Life at Manzanar: The Tamura Brothers

At shortstop
between innings
sparrows dust bathing

– Japanese haiku by Alan Pizzarelli1

 

Pictured L to R: Barry Tamura, George Tamura, and Jimmie Tamura standing in front of their barrack at Manzanar. (Courtesy of Willie Tamura)

 

The Aces were a powerful team that won the championship both in 1942 in the “National League,” one of the many leagues that were formed to play baseball and softball inside the Manzanar incarceration camp, and in the Manzanar Association’s winter league in 1943. For each game that the Aces played, one-third of their lineup card often included the names of the three Tamura brothers—Barry, Jimmie, and George.

Before they were incarcerated after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the three brothers played amateur ball for the San Fernando Aces in the Japanese Athletic League. George, who was 16 years old when he entered Manzanar, was the youngest Ace and was regarded by his peers as one of the best shortstops in Manzanar. His brother Jimmie, three years older than George, was one of the camp’s best pitchers. The oldest of the three siblings, Barry, was the team’s catcher.2

Yonematsu Tamura (1878-1933) married Katsuno (aka Katherine) Honda (1896-1957) in the United States in about 1915 after each had separately emigrated from Hiroshima. They settled in San Fernando, California, and rented a small house on a flower farm owned by the Bessho family.3 Under the law at the time, Japanese-born immigrants, or Issei, were not US citizens and could not own land.

The Tamuras had four children: Norimasa, aka Barry (sometimes referred to as Berry) (1916-2004); Hiromitsu, aka Jimmie (1923-2014); Kimiko, a daughter (1925-1945); and Masanobu, aka George (1926-2024). Since their childhood, the boys went by the Americanized names that their parents gave them.4

When George was 7, Kimiko 8, and Jimmie 10, their father died of cancer. Their mother was left to provide for the youngsters, doing whatever work she could find. Barry, at age 17, found work elsewhere, but the family struggled during the Great Depression. “[H]ow hard she worked—10 cents an hour, 10 hours a day,” said Katsuno’s grandson, Tom.5

“She made four sandwiches from one egg,” said Tom’s brother Jim.6 George remembered fishing and rabbit hunting in those years: “[San Fernando Valley had a] lot of open space . . . It was nothing but orchards and farms.”7

The children attended Pacoima Grammar School until sixth grade and San Fernando High School for both junior and senior high. On Saturdays, George attended Japanese school, schools that were established to teach the Japanese language and culture to the American-born, second-generation Nisei. “I learned quite a bit, but I lost it all, forgot it all now,” George said in an interview that he gave for the National Park Service’s impressive Manzanar Oral History Project in 2016.8 “I liked it because my wife [Miyeko Ishikawa, the girl George later married] was in the same class. She was seven, and I was nine.”9

George also attended religious school at Miyeko’s house on Monday afternoons. “I would go to see Miye first, and [also] I went for the food.”10 Miye and George attended different elementary schools but they both attended San Fernando Junior/Senior High School. Years later, their osanai koi (“puppy love”) grew into matrimony.

In the 1920s and the 1930s, California’s Issei and Nisei embraced the game of baseball, and the Tamuras were no exception. When he was 17 years old, Barry, the biggest of the Tamura brothers at 5-foot-7, 140 pounds,11 played catcher for the San Fernando Nippons, an amateur team composed almost entirely of Japanese Americans and founded by Japanese baseball pioneer Pete Mitsui. According to Kerry Yo Nakagawa, author of Japanese American Baseball in California: A History, the Aces (the Nippons’ new name starting in 1934) were a “powerhouse” team in California’s Japanese Athletic Union.12

Jimmie and George Tamura also played in the JAU, Jimmie when he was 16, George when he was only 13.13 The 5-foot-6½, 128-pound Jimmie pitched for the San Fernando Aces’ “B” team called the Cubs.14 George played shortstop on the Cubs after Jimmie persuaded his friends to let his little brother play. According to his draft card, George was 5-foot-6, 130 pounds at age 18 in October 1944. Look how much smaller than Jimmie he was when they played for the Cubs. It certainly was not the same experience as when Joe Nuxhall pitched for the Cincinnati Reds in the majors at the age of 15, but it must have been thrilling nonetheless for the talented George to play with, and against, the older boys.

The Tamura boys and their widowed mother were among the thousands of Japanese Americans from within the West Coast’s removal zone who were incarcerated after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. Before the war, Katsuno sent her young daughter Kimiko to Japan for education, a common practice. (Nisei who returned to Japan were called Kibei). In April, the family boarded a bus in Burbank as military police armed with rifles and bayonets stood nearby. In June, they were taken to the Owens Valley Reception Center—the first reception or relocation center hastily built after the executive order was issued15—later to be renamed the Manzanar War Relocation Center. Incarcerees were allowed to take from home only what they could carry: linens and bowls, clothing and toiletries, and—for the boys—their baseball gloves.

