Nancy Ukai | Interview 3 | April 04, 2022

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Today is Monday, April 4, 2022. My name is Roger Eardley-Pryor, from the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley. This is interview session number three with Nancy Ukai, as a part of the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project. Nancy, always wonderful to see you. How are you today? UKAI: Thank you, Roger. I'm fine. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Good. Can you remind me where you are located today? UKAI: I'm in Berkeley, California, in my home. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. I'm in my home in Santa Rosa, California. We are recording over Zoom. Today, for this third interview session, I wanted to pick up something that you've hinted at in previous conversations, and that's the role that pilgrimage has played, and particularly the pilgrimages that you have gone on to revisit some of these sites of incarceration. Just generally, what has your experience been with pilgrimages? What role do you think that they serve? UKAI: Pilgrimages have been a touchstone and a real way to 00:01:00reflect not only on my family's history, my parents, my grandparents, and all of their friends and community members. But also to learn about what other families experienced, because it's something, number one, we didn't really learn about in school. Number two, families didn't talk about it very much -- although I remember my parents being at a party or a gathering and the first words exchanged among strangers would be, "What camp were you in?" That was just a greeting. But what I learned through pilgrimages is that so many families have different, very complicated stories of the Issei immigrant people, leaders of community being arrested on Pearl Harbor Day, or soon after, and being taken to Department of Justice camps, and then they're in a chain of camps. One of my friends calls it a gulag. And that wasn't my family's experience. So it's been a real way to, at a personal level, learn about other people's 00:02:00histories. And then, of course, there are these pilgrimages, depending on how they're run, but some of them are two or three days. And so the Tule Lake pilgrimage is really the most powerful one, where it starts with getting on the bus with people from your area, and you take this several-hour ride together. You get to know each other. The mic is passed around. And then when you finally get to the camp that evening, they have a welcoming session, followed by several days of workshops, groups, educational sessions. And then because you're living on the campus of the Oregon Institute of Technology, you're sleeping in the dorms, you're eating together in the cafeteria, and you sit down at a meal and you immediately say, "What camp -- ?" [laughs] No, because not just Tule Lake descendants and survivors go there, but you end up just talking to people, meeting them, and there's this very unparalleled experience of being in a sympathetic 00:03:00group, and learning and touching base with people who, in normal life, you wouldn't talk about it, you wouldn't bring it up. And, interestingly, my husband and I went to one Tule Lake pilgrimage, where we took our daughter, who, I guess, must have been thirty, and she said, "Thank you for inviting me. That was life-changing." And I was quite surprised. She's biracial. She's aware of this history. She's written a little bit about it in high school. But, I said, "Why?" And she said, "Because everyone was so nice." And I think it was the feeling of being in a community where all the faces are Japanese American, and people were genuinely interested in you, and interested in you as a Yonsei, as going to be the person to pass on the future stories, and there's just this kind of warmth and safeness to pilgrimages. Some are just one day. Some are several days. But I came back to Berkeley in 2008. I got involved with the Topaz Museum and Friends of Topaz for the fundraiser 00:04:00in 2013, so I must have gone on my first pilgrimage after that. And it's opened doors and been a really wonderful thing in my life. And now, because I've been doing research on artifacts, I'm invited to speak about artifacts from that camp, and the stories in those. And so that's been great for me to be able to share, and also to do research on different artifacts from different camps. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That sounds like a really powerful, beautiful role that pilgrimages play. Do you have a sense of how different pilgrimages differ from each other? Pilgrimages at different camp sites, how are they different from one another, in your experience, having gone to multiple? UKAI: Yes, that's a great question, because, for example, the pilgrimage at Manzanar, which I think started, the first one, in 1969, and Tule Lake at the same time. 00:05:00The Manzanar pilgrimage is annual, and it's one day, and it's about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Los Angeles, so people drive up from there. But it culminates in a procession at the sacred monument, the I Rei Tō ["Soul Consoling Tower" or "Memorial to the Dead"], which was built in the camp cemetery. And camp descendants and survivors carry these beautiful tall banners with the names of different camps. And the backdrop of Mount Williamson, it's just a spectacular setting. Then there's others. I mentioned the Tule Lake pilgrimage, or the Heart Mountain, Amache pilgrimages, Minidoka, where they're several days. The Minidoka one, to me, is really interesting because they have a very young group of people who organize it. Some pilgrimages are organized by the elders. So there's just different kinds of energy, and they're fun to go to, you meet people. And there are some people who want to go to all of the camps. Not 00:06:00all of the camps have pilgrimages. For example, two, which are on tribal lands, you're not allowed to go there unless you have permission, and generally you need a blood connection. But at any rate, you meet people who want to go to all of them, and exchange stories, and so it's become a way to have an infrastructure of having a pilgrimage trail, and going along that trail. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I have a note that in April of 2017 you attended a pilgrimage to Topaz, to the Topaz campsite, and to -- at the time, I think, the museum was going under its reconstruction to open, its grand opening, with the new exhibit language, the new script language. So I wondered if you could talk about that specific pilgrimage experience to Topaz, where your parents were incarcerated, 00:07:00and what was meaningful about that 2017 experience. UKAI: I just joined that kind of at the last minute. It was run by a survivor of Topaz named Toru Saito. Now, he had run many pilgrimages which were something he created, meaning that he chartered the bus; he made sure that his friend who was a doctor was on the bus; he planned all of the logistics. He's very driven to do that. And so I was really honored, happy to be able to join that, because it turns out that was his last pilgrimage. He must be in his late seventies now. But his goal on this particular pilgrimage, I think it was probably thirty or forty people who took this bus that he chartered from Berkeley to Utah, eight hundred miles, with a stop. Let's see, we stopped one night in Ely, in Nevada. Anyway, his goal 00:08:00was to have a banquet of Japanese food that our ancestors never had. So they had this mess hall food with rice with butter on it, and no fish [during incarceration in camp]. So anyway, it was really fun, because everybody brought coolers with food that was ready to make. And then we were at this motel, and people had hot plates and electric frying pans, and we made all of this incredible food. And then we went to the barrack foundations, where his family was confined, and we laid out this amazing spread. So to be able to not just eat a sandwich, but to sit on that land and eat these foods, and drink sake. And then, after we ate the food -- and there are some really wonderful photographs of that -- people brought their taiko drums. And so they played the taiko -- and these are people in their late seventies who were maybe ten at the time they were in the camps -- and did some traditional summer dancing, Obon dancing. So that was 00:09:00really special. And then the [Topaz] museum hadn't opened yet, but Toru got permission from Scott Bassett, who is a [Topaz Museum] Board member, to go into the museum and visit it. So we were able to see the exhibits for the first time. And it was a little fraught because Toru was not in communication with Jane Beckwith, the Board President, but she was there to greet us. But just various things occurred which were to echo on in later years. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Like what? What's coming to mind? UKAI: I'm just remembering now that Claudia Katayanagi, who lives in the Bay Area and whose family was all incarcerated at Topaz, is a filmmaker, and she was going to make a documentary -- I don't remember what the topic was -- but she was forbidden by the Museum Director to film inside the museum. People, I think, were pleased to be able to see the exhibits, and, of course, happy 00:10:00that the history would be preserved and remembered in this new building. But I remember Kaz Iwahashi, who was probably around ten when her family was forced to close their nursery on University Avenue in Berkeley -- and actually that photograph of her family's business was taken by Dorothea Lange -- said to Jane Beckwith, "Oh, there's a panel with the names of all the babies born at Topaz hanging over a crib. Why are there no names of the people who died?" And Jane Beckwith said, "We didn't have an artifact." And I happened to be standing there when that was said, and I just remember that somebody had asked earlier on the Friends of Topaz Committee, "Can we have a list of the dead?" And Jane said, "No, there's no room." And so it just struck me that this was another example of the museum script portraying births 00:11:00-- which is, of course, joyous, even though you're in confinement -- but avoiding the topic of death. And, of course, [James] Wakasa was the most important death in the camp, in the sense that it was a murder, and people tried to memorialize it. So I think this underlying theme of trying to avoid the truth keeps popping up, and that was what happened at that museum visit, in my memory. EARDLEY-PRYOR: And that 2017 museum visit was in the month of April. And April 11, 1943, is, of course, the date when James Wakasa was shot and murdered by Private First Class Gerald Philpott in the camp. April just seems like a very pregnant month, with regard to Topaz -- being the month of Wakasa's murder at that time, and your pilgrimage visit. I think you had mentioned something about returning to Berkeley in that month, as well. And that also there was some 00:12:00relationship with Topaz and April from before Wakasa's murder? UKAI: Thank you for bringing up that point about April, because I don't think Toru set that date based on all of these events you mentioned, and yet there was this kind of convergence or synergy. We took the bus on a tour of the camp, and Scott Bassett was on it, kindly telling us where things were located, and there was a sign put up that said, "James Wakasa killed, April 11, 1943," and it was placed in the desert, inside the fence. It turns out it was at the wrong place, because nobody knew exactly where Wakasa had died. But we said, "Oh, let's stop the bus." So we did. And I had been doing research on Wakasa now for three years, and this depth of emotion and grief I didn't even know I had 00:13:00just -- I had a meltdown. I mean, I literally got out of the bus and my legs collapsed underneath me. And I just started to weep, and Kimiko Marr had to hold me up. And I think what happened was he had become a person to me, and I had read so many government documents about the coverup and the memorial, his life, forty years living in the United States, two thirds of his life. He was sixty-three years old. So being at this spot where his death was commemorated just triggered this response in me, and I'll just never forget that, because it wasn't even something that involved my own family personally. I mean, of course they were there during that period, and they were there when Wakasa was shot, but I don't think I even either know enough about my own family to have that well of emotion. And also I think the violence 00:14:00-- the racial violence, the way that he died, the way the bullet went through his heart, he fell back on his knees, he bled into the ground, and his body grabbed by the military, treated so disrespectfully. The monument -- of course, we didn't know about it at that point in 2017. But already the emotion of it was just incredibly deep, and something I didn't know I had within me. When we went to Fort Sill three years later -- I think it was three years later -- to protest the migrant children, the government's plan to hold 1,400 migrant children there in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which was also a Department of Justice camp for the 700 Issei. Tom Ikedo of Densho went on that trip, and he was representing Kanesaburo Oshima's family of Hawaii, and this was an immigrant man who kind of lost himself, 00:15:00ran for the fence, and was shot in the back of the head, and was killed there in, of course, an incredibly violent way. And Tom told us later that when he went home he was, I believe, sitting at a table, and he just broke down and started to weep, surprising his wife, surprising himself. And so I think that as we learn about these stories, and the depth of the tragedy, the injustice, the suppressed history, the emotions our families must have had but we never knew about, it wells up in unexpected times, and, for me, that was what happened at Topaz. What happened also with this really interesting, serendipitous timing of that bus trip was that after two or three days on this pilgrimage, long bus ride back and forth, we were going to pull into Berkeley on the anniversary day, 00:16:00seventy-five years later, of the very date that Berkeley people were taken away from their homes and driven on the bus to Tanforan, south of San Francisco, the racetrack, which was the first concentration camp. And when I realized this, we talked to some of the ministers at the Presbyterian church on Dana Street from which people were taken away, Berkeley residents. And the ministers said, "Oh, we would like to be there to welcome you back." And so the original plan was to have the bus pull into the school in Berkeley, where we departed from, but then with this anniversary we changed plans, pulled in front of the church. And a friend of mine who's a psychiatrist said, "Nancy, this is a perfect example of the full circle, where people on that bus had, as infants, been taken with their families to Tanforan, 00:17:00and then seventy-five years later, on the same day, on a bus, a pilgrimage bus, were returning to that same spot." And so I talked to a man who said, "I was an infant at that time," Jesse -- his nickname is Fuzzy -- Fuzzy Furusawa, and he was an infant. And he said, "It really moved me, and I had tears in my eyes when I think about the fact that we pulled out of that church street with our families not knowing what was going to happen, and our families losing everything, and then returning to the church, and seeing out the window these ministers holding up signs saying 'Welcome.'" And so it was, for him, a very moving moment, and journalists were there, and they wrote about it. So that was very special, and extremely serendipitous and wonderful. