Ogden cemetery’s Japanese section assessed to help with preservation efforts
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- Patrick Kawashima of Ogden, right, and Tami Endow of Roy help with an effort to assess the headstones in the Japanese section of the Ogden City Cemetery on Friday, May 5, 2023.
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- Headstones in the Japanese section of the Ogden City Cemetery, photographed Friday, May 5, 2023.
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- Christopher Merritt of the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, right, uncovers a headstone embedded into the ground at the Ogden City Cemetery on Friday, May 5, 2023. A contingent of volunteers gathered to help assess the headstones in the Japanese section of the cemetery.
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- A headstone in the Japanese section of the Ogden City Cemetery, photographed Friday, May 5, 2023.
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- Amy Barry of the Utah State Division of History addresses a group of volunteers at the Ogden City Cemetery on Friday, May 5, 2023. The group gathered to help assess the headstones in the Japanese section of the cemetery.
OGDEN — Cemeteries aren’t just places to mourn lost loved ones — they contain history.
And in a bid to preserve part of the Ogden City Cemetery to keep the past alive, a contingent recently gathered to help inventory the Japanese section of the graveyard, where immigrants from Japan and their descendants are buried. The aim of the ongoing effort is to get a gauge of the condition of the headstones with an eye to fixing those in need of repair and collecting the information inscribed on them.
“The moment you lose a headstone, we lose the last memory of that person,” said Chris Merritt, preservation officer with the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, which is aiding the effort. “That person starts becoming more and more lost to time. I think that these tombstones are people.”
About 20 volunteers, most from the Japanese-American community, took part, including former Utah Sen. Jani Iwamoto of Salt Lake City, aiming, at least initially, to document the condition of 200 of the 2,000 or more headstones in the Japanese section of the cemetery here. They were to upload the information they gathered, plus pictures, to an online database.
“We want to know what’s out there,” said Amy Barry, program manager of the Utah Division of State History Cemeteries and Burials Program and also a participant in the May 5 effort. Then officials will review the information and start prioritizing next steps, likely making additional forays to the cemetery to document more headstones.
Jeanette Misaka of Salt Lake City took part. Members of her husband’s family are buried in the Ogden cemetery. “Preserving history — I think that’s very important for our posterity,” she said.
Tami Endow also helped. “My parents are right there,” she said, taking a break from reviewing a headstone and pointing to a nearby section of the cemetery.
The Ogden effort complements previous assessments of the Chinese and Japanese sections of the Salt Lake City Cemetery. The initiatives, Iwamoto said, are part of broader efforts focused on “telling the stories of all Utahns.”
Merritt said railroad work in the late 1800s initially drew many Japanese people here. “Ogden was the Japanese center of Utah because of the railroad,” he said.
People from China initially accounted for a large chunk of the immigrants helping with construction of the rail system in the U.S. West. But the Japanese contingent grew, he said, after passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which limited the entry of Chinese immigrants. Looking through U.S. Census records of Ogden in the early 1900s, “there’s just page after page” containing the names of those with heritage extending back to Japan, he said.
Aside from recording the condition of headstones, volunteers in the Ogden effort also took pictures of them, in part to document the writing they contain, much of it in kanji, one of the scripts of the Japanese language.
“I’m surprised how much information is on the stones. What you learn from that is so valuable,” Barry said, gesturing to one headstone with a lamb that appeared to memorialize a child. “There’s actually a lot going on in here.”