Dave Tatsuno (born Masaharu Tatsuno August 18, 1913 – January 26, 2006, in

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

) was a Japanese American businessman who documented life in his family's internment camp during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

. His footage was later compiled into the film '' Topaz'' (named for the

Topaz War Relocation Center The Topaz War Relocation Center, also known as the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz) and briefly as the Abraham Relocation Center, was an American concentration camp which housed Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants who had come t ...

where he was confined). The film was placed in the

National Film Registry The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation, each selected for its historical, cultural and aesthetic contributions since the NFPB’s inception ...

, part of the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

, in 1997. Tatsuno was a 1936 graduate of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. After graduation, he went to work at Nichi Bei Bussan, a San Francisco department store his father established in 1902. At Topaz, Tatsuno was put in charge of the camp's co-operative store. Upon Tatsuno's release from Topaz in 1945, he reopened his store but moved his family to San Jose in 1948 after his 7-year-old son died during a routine tonsillectomy. Besides being a prominent civic leader, he spent most of his post-war years running Nichi Bei Bussan and had opened a second one in San Jose after relocating his family there. The San Jose store is run by one of his daughters while San Francisco store closed in 1997 after the death of his brother Masateru "Tut". Tatsuno was predeceased by his wife Alice (died in 2005; née Okada), whom he married in 1938, and a son. He was survived by their five other children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

References

External links

Photograph
of the Tatsuno family in the Topaz camp.

of Dave Tatsuno preparing to evacuate to the Topaz camp. *
"American Topics: Rare Look at Internment Camp"
''The International Herald Tribune'', January 27, 1997. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tatsuno, Dave 1913 births 2006 deaths American people of Japanese descent Businesspeople from San Francisco Japanese-American internees University of California, Berkeley alumni 20th-century American businesspeople

See also

References

External links