A Japanese Place in Utah History: Dugway Proving Ground's Japanese Village

Abstract

"The M69/M69X bomb was designed to lodge in the most flammable part of the building-the ceiling beams." - U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground, Historical Fact Sheet, p. 1. "Initially, it often seemed a home was unaffected, until the windows began to shine from within and then glowed like a paper lantern' from a ball of fire that sprouted tentacles that danced out from beneath the eaves to envelope the house until it crumbled inward upon itself." - Richard B. Frank, describing an M-69 in the Tokyo air raid of March 9-10, 1945 Downfall pp. 7-9. "And, when I saw Japanese Village [at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah], it was burning. It went. It was gone. [It] was built in such a, you know, material, nothing like German Village, it was burnt. It burnt to the ground. All you find out there was a few pieces of wire, or something like that. Maybe some nails. That's all that's left of Japanese Village." - Ethnographic Interviewee [name withheld]. Dugway Proving Ground is a U.S. Army post roughly 90 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, in Tooele County. It is self-contained and has "all of the attributes of any small town in America" according to its official Newcomer and Visitor Guide, and is located between the Salt Lake Desert and Dugway Valley in Tooele County. The gas station-less road from Salt Lake City to Dugway Proving Ground (a site larger than the state of Rhode Island) is unfenced open range filled with wildlife, cattle, blind curves, and vision-impeding hillsides.' Isolated more than twenty miles beyond the gate of Dugway Proving Ground lies the site of German-Japanese Village, the site of WW-II testing of incendiary weaponry. Even today special clearance is required to get to the testing site. One member of the chemical corps that served at Dugway during the time of German and Japanese Village, in an ethnographic interview, called the ride to German-Japanese Village "the most boring road in the world" and told of people frequently falling asleep on evening trips. This testing site, amid an interconnecting labyrinth of seemingly nameless and featureless roadways, is difficult to locate even with online maps. It's no small wonder that even employees interviewed about their memories of German and Japanese Village rarely seemed to have had reason to go that far out onto the site.