Both in real time at age 16 and in hindsight years later, George seemed genuinely troubled by the US government’s actions. At San Fernando High, George was a member of the Junior Hi-Y, a club of students chosen by the faculty whose mission, according to the school yearbook, was “to make its members better citizens, and through their efforts improve their community in the same way.”16

In his Manzanar Oral History Project interview, George said, “I studied the Bill of Rights along with everyone else in school. I saw my classmates, and they wouldn’t say a word. Nobody stood up for us. That’s what broke my heart.”17 George continued, “I remember mothers carrying a baby and [holding] a five-year-old [by] their hand getting on the bus. That really hit me.”18

 

 

In the camp, the family was assigned to Block 22, Building 9, Apartment 1. The facilities were furnished only with simple cots, a stove, and a light bulb. “Boy, it was dusty, and the barracks would leak when the wind blew. It wasn’t too good the first year,” George said.19 There was one notable exception. On his first day at Manzanar, he saw Miye, the little girl from Japanese school, whose family had arrived in Manzanar before the Tamuras did.20 On their first day at Manzanar, Miye’s family of six was placed in a unit with two bachelor men until the men could be moved. “My dad put a sheet around our bed,” Miye recalled, for privacy.21

George was smitten with the bright 14-year-old, so he asked Miye to marry him.22 Of course, they were too young for it to be an official proposal; George formally proposed to Miye before the end of the war.

When the four Tamuras arrived at camp, they all had jobs. Katsuno helped serve food from the kitchen in their section and was paid $19 a month.23 George’s job was to fill the fuel tanks at the barracks. “The weather got pretty cold in Manzanar,” he said.24

His brother Jimmie worked on the farm and gardens at Manzanar, within the camp and on the land surrounding it, growing melons and vegetables. “They had a very good farm,” George said.25 According to the Owens Valley History website, “the food and the medical care at Manzanar were better than adequate, in large measure because the Nisei were given the opportunity to provide for themselves.”26 Jimmie recalled that the food the family received in Manzanar was better than what they lived on in San Fernando during the Depression.27

Barry farmed, too, but on farms outside of Manzanar while on furlough. “Yeah, my brother did sugar beet topping and stuff like that. . . [in] Twin Falls, Idaho,” said George.28 (Sugar beet topping involves removing the leafy green tops from the roots before the beets were stored or shipped.) In March 1943, Barry was elected treasurer of the Young Buddhist Association (YBA), the community organization associated with the Buddhist temples in Manzanar. The YBA offered cultural and religious events and support for the residents. Pete Mitsui, Barry’s contemporary and friend from San Fernando before the removal, served as the men’s athletic director on the same slate of YBA officers.29 The YBA and others, under the guidance of master stoneworker Ryozo Kado, built the iconic “I Rei To” (“Soul Consoling Tower”) obelisk at Manzanar in 1943. (The tower was restored in 2014.)30

Manzanar had a fire department inside the camp, and Barry served as an assistant captain and engineer.31 The fire department played a part in constructing several of the baseball fields sprouting up around camp by pumping water from the firefighting equipment and conducting frequent fire drills on the diamonds to suppress the acres of dust.

As told in the chapters throughout this volume, no doubt remains about the importance of baseball to the Nisei at Manzanar. According to Barry Tamura’s son, Willie, “[Baseball] was really kind of a really, really important component of the whole camp life, and it made it tolerable. They had something to look forward to. [A]lmost everybody talks about the baseball games.”32

Willie’s uncle George explained how it began: “Well, at first, Pete Mitsui came to our house, asked myself and my two brothers if we wanted to play baseball.” The Tamuras did not hesitate. George played shortstop in baseball, and he pitched and played shortstop in fastpitch softball.33 Barry was the Aces’ catcher and Jimmie was their pitcher. According to articles found in the Manzanar Free Press, the Tamura boys played other organized sports in camp as well.

