Life at Manzanar: Harry Tashima
This article was written by Harrison Golden
This article was published in How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945
Portrait of Harry Tashima. (Courtesy of the Tashima family)
As sweat dripped from brows and dust bounced into eyes, Harry Tashima gave people reasons to keep looking up. The 6-foot-1-inch pitcher stood a head taller than teammates and competitors alike. His speed and control demanded attention, though it usually did his strikeout victims no good. The Manzanar Free Press described him as a “Thornhill of the diamond,” a nod to his stature: elm-like, even in a desert.1
Tashima—born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1921—first arrived at the Manzanar concentration camp shortly after his 21st birthday. With him were his father, Miyoshi, and his mother, Yachiyo, both born in the Japanese city of Kumamoto, and American-born sisters Fumiko and Sachi. They exited the bus that brought them and had to walk more than 20 blocks inside the camp, passing the communal latrines and finally reaching their assigned barracks: a one-room shack with holes in the floor, bags of straw for mattresses, and sand hitting their faces. As he remembered years later, “The wind was blowing so hard.”2
Metaphors for change weren’t lost on Tashima. Ever since hearing news of the Pearl Harbor raid while fixing a friend’s car radio on December 7, 1941, Harry had the sense that anti-Japanese discrimination would spread.3 He had experienced it firsthand on December 8, when, after three years of studying and working at the Ryan School of Aeronautics in San Diego, a school security guard barred him from entry, saying Japanese people were no longer welcome.4 Now stuck behind Manzanar’s barbed-wire fences, with no runway or hangar in sight, his dream of becoming an aviator faced another delay.
So he found other ways to pass time. He drove a truck that distributed oil to each of the camp’s 36 residential blocks, earning $12 a month. He served as a cook’s helper in the Block 24 mess hall.5 He spotted a piano and played it.
And despite uncertainty over his aviation career, Tashima still found a way to play with gravity: fastpitch softball. He joined the Sierra Padres of the International League, one of the 12 leagues formed inside Manzanar. He routinely practiced pitching for two to three hours a day, throwing with different speeds, grips, and deliveries to his batterymate, team catcher Victor Yokota.6 The ball became his aircraft.
This team that didn’t even have uniforms yet, only whatever clothes and shoes its players had brought to the camp, had itself a darling. In his first game, on May 23, 1942, Tashima surrendered only five hits against the Knights and notched two of his own. The Padres won, 14-6, with their new pitcher earning the in-camp newspaper’s praise. Beyond the novelty of Tashima and the 5-foot-1 Yokota comprising the “tallest and shortest battery in the softball league,” the May 26 issue of the Manzanar Free Press remarked, “Harry Tashima’s 10 musical fingers can do more than pound the keyboard.”7
Tashima spent June performing more shows. Against the Uptowners, he gave up just three hits and batted in three runs as part of a 10-2 Padres win.8 He fired a two-hit complete game against the Santa Monicans in a 22-0 blowout.9 His “usual cool pitching,” as one Manzanar Free Press reporter worded it, allowed the Padres to cap the softball season’s first half with a 6-1 record, second in the eight-team league.10
Tashima’s selection as an International League all-star added to his popularity. Fellow prisoner Toyo Miyatake, a photographer by trade who had smuggled a camera lens through Manzanar’s gates, asked to take photos of him. Tashima responded by extending his hands into a pose. “We became good friends,” he later said of Miyatake. “He was one of the fellas I could really remember.”
A July all-star game, held at Manzanar to commemorate America’s Independence Day, marked one of Tashima’s best outings yet. His three innings in relief against the Manzanar League’s top players yielded no hits and no runs. He preserved the International League All-Stars’ 8-3 lead, closing out the team’s victory.11 “Quite a bit of people came to watch it,” he said.