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's beautiful. UKAI: His family lost their 00:18:00nursery, and it's on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley, and I looked at the website, and it literally says, "Founded in 1920, family-owned since 1942." So it's their family, but not his family. They lost it in 1942. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. You mentioned that in 2017 you did not know of the [James Wakasa] Memorial stone, or at least where it, at that time, was still buried. When did the memorial stone come onto your radar, and what role has it played for you since? UKAI: So when the Topaz Museum was doing a revision of its narrative, under the direction of the National Park Service, who said it needs to be revised before it can be fabricated and the museum opened, I took special interest in this, and I think it was because, frankly, my first memory of Topaz 00:19:00-- and I have no direct memory because I was born in 1954, after the war -- was my mother sitting at dinner one night. And I just remember to this day her emotion and anger, and saying, "They didn't have to kill him! He was deaf!" Well, he wasn't deaf. That was one of the rumors, which I think the government probably created to rationalize his murder. But I just remember being young -- I must have been in elementary school -- and wondering, why is my mother so upset? Her face is kind of red. She's emotional. And that memory is burned into me. So at any rate -- and then, of course, it was really the most important historical event, I think, at the camp. It just stunned everybody that you could actually die if you were walking near the fence. And it turns out that military guards had been shooting at people four months earlier. They just arrived at the camp in September eleventh, and then December, January, February, March, there were military records of the guards in the watchtower shooting at people, 00:20:00I think nine or ten. So at any rate, I became very interested, did National Archives research. And so when I went to the camp and saw, as I mentioned in this pilgrimage, the sign, it was like, "Oh, evidence of people remembering." And then there was also a handwritten sign saying, "James Wakasa died west of here." It was like somebody took a paint brush or something and wrote on a piece of foam core, and stuck it on the cement foundation at the camp. And that's on Wikimedia, and it says 2002. Then there's also a dead tree trunk which says Wakasa, and that had been there also for about twenty years. So there are these vernacular markers around the camp. And it's very poignant and sad, because people are trying to remember. There's no official kind of marker, but there are these 00:21:00attempts by people to remember him and honor his memory. So anyway, that became something that just was -- I had done a lot of research, and then I wrote a paper for the Topaz Museum academics who were revising the narrative, so that was that. Then, in 2020, when George Floyd was killed in May of that year, that just, of course, unleashed national protests, worldwide protests against racism, against monuments which were celebrating white supremacy, memorializing the wrong things, the domination over others. So at any rate, I was thinking, because Dave Izu and I are working on this "50 Objects" project, the National Park Service project website -- I mean, we got funding from them -- to talk about the World War II history 00:22:00through fifty artifacts. And it struck me that at this time when Confederate monuments are being pulled down in the U.K., all over Europe, and the United States, of course, that the Wakasa Monument is an example of a monument that existed at one point, so it qualifies as an object. But it was gone, because I thought it had been destroyed. The government record says there are no traces left. So we wrote this story as an example of history that had been buried, and let's not forget James Wakasa. And then it was the opportunity to also talk about his life, how there were other military homicides, how there was a coverup, and so on and so forth. At the end of the story I posted a diagram, a map I had found in the National Archives, which was made twenty hours after Wakasa died. And it was made by a guy named George Shimamoto, who was an Issei and lived in the same block, same barrack, I believe, as Wakasa. And he worked for 00:23:00some WRA agency within the camp, and I guess under that jurisdiction or those auspices he drew this little diagram with the guard tower eight, and then 946 feet, and how many inches. He said, "Here is the death spot" -- I mean, he didn't say, he drew it, down to the inch. And he even drew the blood spot. He measured it. He had the watchtower. He had a floodlight drawn in, and all this sagebrush, all this detail, a very serious document. So I put that in. I didn't really know what to do with it, because this map showed a different measurement between the guard tower and where Wakasa died, which was over 300 yards, which is a big distance -- it's city blocks; it's three professional football fields; the marksman was a good shot -- and the government records, which said Wakasa died 250 yards away. So there was a discrepancy, and I didn't really know what to do with 00:24:00that. But I thought, let's put this map in because it's a real document. Unbeknownst to me, two archeologists -- Jeff Burton, who is the Cultural Resources Manager at Manzanar, and Mary Farrell, a retired archeologist -- and they're both eminent archeologists, who just produce the gold standard of archeology of the Japanese American confinement sites -- went out during the middle of COVID. There was smoke from the fires. Jeff said in an interview that he was undergoing chemo at the time and just wanted to get out of the house and do archeology. So they took this diagram to Utah, and they measured it out with their measuring tape. And Mary said that they were just expecting maybe to find, if anything, what she calls a cobble, a small stone. So when they found this four-foot-long stone 00:25:00peaking above the desert, about two inches tall, they knew that was it, because it was in the right place, and it was stunning. They had found the top of the monument, seventy-seven years after it was buried. And they sent me an email that said -- and I didn't know them, I had never met them. I knew of them. But I got an email from Jeff saying something like, "Found the Wakasa Monument." And when I got that email I didn't know what it meant, because I thought it had been demolished. And then when he sent a picture and said, "This is it," it was stunning. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Would you mind sharing the story about how that monument was initially created, and what happened at that time? UKAI: Oh, right. So after Wakasa was murdered on April 11, 1943, at 7:30 at night, walking his dog inside the fence, he was shot through the heart. He fell on his knees. He fell on his back. He died instantly. 00:26:00The bullet went through his heart and also pierced his spine. His body was taken away by the military, and the whitewash began. He was accused of escaping through the fence, and it was in the national papers, and that never got corrected. At any rate, his funeral was held. I believe it was April nineteenth. People wanted to hold the funeral at the spot where he died, and the government refused. They were worried that there might be an uprising. A lot of emotion, of course, on a spot where the blood might have even still been visible. People wanted to build -- Issei wanted to build -- a memorial, and requested, and they were refused. There's talk, all kinds of ideas they had. They wanted a full investigation. They wanted to plant a tree somewhere. Lots of grieving, outrage, fear, wondering how to proceed. So a funeral was held April nineteenth, in the middle of the camp, about, 00:27:00probably -- I'm not sure -- maybe half a mile away from the death spot at the fence. And then some time after that, this memorial went up. And the reason we know that is because it's in government records, and they describe it as, quote-unquote, "impressive." And it says in the government records that half a bag of cement was used. That means there's a landscape crew, immigrant landscape crew, who had access to things like cement and trucks and stuff like that for their work at the camp to create projects and whatever. They had taken cement and, it said, "native stone" and created this monument near the fence. And so this internal correspondence is saying, quote-unquote, it's "impressive," and then photographs were taken, and they were sent to the War Department. So John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, in May writes a letter 00:28:00saying, "I see that the monument has been taken down. I still see debris left around it," which was this message to clean it up. And he describes Wakasa's killing as a "justifiable military action." And he said that monuments like this cannot be allowed to exist because it will give the impression to society, the outside world, that these things which are justified, such as this homicide, are being protested. So, at any rate, the message was clear, and the ensuing correspondence says that the monument has been taken down. The Camp Director at Topaz wrote that, [Charles E.] Ernst. And then there is this really kind of snarky correspondence between Topaz administrators saying, "You'll be amused to know that the builders of the monument dithered for three 00:29:00days. They didn't want to take it down, and I reminded them that their violation of our agreement to not build one was the first time." And so the administrators are guilt tripping these guys, and of course the landscapers have no power. And apparently the landscapers must have talked about it for three days, what to do. And finally, they did take it down. Now, I thought it meant they destroyed it, because we didn't even know what the monument was. I'm thinking it's cement with rocks put in it. I mean, it just said "half a bag of cement," which, of course, is not that much, and "native stone." So I'm thinking, well, was it like those kind of vertical obelisks you see where it's made of cement and stones are stuck in it, or what? So, luckily, [laughs] in our "50 Objects" article, which was published in September 2020, we didn't try and imagine exactly what it looked like, although we did think about it. How do you, in a blog, visually depict something that you have no picture of? At any rate, it was taken down. What we learned from 00:30:00Jeff and Mary's archeological investigation, which rediscovered the top of it, was basically what we think is a 1,000-pound stone, nearly five feet tall -- fifty-seven inches -- and the landscapers buried it. [The current estimate by a stone conservator is 2,400 pounds The 1,000-pound estimate was made by the forklift operator who removed it.] So they seem to have dug a hole, probably behind where it was erected, and then, I guess, pushed it in. And then the top of it was showing. Now, did they leave part of it showing for future generations to discover? Was it buried but the earth moved around and exposed it? I mean, we can all have our theories about this. And actually I should ask Mary and Jeff about this. They would certainly have an opinion. But when you look, what's interesting is that there was a survey done at Topaz, an archeological survey, and no one noticed this. It was not in the record. And then I think another follow-up survey 00:31:00had been done, and it wasn't noticed. Now, the camp grounds are 640 acres. You know, there's a lot of brush. But a large stone like this is anomalous. There's nothing like it. So that's why Mary and Jeff said, "This is it. There's no question." And then other archeologists later said, "Yeah, we think this is it. It's very close to where the map indicated." So what was profound about this was not only finding this piece of lost history, which was laden with meaning, with grief, with outrage, with history, with agency, with the spirit of civil rights, and saying, "We have the right to remember our dead, our friend." But it also located for the first time the actual crime scene, the spot where he died. Before that, you have 250 yards according to the government, and you have this new diagram 00:32:00which says more than 300 yards. This stone said, "this is it." So that was like a message from beyond. Just shocking, and just a wonderful, wonderful, amazing discovery that was so unexpected. