Most historians credit American schoolteacher Horace Wilson with introducing baseball to Japan in 1872. However, recent discoveries suggest that soldiers aboard the USS Colorado arrived a year earlier and taught the game to members of the Japanese army at the Kawaguchi settlement in Osaka.1 Whatever its precise origins, by the end of the nineteenth century baseball had become Japan’s most popular team sport.

Meanwhile, on the US mainland, the earliest known record of Japanese people playing baseball dates to June 7, 1872, when members of the Yeddo Royal Japanese Acrobatic Troupe staged an exhibition game in Washington, DC. Several members of the troupe, joined by their agent and interpreter, faced off against players from the Olympic Base Ball Club at Olympic Grounds. The Daily Morning Chronicle billed the contest as “a grand international game,” noting that “the Japs are not novices with the ‘willow,’ and some Americans are not without apprehension that the West will meet with a crushing defeat from the East.”2

The Daily National Republican described the game as competitive, reporting that it “came near being a victory for the Orientals. The style in which they (the Japanese) handle the ball and bat somewhat astonished our boys.” Had rain not stopped the game, there was a real chance the Japanese might have won. The final score was 18–17, with inning-by-inning tallies showing the game tied 15–15 heading into the fifth, setting up a thrilling finish.3

According to the press, the Yeddo Royal Troupe prepared for two days “under the guidance of Professor Brainard.”4 This “professor” was none other than Asa Brainard, pitcher for the Washington Olympics during the 1871 and 1872 seasons.

JAPANESE AMERICAN BASEBALL IN HAWAII

Alexander Joy Cartwright, often called “The Father of Modern Baseball,” is credited with codifying the rules of the modern game and organizing the first formal club, the New York Knickerbockers, in 1845. Just four years later, he settled in Honolulu, where he spent the remainder of his life teaching and promoting baseball throughout the Hawaiian Islands.

In 1899, Reverend Takie Okumura organized the first known Japanese American team in Hawaii, the Excelsiors of Honolulu. Six years later, in 1905, pitcher Steere Gikaku Noda established the Hawaiian Asahi.5 Within a decade, thriving and highly competitive leagues emerged along ethnic lines, with Japanese American clubs competing against Chinese American, Portuguese, Hawaiian, and Caucasian teams, and even the renowned African American military squad, the 25th Infantry Wreckers.6

 

 

JAPANESE AMERICAN BASEBALL ON THE MAINLAND

On the US mainland, Japanese immigrants began appearing on integrated baseball teams as early as the late 1890s. According to The Sporting News, in 1897, Cleveland Spiders manager Patsy Tebeau attempted to sign an unnamed Japanese player from Chicago’s amateur leagues—identified only as the half-brother of Japanese wrestler Sorakichi Matsuda.7 Another Nikkei player, an outfielder named Sugimoto who reportedly once played for the Negro League’s Cuban Giants, was scouted by New York Giants manager John McGraw in 1905.8 Sugimoto’s presence at the Giants’ spring training, however, helped solidify the unspoken extension of the color line to exclude not only Black players but also those of Asian ancestry from White professional baseball.

Anti-Black, anti-Japanese, and broader anti-immigrant sentiment ran strong in professional baseball during the early 1900s. In the February 12, 1910, issue of The Sporting Life, legendary pitcher Cy Young remarked, “They (the Japs) are like the Cubans—too small to be big players. …That’s the trouble with all foreigners. Base ball will always be an American game.”9 Some historians excuse such comments as typical of the era. Yet evidence suggests otherwise. After returning from a global goodwill tour in 1913, John McGraw confidently predicted, “Mark my prediction. Some star ball players will come out of Japan within the next ten years.”10 His forecast, however, would not come true for another half-century.

Why the delay? The answer lies in the broader climate of discrimination. In the early twentieth century America, people of Japanese ancestry—like African Americans and other minority groups—faced systemic racial barriers across every aspect of life. Civil rights pioneer and NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois underscored this reality in 1913, writing, “The fight of the Japanese for equal rights is similar to the fight the Negroes are making for their rights. Educated people of all races recognize that the color line is artificial.”11

ANTI-ASIAN SENTIMENT & THE AMERICAN PASTIME

Anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, rooted in systemic racism and exclusionary laws, created steep barriers for Japanese players who aspired to compete in major league baseball. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 marked the first major federal legislation to target Asian immigrants and set a precedent for anti-Japanese measures in the early twentieth century. Laws soon followed that deepened these divisions: in 1906, a federal ruling restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons” and people of African descent;12 in 1907, the Gentlemen’s Agreement curtailed Japanese labor immigration; and Alien Land Laws across several states stripped Japanese immigrants of property rights. In 1922, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Ozawa v. United States declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for citizenship, and the Immigration Act of 1924 went further, banning nearly all Asian immigration and heightening tensions between the US and Japan.