But in the shadow of “spectators standing and sitting on bare ground in the blazing sun,” as one storyteller later described Manzanar’s outdoor sports crowds,12 this summertime exhibition’s turnout highlighted a bitter truth. One reason for the larger attendance was that the camp’s population had grown in recent weeks. By September of 1942, 10,000 Japanese Americans had been herded into Manzanar’s dusty fields and barracks, unsure when they could leave.13
If the games Tashima played gave the incarcerated thousands a welcome distraction from wartime uncertainties, he took no such credit. Those closest to him have insisted that his main reason for playing, beyond anything else, was enjoyment. “Definitely fun would be at the top of the list,” said his daughter, Cindie, who was born after the war. “I really do think it’s his own nature to make the best of what’s going on.”14
All the same, the pitcher and his Sierra Padres teammates continued to draw fans of all ages from throughout Manzanar. Twelve-year-old Jimmy Nakashima, who had a knack for memorizing batting averages, took a particular interest in the team. The Padres responded by giving Nakashima makeshift roles as a manager, batboy, and scorekeeper, a gesture that captured more of the camp’s attention.15
Tashima delivered under the growing spotlight. In another July all-star game, a 2-0 victory against players from Manzanar’s American League, the International League ace threw the final two innings in relief, allowing only one walk while striking out five. The showcase pitch of his outing, according to the Manzanar Free Press, was his “blazing dipsy drop ball.”16
Tashima’s mechanics, paired with fast Padre bats, still managed to stymie rivals in the season’s closing weeks. The team racked up lopsided wins through Labor Day: 16-9 against the Island Marlins, including a nine-run seventh inning; a 15-2 two-hitter over the Phantoms; and a 10-2 win against the Monicans.17 He was one of four pitchers to strike out a league-best 13 batters in a game.18 “Tashima has achieved the king of pitching style, freak deliveries, plus natural stuff to provoke much unconcealed jealousy, mouth-watering on the part of other teams,” a Manzanar Free Press scribe wrote. “[N]ice work if you can get him.”19
His hitting wasn’t bad either. He closed the 1942 campaign as one of five Padres with a batting average over .310. His .388 finish ranked second on the team and sixth in the International League.20
Even so, late-August mishaps hurt the Padres’ championship hopes. One such setback was a home-plate collision that left Victor Yokota hospitalized.21 A 6-4 upset by the rival Uptowners and an error-filled 9-5 heartbreaker against the Victory Aces made the ultimate difference in league standings.22 Despite a 16-5 record, the club finished one game behind the first-place Island Marlins.23
Yet Tashima still earned a title. With the softball season over, he and some pals from Block 24 formed a volleyball team, the Buckeyes. They sailed through fall without any losses, with one newspaper account crediting “tall, lanky H. Tashima” with “enforcing the Buckeyes’ forward wall.”24 In the winner-take-all championship game on November 22, Tashima’s “deadly spikers” kept the rival Broncos “off their feet all afternoon,” according to the Manzanar Free Press.25 The result was yet another victory, one that preserved the squad’s undefeated status—and heightened the legend of one of Manzanar’s tallest men.
Harry Tashima (rear center) photographed with the Vandals, one of the many softball teams he played for. (Courtesy of the Tashima family)
Harry wasn’t the only Tashima with active roles in the camp. His sisters took low-wage jobs weaving camouflage nets for the Allied war effort. His parents, who had run an onion and potato farm in Riverside County years earlier, harvested the vegetables they grew on the lawn outside the family barracks.26
But between an uprising that December and the War Relocation Authority’s response, the lives the Tashimas had built for themselves inside Manzanar risked being upended. Early that month, a mob of prisoners stormed mess halls, including the one where Harry worked. The altercation came as concerns of overcrowding, job shortages, low pay, and supply scarcity grew throughout the camp, and as more Japanese-born Issei prisoners accused their American-born Nisei counterparts of getting preferential government treatment. “Our chief cook was related to [someone] they didn’t like,” Harry recalled. “He could pull strings and get good material for the mess hall. The people that were revolting came up to our mess hall and struck all of us. We were threatened at that time.”
The usually extroverted Harry returned to his quarters and stayed there as violence erupted outside. Already, on December 5, six masked intruders had assaulted Fred Tayama, a Japanese American Citizens League leader who lived on Block 24 and was later outed as an FBI informant.27 Hours later, military police fired their guns into a crowd, killing a 17-year-old boy instantly and a 21-year-old man days later.
The attempted uprising waned in the days that followed, but its aftermath impacted Harry and his family. Camp officials opted to close the camouflage net factory where his sisters worked.28 On December 6, all recreational activities at the camp, including sports, were suspended for 13 days.29
Another dilemma arose for the Tashimas. The uprising—plus ones at other government-run camps—led federal officials to administer a “Loyalty Questionnaire” to all Japanese American prisoners. Harry received this question: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces on combat duty, wherever ordered?” Saying “Yes” would have risked putting him in the position of defending the nation that was incarcerating him without due process. Miyoshi and Yachiyo, who, as Issei, were unable to become US citizens at the time, faced a question for which a “Yes” would have left them stateless: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States … and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?”30
Harry and his relatives each settled on “Yes,” in part to keep their family together. They eventually learned that anyone who responded “No” and “No” was seen as un-American and shipped to the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security facility near the Oregon border, almost 500 miles away. In the choice between one concentration camp or another, the family of five opted to stay put. “We didn’t want to go,” Harry later said.
