On Saturday, October 26, 2024, a doubleheader was played on Manzanar’s newly restored diamond. It opened with a morning contest between the Li’l Tokio Giants and the Lodi JACL Templars, followed by an all-star game with Japanese American players wearing custom 1940s-style uniforms and using vintage baseball gear. Witnessed by an intimate crowd of family, friends, and a handful of journalists, it was the first time baseball had been played in Manzanar in almost 80 years.

Dan Kwong stands behind home plate as teams line up for the National Anthem before the second game of the doubleheader played at Manzanar’s newly restored baseball field on October 26, 2024. (Courtesy of Dan Kwong, photograph by Aaron Rapoport)

Dan Kwong, an award-winning performance artist, playwright, director, and documentary video producer who has led a volunteer effort along with the National Park Service staff to restore the Manzanar ballfield, writes:

“I grew up in a time when school history books might contain a single brief paragraph about camp. It was shocking that the defining event of Japanese American history was practically invisible.

“During my senior year at Marshall High I stumbled upon Carey McWilliams’s 1944 book, Prejudice. It was the first time I’d ever come across an account of camp from the perspective of a non-Japanese person. … In those days no one seemed to know or give a shit about what happened to us. That book started an amateur scholarly pursuit that continues to this day.

“Since then I’ve made many grown-up trips to Manzanar National Historic Site: attending the annual Pilgrimage every April; helping to excavate the Japanese garden; taking Mom on visits. Before she passed away in 2010, my mother participated in various Manzanar activities. She was interviewed for its oral history archive, volunteered to correspond with high school students, and donated one of her finest weavings.”

In 2022, Manzanar’s cultural resources program manager, Jeff Burton, made the determination based on an extensive site survey that there would be no adverse effect to building a re-creation of the diamond on the original site, an idea that had been first discussed decades earlier but shut down by the National Park Service. Dan Kwong quickly signed up to help in any way he could. He went to Manzanar on Memorial Day weekend in 2023 to start pulling tumbleweeds out of the ground. While there, he noticed that Manzanar National Historic Site employees had restored a basketball court using old photographs. He was told that when the restoration was completed, employees held a small basketball tournament on the court to celebrate their achievement.

That’s when Dan’s livelihood as a performance artist sparked an idea: He wasn’t going to just help restore the baseball field. He was going to use his background of putting on performance art alongside his connections to the Japanese American baseball community to organize a baseball doubleheader to be played on the diamond upon its restoration.

Volunteers help clear tumbleweed to make way for reconstruction of the Manzanar baseball field in the fall of 2023. (Courtesy of Dan Kwong)

Early on, Dan was connected to a local structural engineering company, Nous Engineering. After he wrote to the company to inquire how to set posts into the ground, Nous replied with technical drawings and became a regular (free) consultant to the project. It was an amazing outpouring of generosity. When LPA Design Studios heard about the project, they gifted $10,000 to the effort. TELACU, a community and economic development organization located in the shadow of Angel Stadium, gave $9,000.

“You go down this long windy path, and you don’t know where the end is,” Kwong said. “You just keep going, thinking, ‘What’s next?’ But if you knew the length of the path at the very beginning, you’d go, ‘I don’t know about this.’ We made a lot of it up as we went. You just take one step after another. When we were building the bleachers, I was just thinking, ‘When is this going to be over? I’m so sick of screwing down floor planks.’”

Camo netting behind the backstop, an homage to Momo Nagano, Dan Kwong’s mother and a camp survivor, whose passion for weaving began at Manzanar while working for a camouflage net weaving factory. (Courtesy of Dan Kwong, photograph by Aaron Rapoport)

Gradually this intense labor of love became a realized baseball field that unfolded in front of them. But there was one more disaster to overcome. A week before the doubleheader was scheduled to be played, the evening right after construction had finished, a windstorm blew down a portion of the ballpark fencing, which led to the possibility that Manzanar would have to cancel the doubleheader. With tens of thousands of dollars spent and people having made their reservations to attend, Dan raced into action with a passionate, well-reasoned plea to Manzanar’s superintendent not to cancel the game.

Thankfully that message resonated with the superintendent and now it was time for the players and fans to willingly come. The performance piece was at hand. There was a doubleheader to be played.

• Read more: “Bringing Baseball Back to Manzanar,” by Russ Speiller
• Read more: “Let’s Play Two,” by Dan Kwong