Life at Manzanar: Pete Mitsui

Pete Mitsui and his brother Saturo (Sat) Mitsui played for the Valley Tire 1939 City Champion softball team. (Courtesy of Willie Tamura)

 

“Mrs. Tamura, can George come out and play?”

We can be certain those were not the exact words Pete Mitsui uttered, but the request took place nonetheless. The year was 1942. The place was the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, where the Mitsui and Tamura families were being housed after they were forcibly relocated from their homes in the San Fernando Valley.

“Pete Mitsui came to our house [at Manzanar], asked myself and my two brothers if we wanted to play baseball,” George Tamura recalled years later. “He [was] forming a team.”1

Mitsui’s contribution to West Coast Japanese American baseball began well before 1942. In 1930, he helped establish the San Fernando Nippons, an amateur Japanese American baseball team who played their brand of the American sport in “the Valley” northwest of downtown Los Angeles.2

During World War II, when his family and his teammates’ families were incarcerated at Manzanar, a military-enforced concentration camp established to segregate Japanese Americans because of their perceived potential loyalty to the enemy, Mitsui did it again. This natural leader gathered his friends from the San Fernando Aces (the Nippons’ new name) and established the Manzanar Aces from San Fernando, one of the best “A” level teams at any of the 10 Japanese American detention centers in and around California where baseball was played behind barbed wire.3

Pete Mitsui was born Mitsushi Mitsui on July 19, 1914, in the Hiroshima prefecture of Japan, in the mountain village of Yoshiwa, located west of Hatsukaichi. He acquired the nickname “Pete” in the United States after high school. His father, Ichiji, who was born in Japan on August 11, 1882,4 had come to America when he was 20 years old. Ichiji initially worked as a farmer and rancher in Hawaii and in California and then served as a railroad laborer in either Colorado or Arizona before he returned to farm labor in the Los Angeles area.

In 1912, Ichiji traveled to Japan where he married Hatsumi Fujii. After Hatsumi became pregnant, they intended to return to California to raise their family. However, the return trip was delayed when Hatsumi became ill; they did not move to the United States until Mitsushi (Pete) was around two or three months old. Pete, along with his parents, would be known in the United States as Issei, or Japanese-born immigrants.

Over the ensuing years in the San Fernando Valley, Mitsui’s father worked various jobs at the Sunkist fruit packing houses while his mother raised Pete and his three younger siblings: his sister, Chiyemi (b. 1916); a brother, Satoru (b. 1921); and the youngest girl, Mitsuko (b. 1924). The family moved their portable, rebuildable, wooden house from fertile farm to fertile farm in the North Los Angeles area. The children helped their parents by harvesting and selling cantaloupes, tomatoes, cabbage, and watermelons in the LA central market—“truck farming” it was called. They had horses but no tractors. In the Valley, most Issei and Nisei (persons born to Issei in the US) either labored in citrus and walnut groves or grew and sold cut flowers.

Mitsui started elementary school in the town of Zelzah, California, which was later renamed Northridge, and finished in Pacoima when his family moved there. He attended San Fernando High School. Although Mitsui did not start school until age 8, he graduated from high school alongside the rest of his age cohort when he was 17, in 1932. “I studied pretty hard, and I used to get good grades,” he recalled later during an interview he granted for an oral history project conducted in 1993 by the California State University Department of Asian American Studies.

With regard, however, to the Japanese language school he attended, Mitsui told his Cal State interviewer a different story: “They taught Japanese on Saturdays. A lot of places in LA went after school but we went on Saturdays.” Then he added, with a roguish grin, “We went there to learn Japanese, but we went there to eat lunch and play baseball . . . [W]e didn’t learn much.”

Interest in baseball burgeoned on the West Coast when Mitsui was a boy. The Pacific Coast League—a professional baseball league that many have called a third major league—had begun in 1903. With the mild West Coast climate, the teams in the PCL typically played a 200-game season. The Japanese community joined the baseball craze. Japanese American teams sprang up all through the southwest corner of the country, while American baseball was still steeped with discrimination.5 Mitsui would play a key role in his community’s zeal.