The Tashima family remained at Manzanar and Harry kept playing sports. Once recreational activities were allowed to resume, he spent time on the Sierra Padres basketball team. He considered himself “not too good” at basketball, but as his team’s center, he capitalized on his height. His 50 total points over seven games, including 22 field goals and six free throws, ranked 10th among the camp’s “AA Casaba” league players in Spring 1943, though it could not lift the Padres from a 2-5 record.31 “I was sort of clumsy,” he recalled. “But we had a lot of fun, so that was the main thing.”
Tashima followed up with a pair of buzzer-beaters in March. With the newly formed Block 24 All-Stars, he intercepted a pass from the opposing Bel-Aires squad and drained a hook shot, securing a double-overtime 46-44 victory.32 Days later, with the Bel-Aires up by one point in the final minute, he stole another pass and again nailed the game-winning basket.33
The multi-sport athlete’s momentum carried onto the softball field. As a pitcher for the Has-Beens in mid-May 1943, Tashima delivered a three-hit, nine-strikeout shutout against the newly formed Venice Packers.34 Despite a narrow loss in one of his first games with the San Pedro Yogores, he earned praise from the Manzanar Free Press for remaining calm: “[H]is cool stand in the sixth frame can well be called the acme and goal for many a pitcher in camp.”35 He reaffirmed his value with a six-inning relief appearance against the YBA team: no runs, no hits, and 11 strikeouts.36 The Yogores’ subsequent victories inspired one reporter to conclude, “This nine-man outfit has opened up their season with a bang…since lanky, whirlwind chucker Harry Tashima signed his ‘John Henry’ on the dotted line for them.”37
Most of the summer went about as well for Tashima. After the squad posted back-to-back losses in mid-July, the pitcher lifted the Yogores back up with a 4-0 shutout of the Bulldogs, a four-hitter against YBA, and a 6-0 shutout against Sears.38 In the final scheduled game of the season, his 12-strikeout drubbing of the San Pedro Skippers knocked that team out of a three-way tie for first place, leaving only his Yogores and the Manzaknights with 8-4 records.39
Tashima’s next two outings, however, did not go his way. A winner-take-all game against the Knights on September 8 ended in a 2-0 loss in front of 3,000 fans.40 In an all-star game on September 12, also against the Knights, the ace pitched the fourth inning in relief and surrendered three hits and four runs.41 (The All-Stars nonetheless beat the Knights, 8-4.)
Tashima stayed involved in sports in 1944—both softball and basketball. He further expanded his activities beyond athletics into music. Manzanar music teacher Lou Frizzell, who years later acted on Broadway and the television show Bonanza, picked Harry to perform in an operetta he had written, Loud and Clear. After the camp’s new auditorium opened and its curtains went up that June, Tashima recalled, “That whole community started to sing the songs that we were singing.”
But it was Tashima’s new role as a women’s softball coach that led him to love. Years later he described his first interaction with a woman named Alice Kakoi:
“We were playing against her team, and we found out her weakness. I was telling my girls to ‘pitch it to her high! Pitch it to her high! She can’t hit those balls.’
Then when we finished, I started talking to her. … She was pretty tall, and I was tall … and she was pretty friendly.”
The two began dating. Even after Kakoi left Manzanar for Yellow Springs, Ohio, because her brother had accepted a job with a newspaper there, she wrote Tashima letters. When he wasn’t singing or playing, Tashima wrote back.
The pair continued their correspondence after Tashima and his family left Manzanar in 1945. By autumn, the US Army drafted him. “It was cold,” he said of his basic training in Washington state. “We were going through training in the snow. We went through firing ranges and stuff like that in the snow. We had to lie down in the snow and shoot our targets, march in the snow.”
The end of World War II presented Tashima with a new opportunity—or, rather, an old one. Army officials gave him permission to leave the service after basic training, allowing him to return to California. He could resume his life not only as a civilian, but as one free of barbed wire. He took the offer and moved to West Los Angeles, where a couple had made good on a promise to protect his family’s belongings during the war.
Still, rejoining society took adjustment. Tashima again sought work in aviation, but the personnel he contacted said no jobs were available. “Hughes and a lot of different airplane companies, none of them would hire me,” he later told an interviewer. “Yet I was seeing people going in and getting jobs.”