As reported in the game summaries section of this publication, the Aces trampled the other teams in Manzanar’s National League during the first summer of the camp. They held first place wire-to-wire and finished with a 20-1 record. When asked years later, George remembered the boys who starred on the Aces alongside the Tamuras: the Mitsui brothers (Pete and Satoru), the Nakadaira brothers (Mas and Hiro), the Sugawara brothers (Lou, Billy, and George), the Hino brothers (Noburo and Hiro), and the Endow brothers (Frank, who led the league in 1942 with a .438 batting average,34 and George).35

However, away from the diamond, tensions between the Japanese Americans and the US administration rose during the winter of 1942. George and Miye, in particular, recalled how they were of two different mindsets when it came time to answer the so-called loyalty questionnaire issued by the government in February 1943. Miye was just an adolescent at the time and thus could not fill out the questionnaire that was given to everyone 17 years and older. However, when her mother answered the questionnaire, she thought that if she answered “No” and “No” to the two critical questions, Questions 27 and 28, the family would be sent back to Japan. This is what her mother wanted, since she believed they had nothing worthwhile to return to in San Fernando. “They still had their home, but they lost their business,” said Miye.36

George, on the other hand, was offended by the process. Rather than affirm that he was willing to serve in the US armed forces, he answered “No, No” because he felt it was unconstitutional for the government to first put Japanese Americans in concentration camps and then attempt to send them into combat. “I thought that was very unfair, in the Bill of Rights and all that,” he said. He was never told what would happen to those who responded “no, no.”37

Although a clear division existed between the perceived “loyal” Japanese Americans who remained at Manzanar and the “disloyal” ones who were bound for Tule Lake in Northern California, the camp that the government converted to a high-security segregation center, the questionnaire did achieve its desired effect of identifying and releasing “loyal” Japanese Americans from the camps, provided they had housing and employment. The Manzanar population decreased from its peak of 10,046 in September 1942 to 8,822 in May 1943.38

With the increased success of the resettlement and enlistment programs, and perhaps for other reasons as well, the number of ballplayers decreased and the makeup of the teams changed in the second year at Manzanar. The players from the 1942 champion Manzanar Aces turned up on other teams for softball in the AA League, the top-level league at Manzanar, in 1943: George Tamura, still in Manzanar, went to the Bulldogs; Pete Mitsui played for the newly formed YBA team along with Mas Nakadaira and George Sugawara; Pete’s brother Sat Mitsui pitched for the Yogores, the team with the colorful nickname (“yogore” is slang for a tough guy or greaser type); Nob Hino went with the Manzaknights, a social club created at Manzanar that sponsored teams in many sports and captured the softball league title that summer; and Ben Yoshiwara, a four-year varsity player before the removal at University High in West LA, not San Fernando High where most of the other Aces went, played for the Has-Beens, then stuck with the Aces for the fall baseball season. (The Manzanar Free Press did not mention if Jimmie Tamura played on an AA League team in 1943.)

When the 1943 softball season ended in September, the baseball season began, and the boys from the San Fernando Aces were reunited. The Aces excelled during the regular season, and so did George and Jimmie. In the all-star game held on Thanksgiving Day in 1943, Jimmie pitched three hitless, scoreless innings, and George went 2-for-5, including a bases-clearing double in the eighth inning, to push the White All-Stars ahead of the Red All-Stars. They held on to win the game, 12-9.

In the postseason playoffs in January 1944, the Aces defeated the Manzaknights and the Red Sox in the first two rounds while the Sears nine, with several boys from San Pedro High School, toppled the Solons and the Skippers to set the stage for the championship game. The Aces defeated Sears, 13-3, and raised the banner as the best team in the Manzanar Baseball Association. The Manzanar Free Press crowed how George Tamura was “more than sensational” in the championship run and got his brother Jimmie “out of the tight pickle more than once.”39

In 1943 and 1944, the government’s effort to move a sufficient number of “loyals” out of the Tule Lake Center to make room for the thousands of so-called “No No Boys,” or “disloyals,” from Manzanar and other camps was slow and disorganized. The first group of “disloyals” at Manzanar was moved to Tule Lake in October 1943.40 The four Tamura family members and others, including four other players from the January championship game, were transferred to Tule Lake in the second wave in February 1944.41 Although George did not know how his family answered Questions 27 and 28, his two brothers and their mother all went to Tule Lake with him so that they could all stay together.42 (It was not unusual for families to elect that course.)