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I note you saying something "from beyond." There's a story that I'm not quite clear on, about something called a hinotama? What is a hinotama, and what's its relationship to the Wakasa memorial site? UKAI: So this was interesting. It's called hinotama. And "hi" is fire, and "tama" is like a fireball. Hinotama. No, "tama" is a ball. I'm sorry, it's a sphere. So hinotama. "No" is the -- I don't know the grammatical term. Anyway, hinotama means fireball. And it goes back centuries in Japanese folklore, and there's a lot of meanings, but one of them is 00:33:00certainly that it holds the spirit of the dead. And so what happened was this man who lives in the Bay Area, Kiyoshi Katsumoto, his wife had conveyed this story that Kiyoshi had told her. That when he was, I believe, ten years old, that after Wakasa died he was in Block Thirty-Six, which is where Wakasa lived, and he said the adults and the children would stand outside and stare at the western sky in the direction of where Wakasa was walking his dog at the fence, and for several nights running they saw this fireball in the sky. And he described it as just luminous, bright, and momentary. And it happened for several nights, and then it stopped. And so he said, "I just remember, and the adults all talked about it, it was this spirit of Wakasa lamenting 00:34:00his unprovoked murder." Another thing that came out was, after we published our story, we got an email from an eighty-six-year-old man in Oberlin, Ohio who said, "I was ten years old, and I used to go out in the desert after dinner and look for things. And there was always this older man there who was also doing the same, and he would say, 'It's getting late, go home.'" And he said, "One night, my buddy and I were walking back to the barrack and we passed this man, and then we heard this pop." He said, "Pop, pop." We know there was only one shot, but anyway, he said -- and he said, "We ran as fast as we could back to the barrack, not looking back." And the next day he learned that this Mr. Wakasa had been shot to death. And he said, "The military came, and Army people interviewed me." He said, "My mother took me to the funeral, and," he said, "I saw the open casket." 00:35:00And he said, "That image haunted me for years." And he said, "I used to sleep in the barrack, on a cot, and I couldn't fall asleep, and my mother would sit at the end and kind of pat me and try and console me. As a result of our '50 Objects' story called 'The Demolished Monument: The Erasure of Memory of James Hatsuaki Wakasa,'" he said, "The memories are hard to erase." So I guess what I'm saying is that people's memories of hinotama, of this encounter with Mr. Wakasa -- this child must have been the last person to see him alive, other than the shooter, and his name is Roy Ebihara. And I'm so grateful that at age eighty-six he decided to share this memory. And he said, "I saw your story on my iPad and decided I needed to write to you," so he took pen to paper [or stylus to screen], and wrote that to us. So we're finding that this story of Wakasa is dragging out these memories, 00:36:00which otherwise we wouldn't know. And because these people are older they could very well pass away and we would never know them. So this has been a gift, this rediscovery. EARDLEY-PRYOR: One of the lines in your "50 Objects" post that you're talking about that really struck me was where you wrote that "As a result of the government's control of the facts and objects, memories have been stolen." It just really struck me as poignant for your feelings of what then ensues in the wake of discovering where this actual stone had been buried, when Jeff Burton and Mary Farrell went and used that map that you had discovered to find the stone, and what has ensued since. I want to ask about what the next steps were that Mary and Jeff Burton took, and what then ensued from that? 00:37:00UKAI: So after the stone was rediscovered -- and Jeff and Mary had done this as archeologists who were curious, and they didn't tell anybody. They just thought, we'll go out there and look around. It's a several-hundred mile drive from eastern California where they live near Manzanar, to Topaz camp in Utah, and then when they found it they let me know. And we just said, "This is an incredible discovery. Let's have a meeting." And so a meeting of several people took place. So we published our ["50 Objects" Wakasa Memorial] story on I think it was September twentieth, twenty-first. They found it a week later, and then we had a meeting in early October and just were talking about what should be done. "Well, we better form a committee." And so by the middle of October, a fourteen-member was pulled together, which included three archeologists, two of whom were working with the Topaz Museum on the cleanup of Block Forty-Two, 00:38:00which was the last bit of the camp which the Topaz Museum was able to purchase, meaning they now owned all 640 acres. One acre was given to the JACL; it's where sort a historical marker is located. And so four members of the National Park Service were invited to be on this, including two National Historic Landmark representatives from Denver -- because Topaz is a National Historic Landmark, it was designated in 2007 -- so they are very interested in anything that happens on that land. Then there were two National Park Service folks, three archeologists, as I just mentioned, three Topaz Board Members, a historian, Franklin Odo, and then three Topaz descendants: Kimiko Marr, me, and Satsuki Ina. So we just started to meet and talk about, how do you handle this momentous discovery? Should it be announced in the public. What do you do with an archeological artifact like this? And at that first meeting the archeologists said, "You keep it 00:39:00in the ground." That's archeological practice now. You don't just go yanking things right away, like might have happened in the past, because archeology is inherently a destructive process, and when you pull something out of the ground you destroy the context. And so at least if you're going to pull something out, you have to do a lot of surveys and a ton of preparation. So that was their advice: leave it in the ground. And we had a few meetings. That was the first meeting, over Zoom, and actually I asked people if I could record it, so I taped it with my phone, and we still have that transcript now and that recording. Then we had a few email exchanges after that, in which the National Historic Landmark folks said, "We can offer technical assistance. There's funding available, if you'd like to explore further, beyond what Mary and Jeff found visually." And then at one point the Topaz 00:40:00Museum, led by Jane Beckwith, was going to apply for a grant from I think it was called the Great Basin Heritage Fund or something like that. It would be a [federally funded heritage grant area]. But anyway, that was the name of the funding group. So an application was drawn up. And at that point Jeff's discovery and my finding of the diagram in the National Archives wasn't listed, so I thought, "Oh, this is the first draft of history. That should be in there." So I made that correction. And then I think that what happened was the museum decided never to follow up on that grant application, so that kind of melted away. One of the archeologists, Dana Shew, was going to put together a budget for how to proceed, and what would the cost be. [That never happened.] So, at any rate, things were being brought up and suggested. We weren't meeting regularly. And then what happened was 00:41:00-- EARDLEY-PRYOR: And I'm thinking in my mind, this would have been late winter-ish -- October, November, December -- of 2020. I mean, this is still peak moments of the pandemic. The numbers are spiking for infections that winter of 2020. So I can understand this is all happening over Zoom, but people are confined at home. UKAI: Very good point. Exactly. And then, of course, meanwhile, in society there's just continual street protests, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, the election is November 2020 that he finally loses the election, Biden wins the Presidential election. UKAI: You know, the upheaval and turmoil of that era is almost hard to recapture, because it's just waves of different kinds of news assaulting you. So, in the midst of that, this is going on. So in July 00:42:00, which is eight months or so after we formed this fourteen-member volunteer committee, 00:43:00I had lunch with Masako Takahashi, whose family -- she was born at Topaz in 1944, and her family had been longtime donors to the museum. They have a family foundation called the [Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation]. So I had lunch with her, and I said, "You know, there's this exciting news about this monument which was discovered at Topaz, and there's discussion about how to proceed." And she said, "Oh, my family foundation would love to be a part of this and fund a proper excavation, and help document it." So the following day, which was Monday -- and I think it was July 20 -- this is in 2021 -- I wrote to our fourteen-member committee and I said, "Exciting news: I talked to Masako Takahashi, and the foundation has invited us to submit an application for an archeological excavation." 00:44:00Then, Justin Henderson, who was the National Historic Landmark official representing the National Park Service, said, "This is exciting news. Surveys and various preparations should be done. I think this calls for a meeting." Then, Wednesday -- so these emails are coming in -- Jane Beckwith, the Museum Director, wrote an email saying, "Let me say what's going on on the museum side." And I can supply you with the actual email, but it said something like, "I have approached the grantors which have given us money to remove debris from Block Forty-Two, and asked if we could use a portion of that to remove the monument, and they have kindly consented. We will keep you apprised." So it was a very short email, but somebody texted me or emailed me and said, "Has it been lifted?" It was kind of unclear. 00:45:00So that was kind of confusing. And the atmosphere was not one of free give-and-take, and we had hardly communicated in this eight-month period. So, at any rate, meanwhile, behind the scenes, Masako Takahashi wrote to Jane privately, because she wasn't a member of the fourteen-member committee, and felt that she didn't want to write to everybody publicly that way. And she just said, "Please make sure that there are videographers there. I would like to be there. If there is a lifting, please let me know." So then Jane wrote back an email to Masako, basically saying, "We will take great care, and the contractor who was cleaning trash from Block Forty-Two, and he's agreed to fit this small task" -- those were the words she used -- "in his schedule." And so then, on 00:46:00July twenty-seventh -- it was a Tuesday -- we got this email in the evening. Masako and I received it, and the subject line was "Fwd: Rock." And it said: "Just a quick report on this morning. We lifted the rock and it was much bigger than we expected. The crack was not a problem. Two pieces fell off." And then four pictures. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What were your feelings of receiving that? UKAI: Complete shock. Complete shock that it had been done preemptively, without telling anybody, using this guy who was cleaning trash from Block Forty-Two. But, of course, just all of the accumulated thinking and researching about James Wakasa just culminated, that this is the way it would be treated, without anybody present, 00:47:00and to be informed in this way. I just literally started to shake, and I started to cry. It was just a very emotional, physical response. And then I realized that, wow, it wasn't an email to the fourteen-member committee; it was just to Masako and me, and it was a forward, so you think, well, who's getting whose email? And I thought, you know, I need to respond and CC the entire committee and express my shock and outrage over this act, because we were all being, I think, kind of informed separately, and we're a committee. We'd been meeting for eight months. Come on. This is a historic artifact, the most important one at Topaz, and probably all of the camps. So at any rate, I wrote an email and then I sent it, and I basically said, "I'm stunned 00:48:00at what you've done." And I tried to not -- I mean, I just was so upset, I wanted to just scream, but I just wrote an email saying, "I'm stunned at what you've done, especially given the fact that we've been having these discussions for many months. And the Wakasa Monument was desecrated at the time that it was forcibly told to be taken down, and you're repeating history. You've done the same thing. And from what I can see, no Japanese Americans were there. It doesn't look like there were archeologists there. Please clarify. James Wakasa's memory deserved better than this." I actually wanted to say, "How are you any different from the WRA?" But I kind of edited that out. But I really felt like Wakasa's stone, the true story of his killing, was whitewashed and suppressed. People could not 00:49:00hold the funeral where they wanted to, at that spot. The shooter was acquitted. People were never told about that. That was never reported, and they didn't know what happened. The whole story's been buried. So I felt like, again, without telling anybody, in secrecy, they covertly removed this monument, and treated it with great disrespect, without telling anybody, in the dark, again. And it's been seventy-eight years; has nothing changed? So I just was stunned at the echoes of history, and how Japanese Americans were still in this subservient position of not being included in the most important history of Topaz. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I saw a copy of the email that you wrote that night, at 10:00 p.m., and CC-ed to the rest of the committee. And some of the lines that really struck me was that it was very measured, I feel like, your reply, 00:50:00for what you're saying about how you were feeling. But you wrote, "You appear not to understand that the place where a member of our community was murdered, and where that crime was memorialized by camp inmates, was desecrated at the time by the WRA. In a similar way our agency and our ability to be involved has been taken away from us once again." This part really struck me, too, where you wrote: "An opportunity for survivors, descendants, and all those in the Topaz and civil rights communities to experience a powerful chance for healing has been lost forever." What were you thinking about there when you're talking about healing? UKAI: You know, the last people to touch that sacred stone were the Issei landscapers. They were the last ones to touch it before they pushed it into the ground. And then this miraculous rediscovery occurred. And then the next people to touch it was 00:51:00this construction worker, who I don't blame him -- he was hired -- but it was basically someone with no ancestral connection, no blood, no memory, no feeling of the connection, this white person in Delta who operates a backhoe company. And then there were no Japanese American witnesses. So it just felt like the ultimate desecration and lack of consideration, sensitivity, understanding. And these are supposed to be the stewards of our history. So it was hurtful, but knowing what had happened with the Topaz Museum's control of the museum narrative, it wasn't also that surprising. It was a continuation. It's part of a pattern. And during the museum narrative fight, those of us who were protesting their WRA perspective, and the inherently white supremacist comments that were made in it, saying things like, "Because there were no white students 00:52:00in the school, the Japanese American high school students could take all of the leadership positions." Or there was a comment saying, "A local person" -- it was referred to so-and-so's -- possessive -- Japanese American cowboys, like he owned them. I mean, there were all these really terrible statements that were made, which reflected the perspective of the people who wrote the narrative. So, at any rate, when we were fighting and protesting against that, we did not publicly come out in newspaper articles or things like that, saying what the problems were. We were hoping that we would not harm the museum before it opened. We just wanted the best possible narrative to come out. So people knew that it was delayed, the opening was delayed of the museum, for three years to fix things, but they didn't really understand why. This horrible, violent assault on our landscape, and the taking out of the stone the way it was, was a continuation, but it was too egregious to remain quiet about. 00:53:00It wasn't going to be like the museum where we kind of didn't talk about it. How do we know this isn't going to happen again? How is this disrespectful behavior and total exclusion of the people whose history it was -- ? It was too hurtful, too egregious, to not talk about. And, in fact, we could have done things a lot more extreme than we did, but this chain of emails started things going. And people immediately understood. I actually have this quote here from a Topaz descendant named Patty Wada, who is also a staff at the JACL. But she just wrote this -- actually, it was July thirty-first, and do you mind if I read part of it? EARDLEY-PRYOR: Please. UKAI: She said, "Thank you, Nancy, for the backstory," because I sent her Jane's announcement, and then I wrote an email. Then Satsuki Ina wrote a very emotional, impassioned email, saying, "You've robbed us of an opportunity to be there." 00:54:00And then Masako Takahashi wrote an email saying, "I can't believe you did this on the convenience of the contractor." So I sent that -- and then, at that point, I'm not sure if Jane Beckwith had responded yet with her rationale, but I sent that email thread to Patty and David Inoue, who's the Executive Director of the JACL. And Patty wrote back, "Thank you for the backstory and the emails. It's sad and insulting that the powers that be did not, and still do not, grasp how the unearthing and removal of the Wakasa Monument is a deeply sacred moment for us, not unlike how Native Americans feel for and respect the lands of their ancestors. We had no opportunity to be there to share in a moment of prayer and remembrance with the spirit of Mr. Wakasa. A clear cultural void exists to have given no thought to include our community. They do not understand the rituals of remembrance, respect, and gratitude that we pay to those who came before us, and here we are now in Obon 00:55:00season. The blessing that should have taken place at the site where James Wakasa lost his life has now been lost." And then, referring to the email that had been sent to us, which started out just saying, "Just a quick report": "We are not bystanders to this history only to be given snippets and photos of how the stone was removed. We are one with that history. James Wakasa's life and death are a part of our collective story. He is us, and, as you wrote, his memory deserved better than this." And I was so moved, because I felt like Patty immediately understood all the issues. Thinking that you can just write a quick email, like a postcard, saying, "Oh, by the way, we lifted it," and to not think to include people, and to understand that this is just part of a long history in the United States of disrespect and disregard and desecration of tribal lands, remains of Native Americans. 00:56:00Twenty twenty-one was the year of the hundred-year anniversary of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the Black section of town had been burned down, and people had been buried in, probably, mass graves. The waves of grief wasn't just for Wakasa, but it was for this endless landscape of buried stories, and the Japanese American story is just a small part of it, and a recent part. And yet I felt this connection and deep melancholy and grief and sadness, just was in a kind of fog for a really long time after that. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You mentioned the JACL's reply, and I see on the Wakasa Memorial Committee's website a list of formal exchanges between the Committee and the Topaz Museum Board, including letters on behalf of the JACL [Northern 00:57:00California Western Nevada Pacific district], and letters from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, all sending letters to the Topaz Museum. So this sounds like there's an ongoing exchange in response that is formalized. I'm wondering about what that process was, and about, "Well, now what? What to do?" From the shock of initial learning, and then how that dissipated throughout the community in different ways. UKAI: Yeah. So I'd say about a month after this occurred, on July twenty-seventh, an advocacy group -- and we called ourselves the Wakasa Memorial Committee -- formed, and actually there was kind of casual discussion of the need to create such a committee even before the rock was lifted. It was like, we need to have a more unified voice and way of 00:58:00conveying our position, not that there's a uniform position, but there needs to be a channel for communication on this committee. Anyway, that didn't happen, but there was such outrage, and yet people didn't know about it, because just a small group within our committee, and whoever was on the original CC for the email I wrote, and Satsuki and Masako -- and the people on that were like three National Park Service people, a State Senator named Jane Iwamoto in Utah, David Inoue of the JACL, the National Trust. Anyway, they were getting the emails, they knew what happened, but the wider community didn't know, and the Topaz Museum wasn't going to go tell people, "Hey, we went up and dug this monument using a forklift and chains." And so it was up to us -- that is, the people who were descendants and survivors -- to tell the wider community. 00:59:00Actually, Chizu Omori, who was also on that group which protested the museum narrative in 2014 and 2015, wrote a column for the Nichi Bei. She is an incredible historian, and someone who's lived the history, was incarcerated at Poston, Arizona when she was twelve years old. She wrote a column, and she just said, "This terrible thing has happened, and the Board lacks professionalism. It shouldn't have happened." And she explained it. That was the first notice to the community that this had occurred, and then Pacific Citizen, which is JACL's national newspaper, and the Nichi Bei, which is a prominent Japanese American newspaper in the Bay Area, and also goes to people all over, wrote a cover story, and it started to leak out. And yet, what we found what happened is 01:00:00people who, either in Topaz, or people outside, in the Japanese American community, and anyone else who had heard about this, immediately was, "What? James Wakasa? Number one, there was a monument? Number two, it was rediscovered? Number three, what? It was pulled out in this terrible, violent way?" At any rate, but there was also a group of people who were loyal, were sympathetic with the Topaz Museum Board, and basically saying, "They've worked very hard for many decades to preserve our history," and "This was a mistake," and "Stop talking about this so much." I mean, that was basically the message. So for "50 Objects" I actually wrote -- so between the time when the monument was excavated, and I had [responded to Jane Beckwith, followed by Satsuki and Masako]. 01:01:00For five days nobody knew this happened, and I knew that the museum would at some point have to write something, but I thought, nobody else knows. So I wrote a [Facebook] post for the "50 Objects" project, and I said something like, "On Tuesday of this week" -- I wrote it on Friday -- "a historic monument was excavated in secrecy at the Topaz Concentration Camp in Utah. It seems to be a 1,000-pound stone. It was dedicated to the memory of James Wakasa. And apparently it was pulled out of the ground by a trash hauler who was hired by the museum to remove debris from Block Forty-Two. We are awaiting details." And then I went into some history about Wakasa, for those who didn't know. And I used three images. One was by Mary Farrell, who had sketched her 01:02:00thinking of what a memorial probably looked like if it would have been pulled out of the ground, before it was. And then I used a photograph Jane Beckwith sent of this contractor sitting on the ground with this stone with a strap around it on the ground. And, ironically, that was probably the spot where Wakasa died, but nobody knew that; they're just kind of there doing their work with their construction machines. And then in the middle I used a very famous brush painting by Chiura Obata, who made it the day after Wakasa was killed, of Wakasa dying, bending over, the dog, the landscape, the barbed wire fence. And it's the only visual depiction that was made at the time of Wakasa's murder, and it's in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum, because the Obata descendants donated it. So I'd used it in the "50 Objects" project a few times before in other stories 01:03:00-- it's a powerful image, I think -- and used it in the middle. So anyway, what happened after that was that the granddaughter of Chiura Obata got really angry with me and the "50 Objects" project, and said, "Take down that painting from your post." And I'm telling this story because it's a reflection of the tensions and the divisions within the Japanese American community. And she said, "Take that down. You have no permission, and you're discrediting the museum." And I said, "Well, we're questioning and critiquing the board's decision to unearth this historic monument using a forklift and chains, and not telling anybody, and not having archeologists present." But at any rate, I said, "I have to check with the museum," the Smithsonian, because if you 01:04:00look at their website, there's fair use. Our use of it was not for commercial purposes, it was for educational purposes. And it says that on their website. So anyway, I got an email saying, "Take it down. Why are you not responding? Take it down." So I just was in a quandary, because on the one hand this is a historical painting, which her grandfather made to memorialize this terrible thing, and the granddaughter is saying remove it. Now, my husband was saying, "Hire a lawyer. This is a First Amendment issue. Let's fight this. You shouldn't have to take it down." And I thought, oh, boy. Then, if it were "50 Objects" or "Nancy Ukai sues the Obata family over use of this painting," then that will become the narrative, not the lifting of the stone. And other people agreed with me, so I just took it down. I can't remember what I did, 01:05:00replaced it with something else. And then social media, it's on Facebook, it's here, it's there, so I had to kind of go around and take those things down. And so to avoid further tension, I took it down. What I found out later was that she wrote a letter, which was sent to many people, and I was shown a copy by somebody who got it and was sympathetic. And it said, "The Obata family asked for '50 Objects' to take down this painting by our grandfather. The intent of the project is to discredit the Topaz Museum," which is untrue. We're not discrediting the Topaz Museum. We want the Topaz Museum to thrive and be the important educational institution that it is and should be. But anyway, by personalizing it, and by also impugning my motives, then I really felt like, oh, gosh, this is going around to people, and 01:06:00it was really distressing. And where I didn't want to, at the time, make this into a First Amendment fight, I thought, boy, if you're going to defame me, I'm ready to call a lawyer on that. But then it kind of petered out. And what's interesting is that Jeff Burton and Mary Farrell wrote a five-part series about their archeological research on James Wakasa, and the stone, and the history of it. They did this before the stone was lifted, and in January of 2021 -- so five months or so before the stone was lifted -- they gave the manuscript to three board members, who reviewed it and turned in three single-spaced pages of revisions. Now, Jeff and Mary had put in the address, the location of the stone. What the museum did was not only did they not complain about that mapping information, they actually changed the address to make it more accurate. 