He drove away and found a new path. A service station was on his route. He pulled in and asked a gentleman in charge if he needed a mechanic. “With my knowledge of aircraft engines that I was working on [before the war], I could work on automobiles just as well,” he said.
He was hired.
And he was reunited with Alice Kakoi. She had finished school in Ohio and moved back to her home city of Los Angeles. After writing, licking stamps, and sending all those letters, they were now only a short drive’s distance apart.
Around the time the couple wed in 1950, Tashima inked another partnership. He teamed with fellow mechanic Shig Taniguchi to open T&T Service, a gas station and auto repair shop on Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Angeles. The repair garage, located at the back of the property, was large enough to fit 10 vehicles at once.42 But as relatives later recalled, he felt most comfortable in the front, welcoming customers.
Many of those whom Tashima greeted were merchants themselves. In the years after T&T’s grand opening, the surrounding area reemerged as a Japanese enclave, as it had been before the US government’s 1942 roundup of Japanese Americans. Florists, grocers, chefs, and fishmongers who had lost their storefronts during the war were, like their new local mechanic, rebuilding what was then known as Little Osaka (and later Sawtelle Japantown).
Business grew, as did family. Daughter Cindie was born in January 1952. Three sons followed: Ernie, born in December 1953; Gregory, in March 1956; and Spencer, in June 1957. They lived in a duplex with Harry’s parents. They joined the West Los Angeles Buddhist Church; Harry became the church’s treasurer. Alice served as a PTA president and Cub Scouts den mother.
Harry worked six- or sometimes seven-day weeks, but still found time to teach his sons and daughter about baseball. After the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958, he took the kids to weekend games. He showed them who the players were, including his favorite, pitcher Don Drysdale—who, at 6-foot-5, was a fellow “lanky chucker.”43
Watching sports, on occasion, spawned rosy accounts of Manzanar. Harry told the children about the friends he made on his teams, the games he played through sundown, and the music he performed for the people in camp. He and Alice laughed as they passed down memories of the day they met.
“I thought it was like a summer camp,” Cindie recalled years later.
Not until junior high school did Cindie learn what Manzanar really was. A history lesson delved into the racism, xenophobia, and suspicion that had led the US government to round up more than 125,000 Japanese Americans—and send her father, mother, grandparents, and other relatives to a concentration camp.
Cindie came home and told her father what she had heard. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
Harry paused. “Well, yes, that’s part of it,” he said of his incarceration and the prejudices that had preceded it. “But we also made our own lives there.”44
Sports had played its role. The children grew to believe that softball hadn’t whitewashed their father’s time at Manzanar; it had, however, colored it. Just as they agreed that nothing could justify such a massive lockup of so many innocent humans, they concluded that nothing had stolen, nor could steal, his capacity for fun. “Love of the game,” in Cindie’s words, “sustained him in times of difficulty.”
And the man still played. He pitched for a church-affiliated softball team that included other former camp prisoners. He awoke early on weekends to golf in Thousand Oaks. He perfected a curved tennis serve that kept his kids moving. He bowled a 300 more than once.45
Time turned the trophies, old uniforms, and worn equipment into mementos. Alice died in 2010, at age 81. Harry died in his sleep on October 10, 2013, aged 92.
But Harry Tashima did leave evidence of his optimism. In 2006, as part of a National Park Service oral-history project for the Manzanar National Historic Site in Independence, California, he had left a message for his five grandchildren: “Get involved in good things…because there’s all kinds of good things going on.”
HARRISON GOLDEN is a retired Little League first baseman who found his second act in journalism. He has served as a news reporter, photographer, anchor, and producer. He has contributed work to CNN.com, USA Today, Interview, and NBC News. He is a frequent writer and fact-checker for the SABR Games Project. He currently lives in North Carolina.
NOTES
1 “Tashima Defeats Knights 14-6,” Manzanar Free Press, May 26, 1942: 6.
2 All direct quotes from Harry Tashima come from: Harry Tashima, interviewed by Erin Brassfield, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, MANZ 1096, March 17, 2006.
3 Harry Tashima.
4 Harry Tashima.
5 Harry Tashima.
6 Harry Tashima.
7 “Tashima Defeats Knights 14-6.”
8 “Padres Slam Uptowners, 10-2,” Manzanar Free Press, June 9, 1942: 6.
