ther dismissed or the defendants were found to be not guilty. One such incident occurred April 11, 1943, at Topaz, by sentry Gerald B. Philpott. James Hatsuki Wakasa was shot and killed on April 11. Wakasa was a graduate of Keio College in Tokyo, and he came to the US in 1903 and studied for two years at the University of Wisconsin. During WWI, he was a civilian cooking instructor at Camp Dodge in Iowa. According to the Army report, Wakasa (who was then in his 60’s) was shot for trying to escape and also for ignoring warnings from two soldiers at the guard towers “while attempting to crawl through the fence”. It was a half an hour before sunset when he was shot in an isolated corner of the camp. It was not until 45 minutes later, after informing a WRA staff member, and after his body was removed, that the shooting became public. The WRA later determined that Wakasa was inside the camp during the shooting, where a large bloodstain marked the spot five feet inside the fence. A postmortem examination of the entry and exit wounds found that Wakasa was facing the soldier who shot him. On April 28, at Fort Douglas, Utah, court-martial proceedings were held for the soldier who had killed Wakasa. He was found “not guilty”. (Taylor 95-97) For many of the elder Japanese –Americans, the WWII internment campswere a defining experience. Grace O*censored*a began talking about Topaz in 1961. It started when one of her son’s high school teachers assigned him to do a report on the internment camps. Part of the project included Grace recounting to the class stories from her three years in camp in Topaz, Utah. Since then, O*censored*a has collected filing cabinets full of letters from her father, photos and books about President Roosevelt and his Executive Order 9066 that sent Japanese-Americans to the internment camps. O*censored*a , a daughter of Issei parents, now often speaks to the sc...