01:07:00And this is memorialized in emails, which I had, because Jeff and Mary asked me also to review the manuscript. I didn't really know what they were going to do with the manuscript, but it was a very academic thing, and it read beautifully, but I didn't ask what they were going to do with it. They ended up publishing it in June of 2021, so several months later, and what happened was Jane Beckwith and the Museum Board seized on the mapping location as the justification for this preemptive lifting of the stone, and basically said, "Now that the coordinates and the location had been made public, we acted hastily to preserve it from vandalism." Now, for those of us on the committee, we had been talking about the monument in many meetings, and we had exchanged emails about what to do with it, and after Masako Takahashi's 01:08:00offer to fund a respectful and archeologically professional excavation, the topic of vandalism never came up. And what could you do to vandalize it? Throw some paint on it? Shoot at it? As somebody pointed out, if you shoot at it the bullet's going to ricochet and hit you. Are you suggesting that people who read -- ? They published it in "Discover Nikkei," which is a blog published by the Japanese American National Museum. Are you suggesting that readers of "Discover Nikkei" are going to go vandalize it? If they are, are they going to take tape measure and measure it out, find it, and then get a forklift to lift it out? It all seemed preposterous. So the fact that these eminent archeologists would be maligned and blamed for the actions of the Museum Board was just devastating, reprehensible, and, Patrick Hayashi said in a livestream, cowardly 01:09:00and cruel. And he said, "I hope that the Board will have the integrity to apologize to them." Because, for him, apologizing and saying "We're sorry we didn't consult Japanese Americans" doesn't go far enough. They harmed the reputation and the history, to say that it was vandalism that was the cause for their actions. And then, what we found out later was that the blog, the Japanese American "Discover Nikkei" blog, had been approached by somebody with a request to delete the article -- censorship -- and the Obata family requested that the painting be removed from the article, and that happened. So somebody said, "Wow, this monument was found a generation or two too early." [laughs] In other words, people are still fighting over whether the information and the truth should come out. 01:10:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was the result of this broader engagement -- from outside groups, along with this memorial group that you helped establish -- with the Topaz Museum Board? UKAI: So what's happened is, through social media, the Wakasa Memorial Committee -- and Kimiko Marr has been a real driver of this -- we had a webpage, we started a Facebook page, but it's one of these things that it's not that complicated, and yet, I don't know, maybe we were explaining it in too much minute detail. And I think that it didn't catch on, like go viral. I also think that people are confused, and they kind of read about it and think, "Hmm, there's a lot of conflict here," and our community is very conflict-averse. And I think that's also a legacy of the camps, 01:11:00and it's also part of Japanese culture in Japan, which was carried over by our ancestors, and which filters down through the generations, which is that -- this is a cliché -- "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." There is this sense that harmony in the community should be preserved, that you talk about things behind closed doors, and then you make your announcement, and that you have this preservation of what seems to be consensus. And so to come out with these horrible truths, I think, affected some people in thinking, well -- there are a lot of fence-sitters. So the truth tellers, in some cases, were maligned as, "Can you guys please settle this behind closed doors and then come out with the Topaz Museum?" Or, "This is terrible. What can we do?" And basically, I think what the Wakasa Memorial Committee has been successful in doing is 01:12:00livestreams. And so Emiko Omori had the idea -- she's an Emmy Award-winning film director, videographer, and she is famous for her film that she and Chizu Omori, her sister, produced called Rabbit in the Moon, and it's been around for, gosh, since the late '90s, so it's a classic. [Two writers recently said it was the single best documentary on the World War II Japanese-American incarceration.] Anyway, she had the idea of Mary Farrell, one of the two-person team which rediscovered the monument, to interview me, who found the map. So she taped this hourlong conversation over Zoom, and what evolved was Mary talking about how -- one of my questions was, "Mary, how would a proper excavation have taken place? Educate us." And she just went through an amazing exposition on how they do things at Manzanar, and how there are ways, if you decide to excavate something, that you prepare, you map, you screen, you dig around this thing 01:13:00so that you leave it on a pedestal, so that things aren't touching it. You study the earth. You take pictures. You use a screen to sift through for any memento. It could be that ashes were in that hole when they buried it, cremains. Somebody might have accidentally dropped something. I mean, there could be things in there that when you lift it out with a forklift, obviously you're not going to find it. So separate from the disrespect there's just a professional scientific aspect of the landscape being destroyed permanently and information being lost, and obviously the opportunity to capture the process and the context is gone forever. So at any rate, Mary explained that in a just really powerful way, but she also brought up the moral and ethical issues of not including the descendent community in making these decisions, and she said, "If we were there, we would have sat in front of the forklift 01:14:00to prevent it from moving forward." And she said, "This has been the worst part of this entire episode," which is the way it was done. To have found something and then have it subjected to this treatment, she said, has been really painful. So the image of these two white archeologists sitting in front of the forklift, like a civil rights act, I found very moving. So that was very powerful. Seventeen hundred people have viewed it. I think we had a hundred, maybe, people watching live. But it explains a lot, and it explains the grief people feel about the desecration of the object and the landscape. But also, from Mary's point of view, as someone who has worked with descendent communities, and has been an archeologist her entire life with the U.S. Forest Service, is really familiar with how Native communities feel about the land, 01:15:00and how property owners feel that it's their possession so they have the right to do what they want, but how that is a way of thinking which has to be challenged. And so that's actually what we're doing now, too, which is the museum saying, "We are the property owners, and this monument is ours. And we are the legal stewards." And I think our argument is, first of all, the land has belonged to tribal people from thousands of years before. The Japanese Americans are just a more recent population that has sat on this land, and this terrible thing has happened. But the history and its interpretation doesn't belong to only one institution, and neither does the object. It belongs to our country. It's a national monument. It's not just a Topaz monument. It's a national monument, and it belongs to all the camps. 01:16:00And so that's now the crux of an argument about what to do with a monument. Where does it belong? Should it go back into the ground? Should it go to the Topaz Museum? Should it go to a national, accredited professional space like the Japanese American National Museum? And so our Wakasa Memorial Committee on September seventh -- so about five weeks after the excavation -- published a formal letter to the Topaz Museum Board, announcing ourselves with an advisory council. And basically, we laid out six steps to move forward. And it was like, we would like mediation; we would like an apology; we would like acknowledgement of who we are; we propose an eightieth anniversary ceremony in 2023 to commemorate Wakasa's killing. And anyway, we didn't get a -- well, interestingly, actually, we published this letter, and we had a very wonderful list of advisors, including Roger Daniels, the preeminent historian of Japanese American 01:17:00incarceration. I'm not going to list everybody, but Tom Ikeda, who was the Founding Director of Densho. A number of camp survivors. At any rate, we sent this article to the Topaz Museum Board, and within a few hours there was a reply from the Director, Jane Beckwith, saying something very gracious, like, "Thank you for your very thoughtful letter. Please give us time to respond in an equally thoughtful way. We look forward to keeping lines of communication open." So this is on September seventh. Within a few hours, I think it was, one of their board members, Hisashi Bill Sugaya, wrote, and hit reply all, saying, "I can't believe you wrote this. This reply doesn't represent me." And then, within minutes, Jane Beckwith replied, "Thank you, Bill, for saying that. I really appreciate that." So within the space of one day we wrote our letter, 01:18:00we got a very gracious reply from Jane, raising our hopes that this could actually move forward in an amicable way, and then Bill saying, "I don't agree with this," raising the question of whether or not the Board even consulted on her reply. And then Jane, minutes later saying, "I agree with you; thank you." So that was just, oh my goodness, what's going on? And then nothing for five weeks. We didn't hear from the board. Then we heard from them, finally, and we started to press for an archeological assessment, one of our six steps, because winter's coming, and let's get some scientists in there, some archeologists, to assess the stone, which was sitting in the courtyard, outdoors, in the museum in Delta, seventeen miles away from the campsite, and then go to the memorial site, and let's see what's happening there. Because we'd also gotten video of the site, and you could see clumps of cement and rocks that were still there. They'd been left behind, 01:19:00because the museum, in its haste to grab the artifact, ignored not only the context and the landscape, but left pieces of the monument there, because that bag of cement probably was used to create a pedestal. So it's just been really painful to think that the lack of knowledge, interest, sensitivity, cooperating with descendants has resulted in the neglect of Mr. Wakasa again, and the only material evidence we have being ignored. So it felt like, here you had a crime scene in 1943, and then nearly eighty years later you have another layer of violence, an assault on his stone and that site, and we are not progressing. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. The poignancy of having these stories literally buried in the ground and then unearthed, 01:20:00it is reminiscent of reopening wounds that perhaps never healed properly. I want to ask about how you mentioned a request to have an actual archeological assessment of the stone, and that that did happen in November thirtieth and December first of 2021. Can you share your experience of what that was, going out to return to Topaz, to investigate? Who was a part of that, and what occurred while you made that visit? UKAI: So that's a really interesting, important milestone in the short history we've had since July twenty-seventh of 2021, in the Wakasa Memorial Committee, and its dealings with the Topaz Museum Board. So one of our six steps was to request an archeological assessment. [A portion of this transcript has been sealed from 01H, 19M, 47S to 01H, 20M, 23S until January 1, 2055.] 01:21:00So we wrote to the National Park Service office and said, "If the Topaz Museum were to invite you to do an assessment, would you agree to do it?" Because although Topaz is a National Historic Landmark, it's privately owned by the museum, and so the National Park Service can't just go in, even though they gave the designation as a Historic Landmark. They can't just go in and say, "We're going to do an assessment." So, at any rate, we were ready to, if the museum disagreed, launch a social media campaign saying, "Winter is coming," which [laughs] I guess is a Game of Thrones meme. 01:22:00Anyway, that didn't happen. We didn't need to. The Topaz Museum agreed to our proposal, the Wakasa Memorial Committee proposal, to have a professional assessment, and they took our advice to use the National Park Service. So that was fantastic news. And I believe what happened, we heard from other people that they might have approached other archeologists and were refused. And in one of their letters, the Topaz Museum Board said something like, "Please stop your attacks on the museum. Archeologists are afraid that if they cooperate with the museum they will be attacked by the Committee," which makes us sound like this vengeful, out-of-control group, when all we're doing is trying to get the truth out, which is damning enough. You don't need to do a whole lot for archeologists to see, 01:23:00number one, the Museum Board was told to keep it in the ground; they didn't; they excavated it without descendants knowing about it, without archeologists, and then they blamed two eminent archeologists for their own mistake. It's not the Wakasa Committee who's to blame for archeologists not wanting to associate themselves with this very now-controversial project. Anyhow, the National Park Service is very accustomed to dealing with descendent communities, and we were told that it's common practice for especially sacred grounds for the National Park Service to invite the associated community to hold before this scientific, kind of white science [laughs] intervention, to hold a ceremony. So, not being familiar with these practices, we didn't really know what to do, and we thought, "Oh, do we have to go really