Dan Kwong: Lessons of Manzanar
This article was written by Dan Kwong
This article was published in How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945
The Nagano family in front of their Los Angeles residence circa 1937. Pictured are Kiro Nagano (husband/father), Aiji Nagano (son), Momo Nagano (wife/mother), and Al Nagano (daughter).Not pictured is Daisuke (eldest son). (Courtesy of the Nagano Kwong family collection)
News of the Pearl Harbor attack made Kiro Nagano’s home in central Los Angeles a somber place. All day long my grandfather sat at the dining table, head in his hands, overcome with sadness.
Born and raised in Sapporo, Japan, Kiro Nagano had been living in the US for 21 years as of December 7, 1941. Over that time, my grandfather—known to everyone simply as “Papa”—had come to deeply love America. Papa still loved Japan and loved being Japanese, but it was America he called home. A series of racist laws beginning with the Naturalization Act of 17901 and continuing through the Immigration Act of 19242 denied my grandfather and other Asian immigrants the opportunity to become naturalized citizens. But the roots of his young family—a wife and three American-born children, including my mother Momo—were deeply planted in fertile California soil. Now the country of his birth and the country of his choice were at war.
At around 10:00 PM that night, the Nagano family was in bed when the doorbell rang. My 16-year-old mother and her younger brother Aiji, in their pajamas, went to answer. They opened the door to find two men in trench coats and fedora hats standing on the darkened porch. Just like in the movies, they flashed their badges, announced themselves as FBI, and pushed their way into the house. One agent began searching the house, pulling open closets, cupboards, drawers, and dumping contents on the floor. The other agent marched into my grandparents’ bedroom. He ordered Papa to get dressed, cryptically adding, “Better take a coat with you. It’s gonna get pretty cold where you’re going.” With no other explanation, the agents marched my grandfather outside to a waiting black sedan. Momo watched them drive away in the night. It was the last time she would see her father for two years.
That same night this scene was being repeated up and down the West Coast, with over 1,200 Issei men arrested in a well-orchestrated roundup. They didn’t know it, but they had been categorized as highly dangerous alien enemies.
For years prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, intelligence sources had been compiling a list of so-called “highly dangerous” Japanese residents in the US, to be arrested should the United States ever find itself head-to-head with an increasingly belligerent Empire of Japan. Qualifications for inclusion on the list were community leadership, successful businesses (especially if engaged in travel to Japan), and involvement with martial arts. Papa was a highly respected leader in the Japanese American community of LA with a flourishing business in the wholesale produce market. The title of vice president of the Southern California Judo Federation made Kiro Nagano a slam dunk for the list.
The FBI’s roundup on December 7 was Japanese America’s night of infamy, the tip of the iceberg of what would eventually be the largest mass incarceration in United States history. It was executed solely on the basis of race and without due process of law: no trials, no convictions, no charges filed.
The Munson Report, a comprehensive intelligence assessment compiled by business executive Curtis B. Munson in October and November 1941 under orders from President Roosevelt, had concluded that Japanese Americans were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States and were not a security threat.
The findings of the Munson Report were circulated throughout the Roosevelt Administration but largely ignored. The subsequent Ringle Report of January 1942, ordered by the Office of Naval Intelligence, only confirmed the Munson Report.3 Neither report supported the claim of military necessity to justify incarceration of Japanese Americans. In spite of this intelligence information, on February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, sealing the fate of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Presidents and Congress have since apologized for the execution of this order, which is regarded as a perfect storm of wartime hysteria, failed leadership, economic opportunism, and racism. As recently as 2018, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts described the wartime legal decision to support the race-based incarceration of Japanese Americans as “gravely wrong the day it was decided,” adding that it “has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’”4
This is the first lesson of Manzanar and her sister camps: We are a nation of immigrants, and American identity is not defined by race, ethnicity, religion, nor place of origin. Rather, as the great Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan so poetically expressed, “America is in the heart.”5
Eighty-four years later, echoes of the night of December 7, 1941, are reverberating in the actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency: targeted arrests of people based on ethnicity; presumption of guilt and suspension of due process of law;6 repurposing the same facilities used to incarcerate Japanese immigrants in order to imprison a new category of immigrants and their families.7 What most distinguishes the present from the past is the breathtaking cruelty and brutality of the current version. At least Papa was allowed to grab his coat. This repetition of history can be considered a lesson not learned.