When he was old enough, Mitsui joined the Los Angeles Nippons, an area-wide all-star team that barnstormed throughout Southern California and had even once faced off against “Larrupin’” Lou Gehrig and “Bustin’” Babe Ruth during their West Coast exhibition tour in 1927. Then in 1930, at just 16 years old, Mitsui became one of the original members of the San Fernando Nippons. (In 1934, those Nippons changed their name to the San Fernando Aces and joined the Japanese Athletic Union (JAU), which had been established in 1931.) Mitsui, a perennial all-star pitcher and hitter, played with the Aces for many years against teams scattered throughout the area from Terminal Island in the Port of Long Beach (46 miles southeast of San Fernando) to Oxnard (56 miles west).6

Mitsui made his high school varsity baseball team as a pitcher during his senior year, after which he was awarded a varsity letter for his excellence in the sport.7 When he finished high school, Mitsui intended to attend UCLA. However, the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression and Mitsui’s father needed him to stay home and help work the farm. Mitsui chose to honor his father’s wishes. “Working hard on the farm never bothered me,” he said.

Mitsui’s friend and teammate, George Tamura, spoke admiringly of him: “He used to be a baseball star at San Fernando High School. He was an all-Valley selection and best hitter and everything.”8

During that time period, Mitsui also played on town merchant-sponsored baseball teams, which were composed mostly of Caucasians, and on an all-Japanese softball team that reigned as city champs in 1939. “At least I didn’t have to work much on Sundays,” Mitsui said.

His brother Satoru (nicknamed “Sat” or “Sats”), who was seven years Pete’s junior and a fine athlete himself (baseball, football, and track when he attended San Fernando High School), played for the Aces for five years and the LA Nippons for one, according to the camp newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press.9 The two brothers were both JAU all-stars in 1937.10

Disaster nearly struck in 1937. One night, after dropping off his friends following a party they attended, Mitsui was headed home in his 1936 Ford V-8 when a horse bolted out of the darkness in front of him. Mitsui was driving fast. The car struck the horse, hit a bank, and flipped over, four tires pointing to the sky. Somehow, Mitsui climbed out of the car and a neighbor took him to San Fernando Hospital. He escaped serious injury.11

 

 

Disaster of a different sort brewed across the Pacific. As Japan engaged in increasingly active and aggressive expansion, tensions rose. In what must have felt like an annual ritual after he turned 18 years of age, Mitsui was ordered to appear before the Japanese council to reassert his American residency and to obtain a waiver from Japanese military service.

Baseball’s popularity in San Fernando really peaked when pro ball came to town.12 The Seattle Rainiers, who were the Pacific Coast League champs in 1939-41 and who regularly trained in warmer climates before their regular season began, chose San Fernando’s Recreation Park for spring training in 1940-42, and again in 1945-46. Once and future major-league players on the Rainiers’ roster, including Lloyd Brown, Jo-Jo White, Dick Barrett, and future Hall-of-Famer Earl Averill, entertained the local fans before they returned to Seattle.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, upending the lives of the Mitsui family. “We gathered in Burbank,” Mitsui recalled. “We didn’t ride a train. We got on buses. We got herded into these buses and directly into Manzanar.”

Detainees were allowed to carry only two bags each. In most cases, families gave away their possessions, or sold them at dreadful discounts. The Mitsui family was fortunate to have a friend, Pete Andres, who owned Valley Tire, the largest tire shop in San Fernando and the sponsor of Mitsui’s softball team. Andres sympathized with the Mitsuis’ plight and stored their belongings or sold them on their behalf for fair market value during their incarceration.

With the harsh reality setting in that Mitsui and many other Japanese Americans were being detained in camp barracks in the desert landscape of Manzanar for an unknown length of time, Mitsui welcomed baseball as a way to increase morale. Before the end of 1942, the men and boys in camp had formed themselves into nearly 100 teams and 12 leagues.14 That’s 1,500 young men! The women, too, formed teams and leagues. As the population grew, more and more baseball and softball fields were built. Population hit its peak of 10,046 in Manzanar on September 22, 1942,15 and there were at least 10 fields according to a report filed during the rehabilitation of the site.16

