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James Wakasa Commemoration, Tues, 4/11, 1-2 pm @ Peace Plaza Press Release by the Wakasa Memorial Committee: “A public remembrance ceremony will be held in the Japantown Peace Plaza to honor the memory of James Hatsuaki Wakasa and all who died in the WWII American Concentration Camps and the soldiers from the camps killed while fighting for freedom overseas…Mr. Wakasa and all people of Japanese descent in the Bay Area were taken first to the Tanforan Assembly Center and then to the Topaz Concentration Camp in central Utah. In September 2020, an astonishing discovery at Topaz solved a 78-year-old mystery: the location of the murder of James Hatsuaki Wakasa who, while on an evening stroll with his dog, was shot and killed by a guard on April 11th, 1943 by a single bullet to his heart from Guard Tower Eight, 315 yards away - a distance of more than three football fields. This was not a warning shot. This was target practice. A large stone memorial erected by Mr. Wakasa's friends at the spot where he was murdered, was ordered destroyed by the government to erase memories of the killing. In defiance, the inmates did not destroy the monument. Instead they buried it leaving an inconspicuous bit exposed to be discovered by future generations…A hand-drawn map of the murder spot was found in the National Archives by Nancy Ukai and published on her website, 50 Objects. Two archeologists, Mary Farrell and Jeff Burton, read the piece and, hoping to find traces of the monument, decided to drive from Lone Pine, California to Delta, Utah. Using a 300-foot measuring tape and following the map, to their great amazement they located the buried stone, long thought to have been destroyed according to War Relocation Authority (WRA) records.” Hear more about this monument at this previously recorded meeting of the Wakasa Memorial Committee where Nancy Ukai visits Japan “In Search of James Wakasa.”
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