Excellence in Written Reporting, Features
Kori Suzuki, “The murder, the museum and the monument,” High Country News
ABOUT THE WORK: Our narrative feature, “The murder, the monument and the museum,” takes readers inside the discovery of a long-lost Japanese American monument and the fight it ignited over historical memory. The piece opens in 1943 at a federal detention camp called the Topaz Relocation Center, deep in the central Utah desert. That year, an American soldier shot and killed an unarmed Japanese immigrant named James Wakasa as he walked along the fence. Furious, a group of prisoners built a monument in Wakasa’s name. The federal government sent in soldiers in riot gear and ordered the monument destroyed.
Eighty years later, two archaeologists and a historical researcher found the monument still buried in the desert. But what came next wasn’t a moment of rediscovery or healing. Instead, the museum tasked with preserving Topaz excavated the monument without involving any of the camp’s survivors or their descendants — repeating, in the eyes of some Japanese Americans, the same patterns of violence and erasure.
High Country News spent more than a year reporting on these events in both Utah and California, where most descendants of Topaz live now. Through dozens of interviews, hours of recorded meetings and hundreds of pages of public records, we pieced together how the monument’s discovery and excavation unfolded. But our narrative also goes further, examining what it means to unearth pieces of history, the troubled legacy of museums and archaeology, and how remembering itself is an act of power.
What emerges is a story about how the United States is still uncovering the violence and history of the last network of federal detention camps it built — and how the country is struggling to reckon with what it finds.
Kori Suzuki is a Japanese American journalist and photographer based in San Diego, California. He is a current staff reporter at KPBS, San Diego's NPR and PBS station, where he covers a regional beat in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands including South San Diego County and the Imperial Valley. His personal work focuses on the environment, race and identity. He was born and raised in the Bay Area.
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