Baseball at Manzanar: Daily Life – Society for American Baseball Research

Introduction Executive Order 9066 Daily Life Baseball Behind Barbed Wire Reconstruction & Reclamation

A total of 11,070 people of Japanese ethnicity were detained at Manzanar between March 1942 and November 1945. No two of those incarcerees had an identical experience.

“When you get into a place where you have 10,000-plus people, you’re gonna have different attitudes and different situations,” said Paul Bannai, a former incarceree. Hikoji Takeuchi recalled that when his family arrived at Manzanar, they felt very anxious and isolated. “My mom just kept telling me, ‘Make the best of it.’ And that’s what we were trying to do,” he said.

Aiko Hamaguchi, Chiye Yamanaki, Catherine Yamaguchi, and Kazoko Nagahama are seated around a table playing bridge in 1943 at Manzanar. (Photo by Ansel Adams, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

To understand daily life at Manzanar, it is crucial to know about the physical setting. The camp was immense. The housing section alone covered 500 acres, enclosed by barbed wire and flanked by eight guard towers with searchlights and guns. More than 500 crude, rustic barracks were built and organized into 36 residential blocks. Barracks were divided into four or five “apartments”—20-by-25-foot rooms, each jammed with as many as eight people. Each room was furnished with an oil stove, cots, and a single light bulb hanging down near the center.

Meals: Each block had 14 barracks and its own mess hall where every meal was prepared because none of Manzanar’s barracks contained cooking facilities. When the camp opened, a limited number of mess halls meant that inmates typically had to stand in line for 20 to 45 minutes in temperatures that averaged about 90 degrees. The camp administration addressed the problem by creating a staggered system of meal hours until additional mess halls were opened. Potatoes were a staple food, and meat was rationed. Rice was introduced later to Manzanar’s meals. “We had a lot of what we call ‘slop-suey,’ which was vegetables mixed together and cooked,” said one inmate.

Lack of privacy: Privacy was an elusive dynamic for Manzanar inmates. The walls between each apartment did not go all the way to the ceiling, and the walls were paper-thin plasterboard. “So, if somebody sneezed in Apartment 1, you could hear it in Apartment 5,” recalled Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga. If a family or couple wanted to discuss a sensitive issue, “you had to go outside if you wanted to carry on a confidential, private conversation.”

Work life: As a way to achieve constructive distraction from their circumstances as well as to make their collective lives better, most inmates at Manzanar worked in some capacity. Some of them planted and tended vegetables and fruit on small farms, and others raised livestock. Some worked in mess halls, cooking food or washing dishes. Still others dug canals for irrigation or other purposes. Inmates with medical training or other professional training worked as doctors, nurses, teachers, and police officers. Many workers made clothes for themselves or their families.

Students in science class at Manzanar. (Photo by Ansel Adams, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

School life: Instead of building schools, Manzanar held classes in regular barracks. High school classes were assigned to Block 7 in the fall of 1942. Classes for other grade levels occurred in a dozen recreation halls scattered across the camp. “We had no chairs, no tables, nothing to write with,” recalled Margaret Stanicci, a former teacher at Manzanar. High school summer session classes were held in empty mess halls amid steamy temperatures that ranged from 100 to 120 degrees. When winter began, there were no stoves in the classrooms.

Social life: Each residential block had a block manager who was elected by inmates. The War Relocation Authority administered the camp and formed an advisory council of block managers. With the support of the WRA, inmates on these councils established churches, temples, and boys and girls clubs. They developed sports, music, dance, and many other recreational programs. They built gardens and ponds. The inmates also published a newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press.

Read more: “Daily Life at Manzanar,” by Matthew Jacob

Ritsuko Masuda and Marion Fujii toss a bat to decide “last ups” before a softball game at Manzanar, May 1942. (Photo: Francis L. Stewart, War Relocation Authority / UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

Celebrating the Fourth of July

On July 4, 1942, the front page of the Manzanar Free Press carried the headline, “Manzanar Celebrates Fourth,” along with the following message from the project director, Roy Nash: “We are in Manzanar for the duration of the war. Possibly for several years. At the end, the essential question will be: ‘How did we play the game?’ The conditions imposed on Americans of Japanese descent and upon those other Japanese who, although long resident on the Pacific Coast, never achieved American citizenship, admittedly are hard. Are we then to nurse our sorrow, water the weeds in the garden of our misery, sulk, complain, lean on the handle of the hoe?

“Or shall we throw into the building of Manzanar the creative energies of a gifted people, the labor of a folk to whom toil is traditional, the gaiety of young men and women who know that the human soul can be defeated by nothing except itself. Mount Whitney already knows the answer: One day the world will know.”

Japanese American incarcerees displayed their American patriotism on Independence Day, celebrating with two days of festivities at the camp. They included gala picnics, with thousands of individuals expected to attend, and a Queen Contest, in which the ladies vied for the title of “Miss Manzanar.” The highlight of the festivities was none other than a grand display of America’s pastime, the game of baseball. Well, in this case it was softball.