The camps are frequently characterized as a terrible “mistake” in our nation’s history. President Ronald Reagan himself used this term when signing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided redress and reparations to all living survivors of the camps:
“… the Nation was then at war, struggling for its survival, and it’s not for us today to pass judgment upon those who may have made mistakes while engaged in that great struggle. Yet we must recognize that the internment of Japanese Americans was just that: a mistake.”8
In many interviews I’ve done since launching the Manzanar Baseball Project, I too have referred to the camps as “a mistake.” When innocent people are prosecuted as criminals, it is indeed a mistake; this is accurate. But historian Roger Daniels offers a different characterization, harsher yet no less accurate:
“… the general tendency of educated Americans, including historians, to write the evacuation off as a ‘mistake’ is to obscure its true significance. Rather than a mistake … the legal atrocity which was committed against the Japanese Americans was a logical outgrowth of over three centuries of American experience, an experience which taught Americans to regard the United States as a white man’s country in which nonwhites ‘had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’”9
Logical outgrowth. Not a mistake. Tough lesson to swallow, but worth a taste.
Recently, loud voices in our country have been calling for a return to a past, “great” version of America. It is a past unapologetically centered around the racial domination described by historian Daniels. It is a version of America frozen in time on Manzanar’s baseball field. When we run its dusty basepaths or sit on its sun-blasted bleachers today, for a few hours the past is unfrozen.
In that thaw, we may grapple with the contradictions embedded in America’s legacy: our welcoming arms and our bigoted rejections; our highest aspirations and our lowest debasements; our kindness and our cruelty, generosity and greed, wisdom and ignorance. Manzanar offers this lesson: humans are beautiful, flawed beings, and in the end to be American is to be human.
My grandfather never lost his love for this country. Even after it treated him as an enemy and destroyed everything he had built, America was still in his heart. It is a small miracle of forgiveness. That is the next lesson of Manzanar—we must find our way back to offering and asking for forgiveness. Rather than showing weakness, it reveals integrity and strength of character.
The final lesson of Manzanar is about the indestructible nature of human spirit, and how that spirit was expressed by Japanese Americans. Rejected by their own country, hated and vilified as the “enemy,” losing homes and livelihoods, being exiled to America’s harshest lands with no visible way out—yet people not only found ways to survive, they found ways to thrive. They danced. They made art and music. They created gardens. They built a baseball field.
May we honor how they played the game.
DAN KWONG is an award-winning performance artist, playwright, director, and documentary video producer who has presented his work nationally and internationally for nearly four decades. His debut solo performance in 1989 was the critically acclaimed Secrets of the Samurai Centerfielder. Recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, and more, he serves as associate artistic director of multicultural performing arts organization Great Leap, is Mentor Resident Artist at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 2023 he has led restoration of the ballfield at Manzanar National Historic Site and is founder/director of the Manzanar Baseball Project commemorative doubleheader. He has played for the Li’l Tokio Giants in the Southern California Nisei Athletic Union Baseball Leagues since 1971 and claims to be the longest-tenured player in NAU history.
Dan Kwong and two baseball teams in vintage 1940s uniforms stand for the National Anthem before the second game of a historic doubleheader played on October 26, 2024, at the newly reconstructed ballfield at the Manzanar National Historic Site in California. (Courtesy of Dan Kwong, photograph by Aaron Rapoport)
NOTES
1 This act restricted naturalization to “free white persons” who had lived in the US for two years.
2 This act effectively banned immigration from Asia by targeting those “ineligible for citizenship.”
3 “Ringle Report on Japanese Internment,” Naval History and Heritage Command, Serial No. 01742316, December 30, 1941, https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/r/ringle-report-on-japanese-internment.html.
4 Ariane de Vogue, “Supreme Court finally rejects infamous Korematsu decision on Japanese-American internment,” CNN, June 26, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/26/politics/korematsu-supreme-court-travel-ban-roberts-sotomayor/index.html.
5 Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (1943; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).
6 In spring of 2025, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was invoked by the Trump Administration—its first implementation since being used to target Japanese Americans in 1942.
7 Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, was used as a prison during World War II for Japanese immigrants such as my grandfather. In August 2025, ICE opened a new immigrant detention camp there.
8 “Remarks on Signing the Bill Providing Restitution for the Wartime Internment of Japanese-American Civilians,”Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, accessed January 10, 2026, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-signing-bill-providing-restitution-wartime-internment-japanese-american.
9 Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps: North America (Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 1993), xvi.