These policies directly shaped opportunities on the baseball diamond. In 1924, Kenichi Zenimura’s team was barred from the San Joaquin Valley Baseball League after officials declared their intent to preserve it as a “white man’s” league.13 A decade later, when the Tokyo Giants toured the US in 1935, standout players such as pitcher Eiji Sawamura and pitcher-outfielder Victor Starffin drew praise from scouts, yet they were barred from signing with professional clubs due to their lack of US citizenship.14

Legal restrictions, combined with the economic scapegoating of immigrants during the Great Depression and the surge of anti-Japanese hostility during World War II, denied many of Japan’s finest players the opportunity to compete in the majors. It was not until the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952 that Asian-born athletes could legally play professional baseball in the United States. That same law finally allowed first-generation Japanese immigrants (Issei), including Zenimura himself, to apply for US citizenship—a modest step forward after decades of exclusion.

LEAGUES OF THEIR OWN

Young Chiura Obata, who later became a renowned artist and illustrator, founded the Fuji Athletic Club in San Francisco in the early 1900s—the first Japanese American team on the mainland.15 In 1910, noted wrestler and jiu-jitsu master Tokugoro Ito organized the first official Japanese American Baseball League. It was headquartered in Seattle and featured six teams throughout Oregon, Washington, and California.16

The 1920s and 1930s became the Golden Era of Japanese American baseball. As the Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) came of age, the game’s popularity soared. For many Nikkei, baseball represented optimism and the possibility of belonging in America. Each Sunday, Japanese American communities across California, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska went “baseball crazy.” During this period, Nikkei teams not only strengthened community identity but also offered a competitive and financially successful brand of baseball that drew fans of all ethnic backgrounds.

 

 

GAMES AGAINST HIGH-CALIBER COMPETITION

Japanese American ballplayers believed that to be the best, they had to face the best. With this in mind, Nikkei teams regularly scheduled contests against top competition from the Pacific Coast League, the California Winter League, major league and Negro League barnstormers, and visiting clubs from Japan. Far from being overmatched, Japanese American players repeatedly proved themselves worthy of sharing the field—and in many cases, they came away victorious.

An analysis of box scores and game reports from 1920 to 1940 suggests that the level of play in the Japanese American leagues mirrored the general assessment of the Negro Leagues: not every player possessed major league ability, but the stars of the league demonstrated time and again that, given the chance, they could have competed with their White counterparts at the highest level.

Among the high-caliber opponents were major league icons Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig; Negro Leagues greats Biz Mackey and Andy Cooper; Pacific Coast League standouts Tony Lazzeri, Joe DiMaggio, and Lefty O’Doul; and Japanese professional stars Shinji Hamazaki and Victor Starffin. The top teams and all-stars of the Japanese American baseball leagues included:

• Alameda Taiku-Kai: Harry Kono, Mike Nakano, Kiyo Nogami, Richard “Cy” Towata
• Arroyo Grande Y.M.B.A.: Kaz Ikeda, Seirin Ikeda
• Cheyenne Nisei: Minol Ota
• Clovis Commodores: Fumio Ikeda, Hy Ikeda, Nick Nishi
• Cortez Wildcats: Yuk Yotsuya
• Denver Nisei: George Akimoto, Dick Kitamura
• Florin Athletic Club: Herb “Moon” Kurima
• Fresno Athletic Club: Harvey Iwata, Takizo “Frank” Matsumoto, John Nakagawa, Ty Saiki, Fred Yoshikawa, Kenichi Zenimura
• Guadalupe Packers: George Aratani, Charlie Hiramatsu, Moriso Matsuno, Fred Tsuda
• Hanford Y.M.B.A.: Ben Mitsuyoshi, Shig Tokumoto
• Hawaiian Asahi: Joe Takata, Andy Yamashiro (the first Japanese American player to sign a contract in organized baseball, 1917. Yamashiro competed under the name “Andy Yim”)
• Hood River Nisei: Kay Kiyokawa
• Los Angeles Nippons: Jimmy Horio, Jack Kakuuchi, George Matsuura, Al Sako, Joe Suski
• Los Angeles Nisei All-Stars: Masao Iriyama, Noboru Iriyama
• Lodi JACL: Bill Kagawa, Masato “Mauch” Yamashita
• Monterey Minato Lions: Maya “Oyster” Miyamoto
• Salinas Taiyos: Harry “Tar” Shirachi
• San Fernando Aces: Pete Mitsui
• San Pedro Skippers: Ichi Hashimoto, Sud Kodama, Isamu “Pee Wee” Tsuda, Cy Yuguchi
• San Jose Asahi: George Hinaga, Russ Hinaga, Henry Honda, Harry “Jiggs” Yamada
• Santa Cruz Y.M.B.A.: Kuichi “Jimmy” Takei
• Seattle Asahi: Frank Fukuda
• Stockton Yamato: Kenso Nushida (the first Japanese American to play in the Pacific Coast League, in 1932), Tadashi Henry “Bozo” Wakabayashi (the first Japanese American player inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, in 1964)
• Vancouver Asahi (Canada): Ty Suga, Roy Yamamura
• Watsonville Kasei: Mike Oita

