Photograph of Harold Hayashi
Photograph of Harold Hayashi
Usage conditions apply
- Description
- This is a photo of a young Harold Hayashi, son of Ryuichi and Margaret Hayashi; brother of Doris (born c. 1920) and Gladys (born c. 1922). They lived in Berkeley before being sent to Tanforan Assembly Center in the spring of 1942 and then moved to the Topaz Relocation Center.
- The Hayashi family was sent to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. This camp was just one prison camp in the United States; the rest were in California, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Arkansas, and Idaho.
- The Topaz camp was 19,800 acres, and it was used for agriculture and light industry and animal husbandry. It was opened on September 11, 1942 and closed on October 31, 1945.
- The camp was designed to hold 9,000 prisoners in 42 blocks. There was a barbed wire fence enclosing the entire 19,000 acres of land. Topaz had a community gym, schools, libraries, a canteen, churches, a post office, a fire station, and a 15-acre garden.
- The weather conditions were dismal at Topaz. The pine floors in the cabins dried out and let the wind in, and buildings were not sufficiently heated, cooled, or insulated; therefore sickness was rampant and common.
- Almost all of Topaz's prisoners came from the San Francisco Bay Area. The rest came from Tanforan Assembly Center, Santa Anita, WRA camps, and Hawai'i.
- James Hatsuki Wakasa was shot and killed by a guard in Topaz for walking too close to a fence on April 11, 1943. He was 63-years-old at the time of his death. When the news was printed in the Topaz Times, the prisoner-run newspaper, it was highly censored and details changed over time. The funeral for Wakasa drew 1,700 attendants.
- After this incident, the administration loosened the military guards' duties and allowed people to go outside of the camp on excursions to places like swimming holes.
- Fred Korematsu was imprisoned in Topaz, and his case traveled up to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion order. Mitsuye Endo also took a case to court and claimed that it was unjust for her to be incarcerated in a prison camp solely based on her race. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor in December of 1944 and the day before, President Roosevelt announced camps would close in 1945.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Object Name
- photo
- photograph
- date made
- c. 1942
- place made
- United States: California, Berkeley
- Physical Description
- ink (overall material)
- paper (overall material)
- Measurements
- overall: 1 1/8 in x 3/4 in; 2.8575 cm x 1.905 cm
- ID Number
- 2016.0105.01
- accession number
- 2016.0105
- catalog number
- 2016.0105.01
- Credit Line
- Willard Middle School, through Michael Williams, Archivist
- subject
- World War II
- Japanese Americans
- World War II
- Japanese American Internment
- See more items in
- Political and Military History: Armed Forces History, Japanese American
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
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