In the summer of 1942, Mitsui’s San Fernando Aces tallied 20 wins against one loss, the best record in Manzanar’s “National League.”17 Right-hander Pete Mitsui hurled two of those wins while his brother Sat, a southpaw,18 won 10 games for the Aces, including a one-hitter and a two-hitter.19 The team’s third pitcher, Hiro Hino, picked up the other eight wins. At the end of the season, 10 Aces players received all-star recognition, including Sat (first team) and Pete (honorable mention).20

Mitsui worked double-duty that summer as he also coached the Windy City Slickers in the “Manzanar League.” “[The] Slickers improved since Pete Mitsui took over the coaching job,” boasted the Manzanar Free Press.21

In October 1942—“just to get out” and make a little extra money—Mitsui took a work assignment at an Idaho Falls sugar beet farm under the camp’s temporary agricultural furlough employment program, where he “topped the beets,” removing the leafy green tops from the roots before the beets were stored or shipped. (Sugar beets were used to produce the industrial alcohol that was vital in the production of both synthetic rubber and ammunition.)22 When the growing season ended, he returned to camp.

On February 20, 1943, Mitsui married Ayako Muto, a seamstress in Manzanar whose dream of one day becoming a fashion designer was shattered by the war.23 Mitsui had known Ayako and her family since his school days. Born on April 10, 1920, Ayako was six years younger than Pete. According to Mitsui, their wedding was the first one held at the Manzanar camp, after which the newlyweds moved to new quarters in Block 8. Ayako’s sister, Kuniko, announced her engagement to Sgt. Kuni Nakao, who was serving overseas, at the same time Ayako announced hers.24

After the wedding, Mitsui was back to his organizing ways. He served on the advisory board that produced the first Fourth of July carnival for the residents,25 and he was installed as the men’s athletic director for the newly formed Young Buddhist Association.26 Not only did Mitsui play for the YBA fastpitch softball team that summer, but he also was selected as a pitcher for the league all-star game held in September.27 Across the diamond, Pete’s brother Satoru, who played for the Yogores team that season, was the first baseman for the opposing all-star squad.

In February 1943, the War Relocation Authority issued its much-maligned “loyalty questionnaire” to the residents at all the camps. Specifically, Question 27 (which asked if the respondent was willing to serve in the US armed forces) and Question 28 (which asked if the respondent was willing to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese Emperor) were perceived as confusing and a poorly conceived attempt to determine loyalty.

Mitsui answered “yes” to the first question, but “no” to the second. He explained, “If I had said ‘Yes’ to that question, I would have been a man without a country. I would not be a US citizen and [would] forsake Japanese citizenship. How can they force me to do that?” The practical outcome was that, unlike those who responded “No” and “No,” Mitsui was eligible to leave camp permanently, provided he could show evidence that he had secured a satisfactory job and housing.

Instead, he and Ayako elected to go to the Paul labor camp near Burley, Idaho, on a temporary work furlough.28 Officially named Camp Rupert, the Paul camp was constructed in 1943 and housed more than 500 Italian and German prisoners of war in 1944.29 Years later, their daughter Patti said her parents told her that the Idaho adventure was their honeymoon.30 In reality, the newlyweds were in Idaho to work. “We learned a lot of things,” Mitsui bragged. “I skinned a sheep, we thinned beets, we thrashed alfalfa, we baled alfalfa, and we castrated pigs. Oh boy, we learned everything.”

After their furlough, the couple returned to Manzanar, and Mitsui was back to his City Hall job—and baseball. As told in fuller detail in another article in this publication, eight top-level teams competed for the Manzanar Baseball Association crown in 1943. The games were played on the League Baseball Field, the largest field in Manzanar, built to major-league specifications, with two benches, four bleachers, and plenty of standing room for spectators.31 League play ran from September 1943 through January 1944. On Thanksgiving Day in 1943, Jimmie and George Tamura, Ben Yoshiwara, and George Sugawara represented the Aces in the all-star game.

The Aces and Sears nine successfully navigated through the first two rounds of the postseason to set up the duel for the championship. George and Jimmie Tamura, Mas Nakadaira, and Billy Sugawara led the Aces to a 13-3 win over Sears to capture the banner in February 1944, making them the best baseball team behind barbed wire.