PREWAR GOODWILL AMBASSADORS

For Nikkei ballplayers, “putting on a baseball uniform was like wearing the American flag.”17 By embracing the national pastime, Japanese Americans saw themselves as demonstrating loyalty to the United States. At the same time, they maintained ties to their heritage and to friends and family in Japan. Baseball became a bridge between the two worlds.

One of the most meaningful ways this connection was expressed was through goodwill tours. Japanese American teams traveled frequently to Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. The Seattle Asahi pioneered these efforts with tours of Japan between 1914 and 1921. Between 1923 and 1930, when no major league clubs visited Japan, it was Japanese American teams—alongside Negro League counterparts—that played a key role in exporting the American game overseas and hosting dozens of Japanese teams visiting the US.

Japanese Americans contributed off the field as well. Fluent in both language and cultural customs, they often acted as essential liaisons—facilitating outbound tours of Caucasian and African American teams to Asia, as well as inbound tours of Japanese clubs to the US Key Nikkei figures in these prewar goodwill efforts included Steere Noda, Frank Fukuda, Takizo Matsumoto, Kenichi Zenimura, Harry Kono, and George Irie.

 

 

GAMES DURING WWII INCARCERATION

One of the most unique, fascinating, and tragic chapters in US baseball history is the story of Japanese American incarceration camp baseball during World War II. The National Pastime behind barbed wire began shortly after President Franklin Roosevelt sent his famous “Green Light Letter” to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, encouraging the continuation of the 1942 baseball season. Just weeks later, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the forced removal and incarceration of more than 125,000 Issei and Nisei from the West Coast.

Inside each of the ten camps scattered across the western United States and in Arkansas, baseball became essential to survival. It lifted morale, created a sense of normalcy, and gave both players and spectators moments of dignity in the face of injustice. Every camp had at least one field and organized leagues. In camps with particularly strong talent—such as Gila River (Arizona), Heart Mountain (Wyoming), and Jerome (Arkansas)—incarcerated teams even scheduled games against top high school, college, and semipro clubs from nearby towns. The scoreboard mattered less than the goodwill built between Japanese Americans confined behind barbed wire and the free Americans beyond the fences.

POSTWAR GOODWILL AMBASSADORS

After the war, Japanese Americans recognized that rebuilding trust at the local level with White communities was only part of the challenge—rebuilding international relations with Japan was equally important. Yet participation in Japanese American leagues never returned to its prewar heights. For those who still longed to compete at the highest levels, options were limited.

“I felt that the big leagues were closed off to us (Japanese Americans) in those days (1955),” recalled Satoshi “Fibber” Hirayama. “That was part of the reason why I went to Japan to play. In a way, we faced the same thing that the Black players went through.”18 Players such as Hirayama, brothers Kenshi and Kenso Zenimura (sons of Kenichi Zenimura), and Wally Yonamine possessed big-league talent, but with doors closed in the US, they turned to Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball League in the 1950s.

Also central to postwar baseball diplomacy was Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada, a former ballplayer once scouted by the St. Louis Cardinals and a decorated veteran of the Military Intelligence Service. Selected by General Douglas MacArthur, Harada arranged goodwill tours of major league teams in postwar Japan. He later served as special assistant to the Tokyo Giants (1951–54), helping the team win three consecutive Japanese Baseball League championships. Harada also played a crucial role in bringing the first Japanese-born player to the major leagues. Hired by New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham in 1954 to scout talent in Japan, Harada eventually delivered when Masanori Murakami signed with the San Francisco Giants in 1964—making history and opening a new chapter in US–Japan baseball relations.

THE JAPANESE AMERICAN BASEBALL LEGACY

Between the 1920s and 1950s, the pioneers of Japanese American baseball influenced hundreds of young players who carried their lessons forward to future generations. Their legacy can be seen in athletes such as Mike Lum, the first Japanese American player in the majors with the Atlanta Braves in 1967, and Ryan Yoshitomo Kurosaki, the first Japanese American pitcher, who debuted with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1975. Other Nikkei beneficiaries include Lenn Sakata, Atlee Hammaker, Don Wakamatsu, Dave Roberts, Travis Ishikawa, Kurt Suzuki, Jeremy Guthrie, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Kyle Higashioka, and Christian Yelich.