9 “Padres Blank Santa Monica,” Manzanar Free Press, June 20, 1942: 6.
10 “Padres Poke Phantoms,” Manzanar Free Press, June 25, 1942: 5.
11 “Internationals Win, 8-3,” Manzanar Free Press, July 7, 1942: 5.
12 Dan Kwong quoted in “This Spring, Baseball Returns to Manzanar,” AngryAsianMan.com, January 17, 2024, https://blog.angryasianman.com/2024/01/this-spring-baseball-returns-to-manzanar.html.
13 “Writer Reports March of Headlines in 1942,” Manzanar Free Press, January 6, 1943: 1-2.
14 All quotes from Cindie Tashima come from: Cindie Tashima, telephone interview with author, June 12, 2025.
15 “Sport Core,” Manzanar Free Press, August 7, 1942: 4.
16 “All-Americans Upset,” Manzanar Free Press, July 20, 1942: 3.
17 “Marlins’ 6-Run Lead Blasted,” Manzanar Free Press, July 29, 1942: 5; “Tashima Twirls 2-Hitter to Win,” Manzanar Free Press, August 12, 1942: 4; “Sierra Padres Scum Santa Monicans, 10-2,” Manzanar Free Press, September 4, 1942: 4.
18 Roy Hoshizaki, “Second Sight,” Manzanar Free Press, August 31, 1942: 4.
19 Hoshizaki.
20 “Sport Core,” Manzanar Free Press, September 19, 1942: 4.
21 “Sport Core,” Manzanar Free Press, August 28, 1942: 4.
22 “Taketomo Bests Tashima in Duel,” Manzanar Free Press, August 24, 1942: 4; “Padres Bow to Victory Aces, 9-5,” Manzanar Free Press, August 26, 1942: 4.
23 “International League Final Standings,” Manzanar Free Press, September 19, 1942: 4.
24 “Sport Core,” Manzanar Free Press, November 7, 1942: 4.
25 “H. Tashima Leads Mates to Victory,” Manzanar Free Press, November 23, 1942: 4.
26 Harry Tashima.
27 Harlan D. Unrau, The Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry During World War II: A Historical Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center (Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1996), 492-93.
28 “Camouflage Net Factory at Manzanar,” National Park Service, accessed October 12, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/places/camouflage-net-factory-at-manzanar.htm.
29 “Writer Reports March of Headlines in 1942.”
30 For the exact wording of the “Loyalty Questionnaire” that was distributed throughout the War Relocation Authority’s camps, the author consulted Mary Matsuda Gruenwald, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps(Troutdale, Oregon: NewSage Press, 2010), 119.
31 “Zeros Top Olivers; Knights in Padre Win,” Manzanar Free Press, March 10, 1943: 4; “R. Goto Tops AA Scoring, Takahashi Bros. Land in Big Five,” Manzanar Free Press, March 27, 1943: 4.
32 “Two Overtimers Give Stars Edge,” Manzanar Free Press, March 27, 1943: 4.
33 “Block 24’ers Edge Aire Cagers Again,” Manzanar Free Press, March 31, 1943: 4.
34 “Has Beens Crate Packers,” Manzanar Free Press, May 19, 1943: 4.
35 “7-11 6th Inning Rally Scrub Yogores, 7-5,” Manzanar Free Press, May 29, 1943: 4.
36 “Elimination Tourney in High Gear: Yogies Wash YBA; Tashima Whirls No-Hit, No-Run,” Manzanar Free Press, June 2, 1943: 6.
37 Tom Yamada, “Warming-Up,” Manzanar Free Press, June 26, 1943: 4.
38 “Sears Nip Yogies for First Defeat,” Manzanar Free Press, July 14, 1943: 4; “Skips 8, Yogies 1,” Manzanar Free Press, July 14, 1943: 4; “Sideline,” Manzanar Free Press, September 18, 1943: 4; “Sideline,” Manzanar Free Press, September 22, 1943: 4.
39 “Sideline,” September 22, 1943; “Softball-Baseball Reign Sports,” Manzanar Free Press, December 22, 1943: 6.
40 “Knights Blank Yogores 2-0 to Gain ‘AA’ Crown,” Manzanar Free Press, September 11, 1943: 1.
41 “All-Star Blast Knights, 8-4,” Manzanar Free Press, September 15, 1943: 4.
42 Telephone interview with a member of the Tashima family, June 14, 2025.
43 Cindie Tashima.
44 Cindie Tashima.
45 Telephone interview with a member of the Tashima family.