Perhaps in an effort to dispel the perception, and the accompanying shame, that they were leaving Manzanar because they were all “disloyal,” or perhaps for other reasons (after all, those were truly tumultuous and confused times), one member of the Tamura family—which one is not known—felt inspired to publish a farewell in the Manzanar Free Press on February 23, 1944: “We wish to employ this means to express our sincere gratitude to our friends and neighbors as we depart for Tule. Barry Tamura. Jimmie Tamura. George Tamura. Mrs. K. Tamura. [Block] 22-9-1.”43

 

George batted .340 over 15 games on the season, the ninth best average in the league, while Jimmie, the team’s ace pitcher, won seven games, which tied him for second best. Both boys were named to the Taiseiyo (“Atlantic”) League all-star team, which defeated the Taiheiyo (“Pacific”) League All-Stars in a best-of-three series. Jimmie pitched in two games but did not factor in either decision. George knocked home the go-ahead run in the eighth inning of Game Three to clinch the game and the series for Taiseiyo.44

George officially proposed to Miye in 1945 in Tule before he was transferred to Fort Lincoln, a Department of Justice incarceration camp near Bismarck, North Dakota.45 Besieged with the socio-political issues and choices surrounding him, George acknowledged in his 2016 interview the relief he felt being with Miye at Tule Lake.46 Other than having Miye with him, George’s time at Tule and Bismarck was not heartening and it was difficult for him to talk about those years later in his life.47

Before Jimmie Tamura was transferred from Manzanar to Tule Lake, he, too, fell in love when he met Sumiko Nakano. They married at Tule Lake and moved to the San Fernando Valley with Barry, George, and their mother after the war, but only for a short time. Within a year or two, they moved to Richmond in the San Francisco Bay Area, closer to Sumi’s parents, where Jimmie and Sumi opened a dry cleaning and laundry establishment, which they operated for 40 years. They had three sons and a daughter: Wynn—who was named after Jimmie’s favorite big-league player, Early Wynn, a pitcher, like Jimmie—Keiko, Jim Jr., and Tom.48 Late in his work career, Jimmie realized that being self-employed provided no pension and inadequate health insurance for his family. The hard worker procured a second job as a bus driver with AC Transit, which he held for 10 years until he retired from both. He died on December 6, 2014, in Martinez, California.49

Barry Tamura settled in San Fernando after his release and worked as a gardener throughout his career. He and his wife, Misuye Nakamori, whom he married on February 2, 1944, had two children, Willie and Joyce. Barry died on February 3, 2004, in San Fernando, California.50

George and Miye married on April 6, 1948.51 After her release and before they married, Miye returned to her father’s farmhouse in San Fernando. She went to work in a sewing factory, saved her money, and put herself through beauty school. Her lifelong career as a beautician was interrupted while she raised their children, Judy and George Jr., in the Chatsworth suburb of Los Angeles. George worked first as a gardener and then as a landscape designer. He died on February 19, 2024, at age 97—exactly 82 years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

In recent decades, George and his brothers enjoyed opportunities to reconnect with their friend Pete Mitsui to reminisce about the two Aces teams that Pete built, the one in San Fernando and the other in Manzanar.52 Other memories, however, were not so happy for the family. After Kimiko moved to Japan, she met a man and married him there. However, when he died during the war, his family did not take care of Kimiko, and she died of starvation or illness, alone.53 In Los Angeles, George’s mother died from a stroke. “[She] blamed herself for having sent [her] daughter over there and she couldn’t live with it,” Miye told her oral history interviewer.

“I could see her dying every day,” sobbed George. “Sixty years old. Died of a broken heart.”54

Based upon his 2016 interview, it appears George’s life was well-lived despite its troubled beginning, and we catch a glimpse of the stoic belief he carried, referred to by the Japanese American people as “Shikata ga nai,” which means “It cannot be helped”:

National Park Service: “Do you have grandkids?”

Miye Tamura: “Yes. We have five grandkids and three great-grandkids.”55

NPS: “What do you want them to remember about this [war experience]?”

George Tamura: “The top of the list would be integrity. Integrity and balance.”

Miye: “That’s what he tells our son.”

Then George added: “Take the bitter with the sweet.”56

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 Jim Tamura Jr. and Wynn Tamura, Jimmie Tamura’s sons, who spoke with the author by telephone on August 20 and 21, 2025, followed by several e-communications; to Willie Tamura, Barry Tamura’s son, who spoke with the author by telephone on August 29 and 31 and September 1, 2025, and provided personal photos of the Aces; and to Sarah Bone, Manzanar National Historic Site park ranger, who provided documents and other resource material from the National Park Service.

 

NOTES

1 Alan Pizzarelli, in Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura (eds.), Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written about the Game (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 79.

2 “Sideline with the Sports Staff,” Manzanar Free Press, February 26, 1944: 4.

3 George Tamura, interviewed by Rose Masters, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, MANZ 1442 (transcript), June 30, 2016, 2-5.

4 Willie Tamura (Barry’s son), telephone interview with author, August 31, 2025.

5 Tom Tamura (Jimmie’s son), email to author, August 29, 2025.

6 Jim Tamura Jr. (Jimmie’s son), telephone interview with author, August 20, 2025.

7 George Tamura, 6.

8 George Tamura, 15.

9 George Tamura, 14.

10 George Tamura, 13.

11 Barry Tamura, Selective Service System draft registration card, October 16, 1940, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Independence, California.

