U.S. military display at the Brigham City Museum exhibit (Photo: Patti Hirahara)
‘Uncovering the Journey’ tells the unknown story of Box Elder County Japanese pioneers.
By Patti Hirahara, P.C. Contributor
The “Uncovering the Journey: Japanese American Pioneers in Box Elder County” exhibit, curated by staff at the Brigham City Museum in Utah, was honored recently by the Utah Museums Assn. with its Award for Excellence in Exhibit Creation and Community Engagement and the Utah Historical Society with its Outstanding Achievement Award for 2025. The exhibit has also been nominated for multiple state and national awards for excellence.
The exhibit, which held its opening reception during the first Day of Remembrance program in Brigham City, Utah, in February and ran through June, tells an unique story of pioneers who came from Japan in the early 1900s and settled in Box Elder, Weber and Salt Lake Counties.
They became part of the local community and when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942, Utah was fortunate to be outside of the Exclusion Zone of the states of California, Oregon, Washington and a portion of Arizona.
Persons of Japanese descent who lived in Utah were not incarcerated and could continue their everyday lives and accepted family members to relocate to Utah before they were to be put into American concentration camps.
This year marked the 80th anniversary of the closing of the camps. The resettlement of people who were incarcerated had an important decision to make when they were released in 1945.
There were several families from Heart Mountain, Wyo., and Topaz, Utah, that took the opportunity to resettle in Utah for a second chance at a better life.
One such person whose family resettled in Brigham City in 1945 at the age of 14 was Norio Uyematsu, a Korean War veteran and a 1948 graduate of Box Elder High School.
In 2022, Uyematsu, then 91, wondered if the Brigham City Museum would consider doing an exhibit about the Japanese pioneers of Box Elder County and tell the story of Earl G. Anderson and his courageous role of offering six Japanese families a place to live and work on his farm in Brigham City in 1945.
Uyematsu’s proposal soon became a reality, as the Brigham City Museum created a plan for a 2,000-square-foot exhibit that would become “Uncovering the Journey.”
The exhibit’s debut in February at the first Day of Remembrance program, held in collaboration with the Wasatch Front North JACL chapter, became the biggest event in Brigham City’s history for the Japanese American community.
According to Brigham City Museum Director Alana Blumenthal, “Two-thousand-seven-hundred-fifty-six people attended the exhibition — that’s about 1,000 more than our average attendance from February-June since 2021. We are grateful to the mayor, city council and all our incredible colleagues at the Brigham City Corp. who supported this vision.
“While creating the exhibit, the Brigham City Museum received many more photos and family histories than they could fit into the exhibit,” Blumenthal continued. “But the exhibition is the beginning of the journey, not the end.”
The museum has created an online portal of images, videos and oral histories and is still seeking input as it grows its collections and resources for future exhibits.
Museum staff also acknowledge the generous support of the Honeyville Buddhist Churches, the local Japanese families who brought personal stories through photographs, artifacts and items for visitors to see and the monetary donors who helped finance the endeavor.
The Brigham City Museum is now in talks to create a Japanese American History Endowment to help preserve the collection and develop the creation of future exhibits for years to come.
Uyematsu is extremely proud that JACL could help contribute to this first in Brigham City and tell a story that needed to be told. As a collaborative effort, the success of this exhibit proves that great things happen when local businesses and community members work together.
To view the full “Uncovering the Journey: Japanese American Pioneers in Box Elder County” 3-D exhibit, visit https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=gz91ao8SepW.