Read more: “Celebrating the Fourth of July,” by Russ Speiller

Jim Morita poses for a photo in April of 2026 at the age of 100. (Courtesy of the Manzanar National Historic Site)

Jim Morita: Assistant Sports Editor

Working as a cook’s aide—washing vegetables and cleaning up after the cook—was one of several jobs that Jim Morita held at Manzanar. A few of his jobs were more physically demanding. One of them was carrying a five-gallon tank of heating oil to each barracks to fill their Coleman stove with oil. Another job was working as part of a roofing crew, which rolled out a tarp, cut it to align with the roof, and then nailed it to the surface.

Of all the jobs he held, Morita’s favorite was serving as an assistant to Danny Iwata, sports editor of the Manzanar Free Press. His newspaper work paid him $16 monthly, which was the most he earned while at the camp. Inmates depended on the Free Press to inform them of important events—people getting engaged or married, and those who had died. “Without the paper, you wouldn’t know anything,” he said.

When asked years later what he would want people to know about Manzanar, Morita focused not on the bleak, isolated terrain nor on the fundamental freedoms that its inmates lost. Instead, he insisted he would want people to know how his family and many others came together in a turbulent time to build a sense of community, cultivate gardens, and “convert that desolate place into a beautiful landscape—a different place, honest. After six months, it was different.”

Read more: “Jim Morita,” by Matthew Jacob

Mary Matsuno Miya and the Children’s Village

Mary Namiko Matsuno was 14 years old when she entered Manzanar, first residing in what was known as the Children’s Village — an orphanage and the only such program to be found in any of the 10 relocation centers. To create more opportunities for their charges, the Children’s Village sponsored its own teams; Mary was an original player for the Fighting Nines softball club.

Her participation did not lead to an athletic career, nor was it a defining part of her time in Manzanar. But Mary’s short time on the diamond elevated her to a select club for whom baseball provided a key shared experience.

Mary also took various jobs in addition to attending school and helping out around the Children’s Village. At different times, she worked in the mess halls, babysat for people working in Manzanar, and for a period of time worked in the camp’s pickle factory. Both Mary and her sister Susie gained some experience working at the camp hospital.

Read more: “Mary Matsuno Miya,” by Ryan Woodward

Mary Matsuno graduated from Manzanar High School in 1945. Pictured here is her One World yearbook photograph.

Misao Sugimoto, left, and Rosie Maruki participate in a practice game between members of the Chick-a-dee softball team at the Manzanar camp in May 1942. (Photo: Francis L. Stewart, War Relocation Authority / UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library)

Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi: Hollywood Dreams

Like many teenagers in early 1940s Los Angeles, Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi spent her days idolizing the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. She squirreled away photos, postcards, and letters from film stars, and she dreamed of being a “script girl.” Even when her family was incarcerated at Manzanar in 1942, the then-16-year-old Kakuuchi retained her starry-eyed naivety and filled her days on the ballfield.

Rosie had grown up playing sports and acknowledged that she would have rather been “playing baseball or listening to Glenn Miller [or] Tommy Dorsey” than focusing on her studies like her classmates at the high school in the camp. Softball enabled Maruki to retain a bit of her life prior to Manzanar. As she grew older, Maruki’s focus shifted to the social scene of high school, especially her social club, the Modernaires. The group, which consisted of many classmates in Manzanar High’s Class of 1944, held dances, played sports, and generally palled around.

She served as class secretary during the first semester of her senior year as well as secretary of the Boosters Club of the school’s Girls’ League. Maruki revisited her Hollywood dreams by directing the senior play Growing Pains by Aurania Rouverol, and she took the stage in a one-act play written by a classmate.

Read more: “Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi,” by Abigail Miskowiec

Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi oral history interview, October 19, 2006, courtesy of Manzanar National Historic Site

Pete and Ayako Mitsui: Married Life

Pete Mitsui’s contribution to West Coast Japanese American baseball began well before Manzanar. In 1930, he helped establish the San Fernando Nippons, an amateur Japanese American baseball team based northwest of Los Angeles. Inside the camp, his Manzanar Aces were one of the best “A” level teams at any of the detention centers.

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. Mitsui had known Ayako and her family since his school days. Their wedding was the first one held at the camp.

Later that year, Pete and Ayako elected to go to the Paul labor camp near Burley, Idaho, on a temporary work furlough. Years later, their daughter Patti said her parents told her the Idaho adventure was their honeymoon. 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.”

Read more: “Pete Mitsui,” by Len Pasculli

Pete Mitsui and his wife Ayako in front of their barrack. (Densho Digital Repository, Grace Maruki Wertz Collection)

Pete Mitsui oral history interview, February 13, 2007, courtesy of Manzanar National Historic Site

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