Mitsui played little or no baseball after that championship run. He and Ayako went on another lengthy furlough later that year, on that occasion to a farm in Ontario, Oregon. (According to one report, 10,000 Japanese Americans who resided outside the evacuation zones avoided confinement but were employed in essential wartime trades, such as harvesting sugar beets in eastern Oregon.)32

The Manzanar Free Press reported that Mitsui went to Ogden, Utah, with his brother Sat for one week in May 1944.33 No reason was given, but perhaps it had something to do with Sat’s plans after Manzanar. On April 7, 1945, Sat married Akiko Sakamoto, whom he had met in Manzanar, at the Salt Lake City Buddhist Church. Witnesses at the wedding were Grace Maruki and Masaru Nakadaira, Sat’s teammate who can be seen kneeling next to Sat in the 1939 softball team photo.34

By Spring 1945, Mitsui’s family had all moved out of the Manzanar camp. Mitsui’s parents and younger sister Mitsuko relocated to New Jersey where they worked at Seabrook Farms, a large producer of canned food during World War II. Sat was in Salt Lake City. Their sister Chiyemi and her husband Frank Ishida, who served in the US Army as a translator, were in Manzanar initially before they were stationed at Camp Savage in Minnesota.35 (They all moved back to California when the war ended.) Mitsui again considered the permanent departure decision and he and Ayako officially left the camp on May 15, 1945.36

Pete Andres, Mitsui’s friend at the Valley Tire shop, offered him a job repairing tires, a pickup truck to commute to and from work, and a place to stay if he and Aya came back to San Fernando. It was a generous gesture that Pete and Aya gladly accepted. Just two years later, however, Andres suffered a heart attack and died. “He wasn’t even 50 when he passed away,” Mitsui said.

After Andres’ death, Mitsui moved to South Gate and partnered with his brother-in-law, Frank Ishida, who ran a retail flower nursery with Chiyemi called the Uneeda Garden Nursery. It was a family business, as Mitsui’s wife, his parents, and his sister, Mitsuko, helped at the nursery, too. (Sat and Akiko did not work at the nursery; Akiko was a librarian at Beverly Hills High School Library,37 and Sat worked for a company that manufactured comforters before he died in a car accident on Thanksgiving Day in 1993.)38

Mitsui was naturalized as a US citizen on November 11, 1954. Naturalization was unavailable to Issei before 1952. He and Ayako had three children: Patti was born in San Fernando, Peggy and Brian were born when the family lived in South Gate. With work and family life keeping Pete very busy, he no longer had time to play baseball.

In about 1957 or 1958, the family moved to a Japanese American community established in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, about 12 miles west of the nursery. After Chiyemi’s death in 1971, Mitsui bought out Ishida’s share and worked in the nursery with his son Brian, who operated the business after Mitsui retired in the 1980s.

The Los Angeles riots of 1992 tore apart Crenshaw and other neighborhoods, stirring Pete and Aya to move to Fullerton around 2001.39 While in Crenshaw and Fullerton, Mitsui kept active with gardening, bowling (he once scored a perfect 300), golf, dancing, and poker, until heart surgery slowed him down around age 88.40

Mitsui spoke frequently about his baseball and wartime experience, not with bitterness but rather with purpose. He participated in several presentations and dedications commemorating baseball in San Fernando and Manzanar. He was an important contributor to the Nisei Baseball Research Project, which was founded by Kerry Yo Nakagawa in 1996 and featured at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1998.41 Mitsui’s actions at Manzanar and in the years thereafter blended courage and optimism with the competitive spirit of an athlete, and his testimony was a tribute to his family and his culture.