early, before they start, and hold it so we don't interrupt their work?" And we were assured, no, this is part of the reason why 01:24:00we're there. This is integral to what's happening. So we held two ceremonies: one on November thirtieth, at the museum, where the stone was held on a pallet, on a carpet fragment on a pallet. And then we held the second one at the site where the memorial site had been dug up. And we weren't really sure what to do. We've never done this before. It's not like with Indigenous tribes where you might have particular ceremonies you do. Wakasa was a Christian, so his funeral had ministers and Christian hymns. But we thought, let's try and have an interfaith ceremony, and really days before we contacted Duncan [Ryūken] Williams, who's a Professor of Religion at USC, and he's an ordained Buddhist priest. He's the author of American Sutra, which is an award-winning, incredible history of [Buddhism] in the camps. Anyway, he said, "Why don't you contact 01:25:00a friend who's a Buddhist priest in Salt Lake City?" And we did that, and [Reverend Jerry Hirano of the Salt Lake Buddhist Temple] very generously agreed to drive down from Salt Lake City to Topaz and hold a brief ceremony. So that gave us structure. We invited Mark Izu, a musician in San Francisco who had been involved in the Topaz narrative fight, to come to Topaz and play a woodwind instrument that actually originated in China, but also is used in Japanese court music. So it's kind of atonal, doesn't have a melody. It's very lonely, haunting. It's using this bamboo flute [the shō] with many pipes. He decided to come, so it started to take shape. And then we thought, you know what? We need to have something with paper flowers, because in 1943, when the funeral was held, there were no fresh flowers available, and it was one of the features of that funeral, that 01:26:00every block, all forty-two blocks in the camp, the women -- and I think it was a gendered activity -- folded flowers. And they made thirty funereal objects -- wreaths, crosses -- and you can see them in the photographs. And Miné Okubo, in her graphic novel Citizen 13660, actually has two drawings of people folding flowers. And Satsuki Ina, who was born at Tule Lake and is a member of the Wakasa Memorial Committee's advisory council, her mother wrote a diary, and on the day 01:27:00after Wakasa was killed she wrote, "Mr. Wakasa has been killed. No one knows the truth." Then her mother, Shizuko Ina, also wrote about her block folding flowers. Then, Akemi Ina, who was on the committee, she was born at Topaz the day after Wakasa was killed. Her mother was pregnant with her, and she said, "My mother had a really difficult childbirth." It was the day after. It was April 12, 1943. And so she has this direct connection of not only being born there, but being born during the uproar, when the Army had brought in tear gas, machine guns, and all of the equipment to put down what they thought might be a riot. Now, after two days that was called off. But this was coming four months after the Manzanar uprising, when two Japanese Americans were killed, so the Army and the WRA didn't know what was going to happen. And Akemi was born during that period. So what we found, or I've learned, is that there are these incredibly powerful histories that -- I've known Akemi for years. I knew she was born at Topaz. I've been researching Wakasa. I didn't know she was born the day after. She made the most incredible cross with paper flowers. 01:28:00And at first, we were thinking, "Oh, how religious do we want this to be?" And it was all happening really quickly, days before. She made this exquisite cross with white roses, and it became something that we hung on the fence. And this is the historic fence where Wakasa died. We hung it on the fence, and it became a place where we, first of all, after the ceremony proceedings were over, the speeches -- Masako Takahashi spoke -- people took a fresh flower and laid it at the foot of the cross, and then later we had folded paper flowers, and then all of the descendants and everybody, in fact, was invited; all the participants, attendees were invited to tie a paper flower to the fence as a symbol of remembrance of the funeral, and also our own personal healing. And Claudia Katayanagi said that her family was in the flower business, and also her grandfather, I think, helped start the Buddhist church in Berkeley. 01:29:00So for her to hear the Buddhist priest chanting a sutra, and then also to tie a paper flower -- there are all these personal resonances that I didn't even know. And she said, "It just brought tears to my eyes." And she was the one who was refused the ability to film at the Topaz Museum in 2017. So she's got her boom mic, she's got her camera equipment, and she goes to the fence, and she ties a flower, and she later said, "This was what was in my mind." So these ceremonies are really powerful opportunities for people to connect with the land, the history, and bring these symbols of grief and memory. That's what we learned. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That sounds like a powerful experience there. I'm looking at a note from a back-and-forth between the Topaz Museum Board and the Wakasa Memorial Committee, which the Memorial Committee wrote on January twenty-fifth of 2022. It says, "It is important that 01:30:00ceremonies of remembrance belong to the survivors and descendants of incarceration. They should guide the ceremony, speeches and memorial programming, and related activities. This is a very important aspect of communities working through generational trauma." And I imagine that that was about planning for this April of 2022 hopeful ceremony to commemorate the eighty years after Wakasa's shooting. UKAI: Right, so it would be 2023. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, yes, I'm sorry. Thank you. UKAI: Oh no, I do that all the time. And we thought that, first of all, we might not be at a place where we could hold a ceremony in 2022. We would need that extra year, which is a year from now, actually. Duncan Williams helped us arrive at that date. And eighty was a better number than seventy-nine. So that was one of our original six steps, that we proposed a memorial of some sort to be held 01:31:00in 2023. And one thing that was quite, we felt, disrespectful was that the museum seized on this eightieth anniversary memorial ceremony as something they wanted to promote, which is good -- we all want to work together -- but if you have planning for the ceremony without addressing also how to repair not only the community hurt but also the physical artifact and the landscape, then focusing on the memorial ceremony almost seemed like, to some members of the Committee, party planning -- like, "Let's forget all the tough stuff and focus on this healing, come-together, kumbaya ceremony." Secondly, the fact that they seized on it and didn't give us credit when it was our proposal felt like they were appropriating it. Anyway, these are just an example of kind 01:32:00of the fissures that were coming up. And because they were saying something like, "We liked many of the parts of your ceremony, and we think that some of these can be incorporated into the ceremony next year." It also felt like, well, wait a minute: you are not the people who get to decide what's in our community ceremony. We didn't say this, but "You're the perpetrators. You damaged the stone. You ripped our history and our ability to be there from us, so you don't get to run the ceremony. You're the board, yes, but please respect our voices and our agency in planning this really important moment for us to reflect on the history." So that's been another tension where the board has assumed that because they're the steward, and because they have operated the museum and created it, even though there was all this 01:33:00dissension leading up to its opening because of the narrative, still feel that they need to control activities, and it's hard to, probably, adjust to a change in this earthquake in power when you've been able to kind of run things the way you want for many decades, in fact. And many Japanese Americans have been unhappy with things, but people would drop out of the project and step back, and not confront the board, as happened with the narrative and now with the stone. So all of a sudden you're in a new relationship, with a new group of people. So part of it has been to malign us as the radical fringe, as not representative, as Johnny-come-lately, as people who don't have good intentions. And so I think what we need to emphasize is that we want professionalism. We want participation. We want partnership. 01:34:00And it's for the good of the museum, and for the truth and history to come out. It's not like we're some vengeful group who is out to harm the museum. It's the opposite. But Jane Beckwith actually told somebody in Salt Lake City that the Wakasa Committee's goal is to have her fired. We have never said that, and, frankly, I think people on the Committee feel that's the Board's issue, to decide their governance. But we just want to make sure that when this history is written, we're there. This is our history, and we're tired of being excluded. And then, also, how will the stone and site be preserved? Those are our concerns. EARDLEY-PRYOR: With that, wherever things stand now between these dialogues, between the Wakasa Memorial Committee and the Topaz Museum Board, what is it that you hope will happen? What do you hope will be the result of whatever the future will be? 01:35:00UKAI: So that's a great question. From the beginning the Committee's position has been we would like full partnership in preserving our history, whether that's the text or whether it's the material history. And we thought that having town halls with community discussions about what happened, number one, and, number two, how do we move forward? What do we do with these things, such as the stone and the memorial site? How do you commemorate this history? What do you do with the artifact itself? Members of the Committee, there are some, and advisors, who believe very strongly that the museum has disqualified itself from being a steward of the stone anymore, and that, furthermore, the museum, which is in a town of 3,000, two and a half hours' drive south of Salt Lake City, is, as Masako Takahashi wrote in a column, it will become a roadside attraction. Others have said 01:36:00these small museums in small towns, because they're not run by professionals -- so it's run by a fully volunteer board; the docents are volunteers. And so it's definitely a case where there are not large resources and budgets behind it. Now, you can go into why is that the case. The Wakasa stone would have actually been an unimaginable opportunity to raise money, to bring people together, to actually have community conversations on the history and what to do with it, but instead the opposite happened. So you can say it's mismanagement of everything. But at any rate, rather than kind of going through all of that, which, again, is taken as, "Oh, you're being so negative," just trying to move forward. And so I guess your question of what do we want to happen is if you want democracy, and to have community town halls, and so on and so forth, 01:37:00it's kind of amorphous, and kind of in our world of strong messages, social media, communicating the urgency of the moment, is something like, hey, we want a town meeting or something. It doesn't really resonate. We would like full transparency and accountability. So, for example, we've been asking from September seventh and our six steps for the release of the video. We know that there are two videographers who were there. We know that the process took two hours, according to Jane Beckwith. We would like to see that. And, in fact, one of the problems with the National Park Service's report, which they produced and issued on February fourth -- so two months after their assessment in Topaz, right? -- they didn't have access to that video, so they had no basis for comparison of the before and the after. Now, that exists, and if you're going 01:38:00to have a scientific assessment you need that basic information. They didn't get it. So we would still like to see it, and the museum has refused, saying that the Wakasa Committee will edit it, and, because they were very unhappy with the livestreams, you will edit it to show us in a bad light. And we're like, put a watermark on it, you know? Get it out there. So, at any rate, that's still something that people would like to have happen. And now, I guess, one of the other things we've been saying is we would like a med -- so I'm sorry it's kind of disorganized, the way I'm presenting things, but one of the things we've always wanted is a mediator for future discussions, because we feel that just putting people in a room together may not be productive. So we've been asking for a mediator and a memorandum of agreement to set ground rules for how the discussions can go on. And the museum said a memorandum of agreement would be, in effect, surrendering their agency and their legitimacy as a board to outsiders, 01:39:00and people would line up to weaken the board, and so on and so forth, which is not true. Memorandum of agreements are very commonplace, especially in places of dispute over heritage. That's just a commonplace -- but at any rate. And a mediator, they said, "Well, we don't think we need one." At any rate, here we are -- what is it -- April fourth, about eight months after the monument was unearthed. We had one meeting with the Board -- three members of the Board and three members of the Committee, on February fifteenth, and it was going along fairly smoothly, with Satsuki Ina, Kimiko Marr, and me, as the Wakasa Memorial Committee members, and then Sherrie Hayashi, Ned Isokawa -- new Board members put on just a few months ago -- and Scott Bassett, who has been on the Board for a very long time, as their representatives. And it went along pretty smoothly, and Satsuki was the facilitator, 01:40:00and we agreed to have future meetings. We agreed that we would rotate the hosting. We talked about having a joint committee with three Board members, three Wakasa members, and four stakeholders, as a rough proposal, but anyway, we started to put infrastructure into place for future discussions. And then Ned, towards the end of the meeting, said something like, "These negative attacks on the museum must cease," or something like that, and then that just triggered, essentially, responses by Kimiko and me, which we started to cry. