn more about the Topaz Toddlers Art Project, on display at Central Library from July 1-31.. Event starts at July 25, 2026 11:00 AM PDT

07/02/2026

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Looped wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa (1951).

06/24/2026

Two sketchbooks and two paintings by Japanese American artist Chiura Obata have joined our collection as gifts from the artist’s family.

Check out these works on our blog and read about Obata's shared artistic legacy between his home country of Japan and his adopted home in the United States: https://s.si.edu/3ROkHm5