Pete Mitsui died of natural causes on August 31, 2011, at the age of 97, in San Luis Obispo, California, where he had lived since 2006.42 He and Ayako, who died on January 28, 2021, at the age of 100, are buried at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes. Their daughter, Peggy, predeceased Mitsui. At the time of this writing, their son Brian and his wife Joanne made their home in Carlsbad outside of San Diego. Their daughter Patti and her husband Geoff lived in Westlake Village, outside of Los Angeles.43

In Patti’s words, “Pete enjoyed every minute of life and found it wondrous and the world beautiful.”44

About a year before Mitsui passed, Terry Cannon, founder of The Baseball Reliquary, an organization “which celebrates pioneers and trailblazers” beyond their statistics, published a list of the 12 high school baseball players from the greater Los Angeles area who, in his opinion, made the greatest contributions to baseball culture. Jackie Robinson from Pasadena is on the list. Pete Mitsui from San Fernando High is also on the list.45

LEN PASCULLI, a lifelong New Jersey resident and retired attorney, is a frequent BioProject contributor for SABR. He attended Penn State undergrad, Fordham Law School, and Rutgers Business School, yet needed to contribute to How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar 1942–1945 to learn the history, politics, and sociology of Japanese American incarceration camps that he somehow missed in school. May God bless this publication and all those affiliated with its issuance.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Cory Mitsui, Pete Mitsui’s grandson, who spoke with the author by telephone on February 12 and February 26, 2025, and followed up with several e-communications from both him and his Aunt Patti, Pete’s daughter (hereafter referred to as “C. Mitsui-Pasculli interview”); and to Sarah Bone, Manzanar National Historic Site Park Ranger, for providing documents and other resource material from the National Park Service.

All information about and quotes from Pete Mitsui not otherwise cited are from two recorded archival interviews:

• Pete Mitsui. Interviewed by Richard Potashin, 2007, Manzanar Oral History Project Interview #1150, Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service.
• Interview of Pete Mitsui, April 24 and May 21, 1993, “Japanese American Farmers in the San Fernando Valley Before and After WWII—Oral History Project,” Department of Asian American Studies, California State University, Northridge, California, Densho Digital Repository, https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-csujad-31-8/.

 

NOTES

1 George Tamura, interviewed by Rose Masters, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, MANZ 1442, June 30, 2016, 36.

2 Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Japanese American Baseball in California: A History (Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2014), 62.

3 Nakagawa, 108-112, 131-133.

4 Ichigi [sic] Mitsui, World War I Selective Service System draft registration card, September 12, 1918, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Independence, California.

5 Nakagawa, 13, 60-61.

6 Nakagawa, 62; Steve Henson, “For Some, Baseball Was More Than a Pastime,” Los Angeles Times, September 29, 1997: A1, A20.

7 San Fernando High School, one of the oldest schools in the district, formed its first baseball team in 1899. “History of Athletics,” San Fernando High School, accessed September 12, 2025, https://sanfernandohs.lausd.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=4425760&type=d&pREC_ID=2661977.

8 Tamura, 30.

9 “Diamond Dusters: S.F. Aces,” Manzanar Free Press, January 19, 1944: 4.

10 Stanley Speer, “Four First-Rate Hurlers Top Bargain Softball Program at Fiedler’s Fairfax Diamond,” Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, July 23, 1937: 10.

11 Pete Mitsui oral history interview transcript, Japanese American Farmers in the San Fernando Valley Before and After WWII Oral History Project, CSU Northridge Japanese Americans in the San Fernando Valley Oral History Project Collection, Densho Digital Repository, April 24, 1993 (Part 2, May 21, 1993), 26, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-csujad-31/ddr-csujad-31-8-transcript-cd0b04d368.pdf.

12 “‘Back to Baseball’ Movement Is Launched by 20-30 Clubs,” San Fernando Valley Times, November 4, 1941: 5; Dan Raley, Pitchers of Beer: The Story of the Seattle Rainiers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 98, 330; Dennis Snelling, The Greatest Minor League: A History of the Pacific Coast League, 1903-1957 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012), 307.

13 “Roster of Manzanar Residents: June 1, 1942 – December 31, 1944,” Sheet 110 of 251, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Independence, California.

14 National Park Service, “Manzanar Baseball,” accessed May 8, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/places/manzanar-baseball.htm.

15 National Park Service, “War Relocation Centers: Manzanar,” accessed May 8, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/war-relocation-centers.htm.

16 Jeff Burton, “League Baseball Field Rehabilitation Manzanar National Historic Site Determination of No Adverse Effect,” July 22, 2022, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Independence, California.

17 “Final National League Standings,” Manzanar Free Press, August 31, 1942: 4.

18 “Pitching Duel in Star-Ace Tilt,” Manzanar Free Press, April 17, 1943: 4.