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Why? What was coming up for you in that moment? UKAI: Because we were being silenced. We were being silenced again, and being told that our feelings of grief and emotion and pain shouldn't be spoken of, because they make the museum look bad. And Kimiko 01:41:00was so eloquent, and she said, "You're silencing me. This meeting has been fine up until now, but I'm not happy anymore." And then Sherrie Hayashi, the Board member, said something like, "Kimiko has the right to express her feelings." And then I not so succinctly but basically said, "I feel like if the George Floyd family were told, 'Stop talking about that officer's knee on the neck,' that's how I feel. We still have grief, and for you to tell us to stop talking about what actually happened is wrong, and it's painful." And then -- I didn't expect this to happen -- I started to cry. I'm not a crier, [laughs] although listening to this you think that's all I do. But I had to put my hands over my face because I was so embarrassed. We're on Zoom. And then that triggered Kimiko. You know, when people cry that often -- anyway, it ended badly. 01:42:00So that was that. We said, "Let's have a joint press release at least so we can tell the community we met. People are watching and saying, 'Have you met yet? What's happened?'" They never responded. And then two days later this livestream -- so the first livestream was an interview between Mary Farrell, the archeologist, and me. That was in October last year, 2021. So the second livestream was in February, and Kimiko Marr was the moderator. She brought Patrick Hayashi, who was born at Topaz and is a retired UC Berkeley Dean, who's been a very thoughtful person to talk about the Wakasa Monument. Just let me digress for one minute. His mother died at age thirty-nine, and he feels that the camps killed her, because she had a weak heart, and he said she just got worn out. She died at age thirty-nine. Before she died, she told Patrick -- I guess he might have been around ten -- about 01:43:00Wakasa's murder. And he said, "This was the only Topaz story she told me." So here she is, a young mother, telling her young son about something that he didn't really know how to process, but he carried with him for his entire life. And he said, "I think she was telling me it's a racist society, be careful." He said, "Black parents give the talk to their boys," and he said, "I think my mother was doing that, but I didn't know it, and now I'm finally realizing at age seventy-eight that all of this rage I've carried inside, and this confusion about Wakasa's murder and what that meant, has all kind of bubbled to the surface." So he was on that program, and talking about the silence that was brought on his family by his mother's death, his father's grief, trying to raise three boys by himself. Masako Takahashi was on that program, and Claudia Katayanagi. And basically they just spoke very freely, and their group discussion was preceded by 01:44:00a fifteen-minute short documentary by Emiko Omori about the ceremonies we just talked about at Topaz. And she put it together beautifully, the two days, the people standing around the stone at the museum, and then the landscape at the camp. And I should just mention -- I'm kind of free associating -- that when we went the previous day, before the second ceremony at the camp, before the National Park Service started its professional study of the memorial site and what was left behind, the indentation in the ground, we went the previous day to just check out the site and kind of look around for our ceremony. The National Park Service folks were carrying these traffic cones from the parking area to the fence, and I'm going, what's that for? These kind of bright orange traffic cones. They get to the site, which is probably a five- or ten-minute 01:45:00walk from the parking area at Block Thirty-Six, which is where Wakasa lived, and they started setting them down on the ground, and then attaching this plastic taping ribbon to them. In other words, they're demarcating the area where they're going to carry out their assessment the following day. They're doing it because they don't want people to walk on it. There are going to be, I don't know, thirty people at the assessment the following day, for the ceremony. But that, for me, was just the most moving moment of the entire visit to Topaz. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Why? UKAI: Because that was a sign to me that the land was being recognized. It was being protected. This spot, which had been hidden, kept in the dark, the history repressed, where a man had died, 01:46:00where the monument had been excavated so violently, was now being finally accorded validation, respect, and legitimacy. So it's nothing I could have predicted, but walking up there and seeing them put these traffic cones and orange ribbon around it -- they're gone now, because they only put it up for that day and the following day, but it was a real symbol of professionalism has arrived, respect has arrived, and all the things that we never had for eighty years, seventy-eight years, was here. I don't know how other people saw it, but to me it was like, "Okay, now we know where it happened. Now we're going to have some professional respect and scientific records made of a history that's been in the dark for too long." EARDLEY-PRYOR: You started telling that story by connecting it to the livestream event that happened in the wake of the Zoom meeting between the Museum Board and the 01:47:00Wakasa Memorial Committee. Where do things stand now in the wake of that Zoom meeting that ended on a sour note, from your telling, and the livestream that followed it? UKAI: So the livestream was people speaking the truth: again, not the most common response in the Japanese American community, but Patrick is extremely eloquent. And he used to go to Utah schools and educators with Jane Beckwith, so he started off saying, "When we used to go, we did this," and he had a few funny anecdotes. And then he talked about how he's in pain. And he said, "People want this to end, for the controversy to end," and he said, "I don't. I think it's going to take a really long time, and I just want to sit with the pain." And I think that it's true: grieving is a process. You can't put a calendar date on it. And 01:48:00his honesty and ability to speak from his heart touched people. And he talked about, as I mentioned, the archeologists, and said, "It was cruel and cowardly for the Board to blame these archeologists, and I hope they have the integrity to apologize." I can't even remember all the things he said, but at any rate it inflamed the Board. They were very upset, being called out in public, and also by someone who's not on the committee. He's not on our committee. He's just a survivor who's an artist. He did paintings of hinotama, the fireballs. He uses this encaustic process with melted paraffin. So the joint committee and board meeting was February fifteenth, which didn't end well. The livestream is February seventeenth, which is quite raw, and then February nineteenth is the Day of Remembrance, the anniversary of Franklin 01:49:00Roosevelt's signing of Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the incarceration. And there was a program, collaborated with the National Park Service and the Smithsonian and the Heart Mountain, Wyoming Foundation and the Japanese American Confinement Site Consortium and, I believe, the JACL. At any rate, there was one panel where people kind of talked again about the Wakasa Monument. So it's been bubbling up, and Brandon Shimoda, he's a [Yonsei] poet and writer, and his Day of Remembrance program also raised it. So the board, we found out later -- David Inoue who's the Executive Director of the JACL got involved. He said, "I saw the board meeting, which was -- " The board wanted to tape it, so they shared the Zoom link, and then that automatically made it accessible to anybody who wants to see it. Then there was the livestream, of course, which is on YouTube, 01:50:00on Kimiko Marr's Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimage site, and then the Smithsonian thing, which people might have heard about. So David Inoue saw those programs and said, "I was concerned." So he called Satsuki Ina and me to get our take on things, and then he called two board members, Sherrie Hayashi and Ned Isokawa. And his message was, "They will not hold a second meeting unless you take down the livestream video," which shows how upset they were. He said, "They feel hurt by it." And I said, "That's going to be a nonstarter with the committee." And Satsuki Ina said, "Yeah, that's difficult. Nancy, how are you going to explain this?" And I said, "Yeah, you're playing telephone. David, you talk to them, then you tell me that I'm supposed to go to the committee, and this is momentous stuff. Somebody should write it down, or at least make sure that I use the right words. 01:51:00Do I say censor it? Delete it? What am I supposed to say?" So he goes back to Sherrie and Ned, and they said, "Okay, well, we should talk about it. Maybe this can be the subject of the next meeting." So I went to the Wakasa Memorial Committee, and I said the condition for a second meeting was going to be that we take it down. Everyone was really excited that the message was [laughs] not only getting through to the wider public but that it had had an effect on the board, let us say, and this whole middle part of, "No, never mind, let's not do that," kind of got lost. And, in fact, Kimiko made this graphic of the advertisement for the livestream, which says, "From desecration to consecration: community-led hearing," and on the left side shows a forklift 01:52:00and on the right side shows people praying as they chant the sutra. She used that graphic, and she put across it in big red letters "Banned." [laughs] And I'm going, oh my goodness. I'm kind of a more moderate on the committee, and I said, "If that goes out, it will destroy any chance of another meeting, because although that's their original intent, they've backed away from it." But, of course, they did say it, and there's a double standard: if the Wakasa Memorial Committee had said, "For example, we want the director fired," and then we pulled back and said, "No, never mind, that's too strong," nobody would remember the second part, right? So the board is given more leeway. At any rate, that actually has resulted in the committee kind of pulling apart, 01:53:00because, as in any kind of advocacy efforts, you're going to have very passionate people who disagree on the pace, the message, how you do it, how you deliver it. So there was discussion of should we have a guerrilla group, not a primate [laughs] but a group that gets to punch hard, and then a group that's kind of doing the slow and tedious, back-and-forth, letters saying, "Should we have a meeting? When should it be?" Et cetera. And at any rate, you also have artists in this group who are very used to having full expression of their voice, not necessarily politicians who are saying, "Oh, there's that constituency, there's this one, we've got to be -- " So at any rate, all this to say the Wakasa Committee is probably around twenty people, but there's an executive group which is around eight or nine, and we're the ones who are meeting all the time. And the meetings get really stressful, because people are venting, and they're upset, 01:54:00and you're getting insulted by the board. For example, they send out a letter saying, "We are working with the committee," but they never sent it to us, so we were left to read it in the newspaper, or somebody sends it to us and says, "Hey, did you see this?" And you go, oh, that's so insulting. Or, when they appointed board members to the Topaz Museum Board, the very people we're supposed to be negotiating with in the future, they didn't send us that press release, so I found out about it through the Berkeley JACL, which is, again, "You're promoting you're working with us and yet you're blowing us off." So at any rate, there's been so many layers of insults, and it's just been -- I'm sure that on their side, as well, there's confusion, and so on and so forth. But we feel that they are the perpetrators. They're the ones who desecrated our land, destroyed the landscape, and damaged the stone, and have been resisting engagement with us now for seven, eight months, and 01:55:00lying, frankly. And so, anyway, it's taken a toll. But Barbara Takei, who is a leader for the Tule Lake camp, has reminded us that it's a long fight, and she says things like, "This takes decades," and we're going, what? [laughs] We're not in this for twenty or thirty years. Number one, we're not going to live that long, and secondly, this is something that's -- well, the hard work of preservation, of course, does take a long time. So there are people who are like, "I want that stone out and then I'm out of here." And then there are people who are like, "I think the Topaz property should be a unit of the National Park Service, and that's going to take decades." So you have a range of opinions. You have a range of commitment. Kimiko Marr, who's a fourth-generation Yonsei, feels like "I'm the youngest one here, I'm in it for the long haul." So anyway, all this to say is Kimiko recently stepped 01:56:00back from the committee -- her name has come off the committee list -- and she is now speaking her mind, and she's now publishing all of the emails, with her commentary, on social media, and she's changed her title on her social media accounts from something like Hapa Yonsei, which is something like biracial Yonsei, fourth generation, to Angry Topaz Descendent. And what she's done is taken the verbiage of these extremely bureaucratic letters, and