12 Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Japanese American Baseball in California: A History (Charleston, South Carolina: History Press, 2014), 83.

13 George Tamura, 7.

14 Jimmie Tamura, World War II Selective Service System draft registration card, June 30, 1942, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Independence, California; “Diamond Dusters: S.F. Aces,” Manzanar Free Press, January 19, 1944: 4.

15 National Park Service, “Early Days at Manzanar – Commencement of Construction and Operations Under the Wartime Civil Control Administration, March-May 1942,” Manzanar: Historic Resource Study/Special History Study, accessed August 11, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/manz/hrs7.htm. A baseball-related twist was that Del E. Webb Construction Company received the contract to build the relocation center (or centers) in Arizona. Using the riches he acquired from his businesses, Webb, along with his partners Larry MacPhail and Dan Topping, bought the New York Yankees for $2.89 million in 1945. (See Mark Armour and Daniel R. Levitt, “Del Webb,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, accessed August 11, 2025, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/del-webb.)

16 San Fernando High School, Orange Blossom (n.p., 1941), 83. (Accessed August 12, 2025, through Ancestry.com.)

17 Steve Henson, “For Some, Baseball Was More Than a Pastime,” Los Angeles Times, September 29, 1997. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-sep-29-mn-37463-story.html.

18 George Tamura, 31.

19 George Tamura, 32.

20 Miyeko Tamura, interviewed by Alisa Lynch, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, MANZ 1443 (transcript), June 30, 2016, 8.

21 Miyeko Tamura, 9.

22 Miyeko Tamura, 5, 8; George Tamura, 14.

23 George Tamura, 46, 51, 58.

24 George Tamura, 46-47, 58.

25 George Tamura, 62-63.

26 “Manzanar War Relocation Authority Camps,” Owens Valley History, accessed August 20, 2025, http://www.owensvalleyhistory.com/manzanar1/page10.html.

27 Jim Tamura Jr., telephone interview with author, August 20, 2025.

28 George Tamura, 57-58.

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

30 National Park Service, “History of the Manzanar Cemetery,” Manzanar National Historic Site, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/places/history-of-the-manzanar-cemetery.htm.

31 George Tamura, 62; “Progress Report on Year of Departmental Activity,” Manzanar Free Press, March 20, 1943: 4-8, 17.

32 Miyeko Tamura, 31.

33 George Tamura, 36-38.

34 “Frank Endow Captures National Bat Honors,” Manzanar Free Press, September 2, 1942: 4.

35 George Tamura, 44; “Diamond Dusters: S.F. Aces,” Manzanar Free Press, January 19, 1944: 4; and other articles in the Manzanar Free Press.

36 Miyeko Tamura, 13.

37 George Tamura, 59-61.

38 “Population of Camp Dwindles Down to 8,822,” Manzanar Free Press, May 26, 1943: 1.

39 “All-Star Horsehiders Survey,” Manzanar Free Press, February 23, 1944: 4.

40 Sarah Bone, telephone interview with author, July 24, 2025.

41 Sports Staff, “Sideline,” Manzanar Free Press, February 12, 1944: 6.

42 George Tamura, 59-60.

43 Manzanar Free Press, February 23, 1944: 3.

44 Game summaries and statistics were published in Satoru Munekawa (ed.), Baseball: Tule Lake Center 1944 (Newell Star Sports Department, December 31, 1944). https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/nanna/record/172706/files/cubanc6714_b268r40_0015.pdf?withWatermark=0&withMetadata=0&registerDownload=1&version=1, accessed August 21, 2025.

45 George Tamura, 26-27, 69. According to Sarah Bone, Manzanar National Historic Site park ranger [telephone interview with author, July 24, 2025], for George to have been transferred to Bismarck, he would have had to have been (1) designated an “alien”—that is, a citizen who renounced his citizenship pursuant to the 1944 Renunciation Act (see 1944 Tule Lake Roster available through the National Park Service’s Manzanar Project), and (2) deemed a “leader” (or “so-called trouble-maker”) by the administration (see George Tamura, 69-71, 78-79).

46 George Tamura, 64.

47 George Tamura, 79-82; Miyeko Tamura, 18-19.

48 Wynn Tamura, telephone interview with author, August 21, 2025.

49 Jim Tamura Jr.

50 Willie Tamura.

51 California Marriage Index.

52 Henson.

53 Jim Tamura Jr.

54 Miyeko Tamura, 41.

55 Miyeko Tamura, 27.

56 Miyeko Tamura, 40.