19 Pete Ohtaki, “For Pete’s Sake,” Manzanar Free Press, September 11, 1942: 4.

20 “Fernando Players Dominate National All-Star Lineup,” Manzanar Free Press, September 11, 1942: 4.

21 Roy Hoshizaki, “Second Sight,” Manzanar Free Press, August 31, 1942: 4.

22 Cassie M. Gray-Jeffries, “False Freedom: Japanese Americans in Eastern Oregon During the Internment Period,” Academia.edu, June 1, 2015, 24, https://www.academia.edu/search?q=%20False%20Freedom:%20Japanese%20Americans%20in%20Eastern%20Oregon%20during%20the%20Internment%20Period.

23 Ayako Mitsui obituary, Fukui Mortuary, accessed June 22, 2025, https://www.fukuimortuary.com/obituary/ayako-mitsui.

24 “Three Engagements Announced,” Manzanar Free Press, February 6, 1943: 3.

25 “Carnival Plans Complete,” Manzanar Free Press, June 26, 1943: 1.

26 “YBA Installation Hailed Success,” Manzanar Free Press, April 3, 1943: 4.

27 “AA All-Stars to Tangle Sunday,” Manzanar Free Press, September 4, 1943: 4.

28 “149 Furlough Workers Slated for Beet Fields,” Manzanar Free Press, September 13, 1943: 1-2.

29 “The Paul Prisoner-of-War Camp,” Discover Area Guides, accessed May 12, 2025, https://discoverareaguides.com/the-paul-prisoner-of-war-camp/.

30 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

31 Burton.

32 Gray-Jeffries, 3.

33 “As They Come and Go,” Manzanar Free Press, May 6, 1944: 2, and May 13, 1944: 2.

34 “Satoru Mitsui Akiko Sakamoto Wed in Salt Lake City,” Manzanar Free Press, April 21, 1945: 2.

35 Camp Savage, where Ishida served, had a military school for Japanese Americans to teach Japanese to English-speaking soldiers. On one occasion, Ishida interviewed Japanese prisoners in the Philippines and obtained information that led to the US bombing of Kobe, Japan, where the enemy manufactured munitions. See “Interview of Frank Kiyoshi Ishida by Robert M. Kasper, Jr.,” July 18, 1973 [transcript]. California State University, Fullerton, Japanese American Oral History Project, Online Archive of California, accessed July 18, 2025, https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft3v19n830;NAAN=13030&chunk.id=d0e119&toc.id=&toc.depth=1&brand=oac4&anchor.id=p3.

36 “Roster of Manzanar Residents: June 1, 1942 – December 31, 1944.” On January 2, 1945—two weeks after Ex parte Endo, the Supreme Court decision which held that the US government could not detain a citizen who was “concededly loyal” to the United States—President Roosevelt lifted the West Coast exclusion. However, it took months before all incarcerees were able to leave. See Rachel Ng, “The Moving Story of Bringing Baseball Back to Manzanar, Where Thousands of Japanese Americans Were Incarcerated During World War II,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 27, 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/moving-story-of-bringing-baseball-back-to-manzanar-where-thousands-of-japanese-americans-were-incarcerated-during-world-war-II-180986312.

37 Tani Mitsui Brown, “Discover Nikkei: A Hapa Girl in Vietnam,” Discover Nikkei, a project of the Japanese American National Museum, October 24, 2013. https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2013/10/24/hapa-girl-in-vietnam. (Tani Brown is the granddaughter of Satoru and Akiko Mitsui.)

38 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

39 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

40 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

41 Emily Hawks, “Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project, Discusses the Little Known History of Japanese American Baseball,” International Examiner, December 13, 2023, https://iexaminer.org/kerry-yo-nakagawa-founder-of-the-nisei-baseball-research-project-discusses-the-little-known-history-of-japanese-american-baseball/.

42 Pete Mitsui obituary, Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2011: A38.

43 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

44 Patti Mitsui Westen, email to author, July 12, 2025.

45 Terry Cannon, “Terry Cannon’s All-Time Southland Baseball All-Stars,” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2010, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-jul-12-la-sp-0713-cannons-team-20100713-story.html.