she's taken out the essential parts. She's put them onto social media graphics, and then adds her own commentary. And it's very visual, it's condensed, it's got her own read on things, and it's very powerful. It's attracting all kinds of attention, and although publicly it may not get 01:57:00dozens of public "likes," she's getting private emails from people saying, "I can't believe this." So for those of us who've kind of tried to maintain a civil tone, and in public not say the things that have really been happening, she's now saying, "I've been quiet for a year and a half. I can't do this anymore." So in a way, now we're at the space where people are doing what they want to do. Kimiko's out doing her thing, and being very strong, which actually places the committee in a more moderate position. We've been seen as kind of the bad guys. Now, we're kind of the adults in the room. So we're in the middle of it. I don't know how it's going to proceed. However, I would say the National Trust for Historic Preservation saw the original alert that the "50 Objects" put out on social media four days after the excavation, and then they contacted us, 01:58:00and they've been a really wonderful, professional voice of support. And one of the things that they did was say, "There's this rubric which we've been involved in, and it evolved at the Montpelier estate of James Madison," the fourth President of the United States, who ran a plantation with I think it was 300 enslaved people. And because the narrative at that plantation, essentially, in Virginia has been really white-centered, in efforts to kind of recenter the conversation there's been a movement over time to include descendants on the board, and also to create this rubric which is basically kind of like a checklist or a report card for museum curators to judge how they're doing in engaging descendants. So one of the things might be engaging descendants: 01:59:00one, we don't know any; number two, we know a few but we're still looking for their phone numbers -- I'm being a little bit glib here; number three, we have many on our board and we're in constant conversation; number four, they're helping us write the narrative. So in other words, you can kind of judge where you are as an institution in engaging descendants. And when Rob Nieweg, who is on the National Trust, shared this rubric with us, people on our committee -- Bif Brigman and Emiko Omori and Barbara Takei -- said, oh, this is something that the Japanese American community can use. Not just Topaz, but any confinement site can say, "How are we doing? Here's a rubric created that we can use." So they proposed modifying it for Japanese American communities, and that would mean adjusting some of the vocabulary. So we were working on that in January, actually. What happened is that, on a parallel track, 02:00:00the Montpelier project, the museum, just in the last two weeks there was this major blowup in the sense that the board of Montpelier rescinded an agreement to have equal representation of Black descendants and the White descendants on the board. And it means that all this progress -- for example, creating the rubric, moving ahead to be more inclusive -- has all been destroyed. And it's become a national story. And we immediately wrote a letter, the Wakasa Memorial Committee, saying, "We support you. As Japanese Americans, we understand the necessity for descendant voices. We stand with you. Let us know what we can do." So in the meantime, the American Association of Museums, the American Association of Anthropologists, various large institutional national groups have come out in support of Montpelier descendants, 02:01:00African American descendants, saying, "This is going backwards. We support the descendants." And a news article said, "The American Association of Museums and the Anthropology Association and the Wakasa Memorial Committee [laughs] support the Montpelier descendants." So we were really pleased. And our next thing is to make more open the ties that we have with other communities of color who are fighting against white supremacy, and to have a narrative that's centered on our voices and our perspective of the history. So I've put in a proposal to the Holocaust Museum, which is holding a conference this summer, on how to treat sacred objects, and the Topaz Museum treatment would be an example of how not to treat a sacred object, but it makes you think: what defines sacred? Who gets to define that? How do you read it? How do you deal with the trauma 02:02:00that staff experience when they deal with such things? In our case, it's the trauma of descendants who had no ability to have any [input on decisions made on our community heritage]. There's another conference in Japan which is occurring in June of this year, so in two or three months, in which there's a conference at Kyoto University. I think it's the Association of Japanese Migration. And they're going to have a roundtable on the Wakasa Monument, and they're having a genealogist who is trying to find descendants of Wakasa, and I'm working with them, and they're going to show Emiko's film, and I'm going to be piped in with a ten-minute PowerPoint. And then finally there's an Association of African American Museums, which is having a conference in Florida -- I believe it's in August -- and we've been invited to present on the topic of handling traumatic objects. So it's kind of a slow, 02:03:00evolving process, but I feel like we're gaining momentum. We're learning. We're building solidarity ties. And I think this Wakasa story and the monument, as you said, it's opened a wound, but it's also created opportunities for connection and building on the story, and making it into something that will eventually teach, we hope, others, not only about Topaz, but about American history. It's a case study. It's a case study, yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I want to transition to a conclusion for us today. I think you've brought things up very much to the present and the near future. I'd love to hear your thoughts about reflections and legacy, particularly with regard to healing. And to open that discussion I'll ask, do you think healing is possible? 02:04:00UKAI: Healing. I feel we're far from that, but I'm just speaking for me. Some people don't think there are any wounds, or they think that put a Band-Aid on it, or they're thinking -- I mean, I don't know. I don't want to speak for other people. For me, what is healing is meeting other people. And Patrick Hayashi said, "Many people have said that this Wakasa Monument is dividing the community." He said, "There have been fractures in our community ever since the war that have always been papered over and not talked about. And what the Wakasa Monument is doing is allowing these disagreements and these fractures to be out in the open, and to deal with them. And unless we do that, we're not going to heal." And I think that's really true. And in dealing with the truth, we're making friends. We're able to talk about things which we didn't even know were topics before, 02:05:00or if we did it was very inchoate and kind of undefined. But now, finding out facts about what happened is healing. And so I guess my answer to you would be truth, accountability, participation in our own history is, I think, a step to healing. That's where it's going to come from. More lies, more coverups, that's just going to result in more frustration and festering of this decades-long example of injustice. And I think, going back to your comment about pilgrimage, I had said that in September seventh one of our Wakasa Committee's six steps was to have a memorial ceremony. And we didn't know really what that meant, but we thought, "It's the eightieth anniversary. Let's come together and commemorate this, and we'll figure out the details." And we're very far from it, right now, one year out. However, 02:06:00Kimiko Marr, who has a project which organizes memorial pilgrimages, Barbara Takei, who is a leader of the Tule Lake Pilgrimage Committee, Bif Brigman [who has been on the Minidoka Pilgrimage planning committee for nearly twenty years] (these are people on our Wakasa Memorial Committee) and all of us who attended pilgrimages, and documented them in different ways, it was quite obvious: next year needs to have a pilgrimage. It's not just going to be a one-day memorial ceremony. It's going to be a pilgrimage, multiple days. Now the people in Japan want to come. They said, "Please talk about it in our conference about your ceremony," and I say, "Oh, well, there's not really much to talk about right now, but what we envision is a multi-day pilgrimage to the site." And hopefully the truth and the story will be out, and we can really think and reflect 02:07:00upon the history, and come together as a community of not only Japanese Americans but all allies who want to be there and acknowledge and celebrate our strength when we come together. So what's interesting is that the Topaz Museum, it's their property, right? They own it. And somebody said, "Well, what if they don't agree? What do you do? What if they don't let you on the land?" And it's like, are they going to really not let Japanese American descendants onto the place of their own national family heritage? Are they going to be there, keeping us literally out from our own landscape, after desecrating our monument, on the place where our families talked about the murder of James Wakasa? Patrick Hayashi says, "This is the story of Topaz that parents pass down to their children." And what we're finding 02:08:00is so many people writing -- one women in Seattle said, "When I talked to my grandmother and I knew she was getting near the end, I asked her to write down her memories, and she wrote about Topaz, the killing of James Wakasa." So this has brought out all these ghosts, spirits, things coming out of the ground, also stories which, by knowing them and thinking about them and knowing the presence and importance of them in people's lives, we can connect with our ancestors. And then by making sure that an honest narrative is created -- which includes the video, because now this is part of the violence: the fact of the violence enacted on it is part of the history, so we can't cover that up. That's part of it. In fact, that's the story of it. So that's, I think, part of the healing, as well. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Thank you. UKAI: And one last thing, I think, is really interesting is the permanence, 02:09:00the weight, the materiality of the rock, okay? It's a stone. We think it's a thousand pounds. [John Lambert, the stone conservator retained by the Topaz Museum in 2022, estimated a weight of 2,400 pounds in his written report to the museum.] It's gigantic. It's really interesting because it connects us to the Japanese reverence for stones. Those are used in Japan as memorials. There are centuries-year-old stones in public parks which say, "Here is where the Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu wrote his battle plan." It's a rock. Japanese have the Shinto belief in inanimate things having spirits. So one of the supporters of the Topaz Museum said, "Except for its extraordinary symbolism, it's remarkably ordinary," and that, to me, shows how far we descendants are removed from our own ancestral culture and appreciation of stones. Think of the stone gardens in Japan, right? And it's also like we've acquired this kind of white or European or Western sense 02:10:00of the landscape being something to be conquered and owned, but not appreciating the essence of it. And that it was here before us, and will be here after us. So you have that stone as a material, but then you also have the paper flowers, which have so touched people, these ephemeral paper flowers, which after the funeral were burned, because they were ceremonial objects. But they were things which people folded in memory of Wakasa, and we still did it in the ceremony last year. And, frankly, it's April fourth. In seven days, it will be the seventy-ninth anniversary of Wakasa's death. And Wakasa Memorial Committee now has this social media campaign for everyone to fold flowers, and to send a photograph of your flowers, or you with your flowers, or whatever, to us by the eighth, so in four days, and then we will share those photographs with people on April eleventh. And what I'm thinking we might do is have 02:11:00a one- or two-minute musical soundtrack, maybe "Someone" -- what is the song, the Gershwin song? "Someone to Watch Over Me." I think the sentiment is nice, and Wakasa might have known that song. It was in the air, right? And maybe "Someone to Watch Over Me," maybe we play that with lots of photographs of people holding their paper flowers. [The video of this event used an instrumental of "Rock of Ages," which was the hymn played at Wakasa’s funeral in 1943.] EARDLEY-PRYOR: Is there anything else that you want to share that we haven't covered in your oral history? UKAI: I don't know, and I just thank you, Roger. I don't know if we're in the second inning or the fourth inning [laughs] of a baseball game that might go into extra innings, so I can only say what my perspective is now. I'm really hoping that we can 02:12:00come together as a community to be honest, and maybe have a truth and reconciliation town meeting where people speak with truth about how they feel. And I think that would be something that would be good, and we'll see. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I'm really grateful for -- UKAI: So thank you. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Thank you. I'm so grateful for you speaking your truth, and sharing how you feel. It's been wonderful to be a part of this with you, so thank you. UKAI: I feel like I'm one small voice. I really do. I'm not saying that to be falsely humble. Again, when you think of what our ancestors sacrificed, we're just doing minimal, what we can do. And we live in a difficult world, with climate change, and COVID's continuing, but we can only do what we think is right. EARDLEY-PRYOR: All right. I'm going to conclude our recording here. Thank you again, Nancy. UKAI: Thank you. [End of Interview]