The torch of this legacy was carried most visibly by Nisei pioneers George “Hats” Omachi, Satoshi “Fibber” Hirayama, and Kenso “Howard” Zenimura. After World War II, Omachi became a mainstay in Kenichi Zenimura’s Fresno Japanese ballclub, later joining the New York Mets in 1968 as a Central California scout. He went on to scout for the Giants, Pirates, Brewers, and Astros. By the 1970s, with Japanese American participation declining, he formed the Omachi All-Stars, a multi-ethnic team that drew talent from Fresno County. Among his protégés who reached the majors were Bobby Cox, Tom Seaver, Will Clark, Rex Hudler, and Geoff Jenkins.

Satoshi “Fibber” Hirayama’s journey began in the Poston, Arizona, incarceration camp. After returning to California and excelling at Fresno State College, he signed with the Hiroshima Carp in 1955 alongside Kenshi Zenimura. Hirayama became a two-time All-Star and faced legends like Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Stan Musial in US–Japan exhibition games. After a decade as a Carp standout, he transitioned into scouting, identifying talent in Japan and the Dominican Republic. His discoveries included future major leaguers Timo Pérez and Alfonso Soriano.

Kenso “Howard” Zenimura followed in his father’s footsteps as an international ambassador of the game and a mentor for young athletes. In 1978, P.A. Shibata of the Japanese Boys League recruited him to manage an international travel team of 14- and 15-year-olds. When the league was restructured as the International Boys League (IBL) in 1982, Zenimura coached its first tournament in Osaka, which featured Japanese and foreign squads. He invited a 19-year-old catcher from Hayward, Don Wakamatsu, to join as an assistant coach for the Fresno IBL team. This formative trip to Japan laid the foundation for Wakamatsu’s future as manager of the Seattle Mariners, a Japanese-owned team known for recruiting top talent from Japan.

Few fans know the story of early twentieth century Japanese American baseball. To preserve it, Kerry Yo Nakagawa founded the nonprofit Nisei Baseball Research Project (NBRP, www.​nisei​baseb​all.​com) in 1996. Nakagawa, a filmmaker and historian, is the nephew of John Nakagawa, the “Nisei Babe Ruth.” Since its founding, the NBRP has worked to have Japanese American baseball and its pioneers recognized by professional teams, museums, schools, and communities across the US and Japan. Their story has also been told through works like the children’s book Baseball Saved Us, the documentary Diamonds in the Rough, Yuriko Gamo Romer’s short film, Baseball Behind Barbed Wire, and the major motion picture American Pastime.

The 2023 MLB All-Star Week exhibit, Baseball’s Bridge Across the Pacific: Celebrating the Legacy of Japanese American Baseball, continues this preservation work. Through panels, artifacts, and video, the exhibit highlights how Japanese American baseball shaped the game’s globalization and served as a cultural bridge to Asia. It traces the introduction of baseball to Japan in the 1870s, the first Japanese American teams of 1903, and their groundbreaking tours to Asia, which laid the foundation for professional baseball in Japan by 1936. Excluded from major league baseball by prejudice, players who were Japanese emigrants and their descendants, referred to by the term Nikkei, showcased their talent in independent leagues, often against Negro League and Latin American teams. Even during World War II incarceration, they kept the game alive, and in the postwar years, baseball became a vital tool of healing and resilience.

Today’s Asian MLB stars, like Shohei Ohtani, recognize this legacy. “I definitely feel all the history of the guys that came before me who opened the door for me to be able to play over here,” Ohtani said in 2023.19 The exhibit, made possible by the NBRP, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), and the late Billy Bean (1964–2024), head of MLB’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion office, educates the public about these trailblazers, celebrates their legacy, and advocates for a permanent tribute to Asian American pioneers in baseball history.

The induction of Ichiro Suzuki into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2025, alongside the exhibit Yakyu | Baseball, provided an opportunity to acknowledge this overlooked legacy. However, under current eligibility rules, the Hall’s Classic Baseball Era Committee considers only pre-1980s major leaguers and Negro Leaguers—which excludes Japanese American players. In 2024, the NBRP and JACL proposed expanding eligibility to “individuals from all historically marginalized leagues.” This inclusive rule would allow recognition of figures such as Kenichi Zenimura, Steere Noda, Frank Fukuda, and Cappy Harada, while also honoring other underrepresented groups. Unfortunately, the Hall’s Board of Directors rejected the proposal in February 2025.

Former baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti once said, “We must never lose sight of our history, insofar as it is ugly, never to repeat it, and insofar as it is glorious, to cherish it.”20 Filmmaker Ken Burns echoed the sentiment, reminding us that the national pastime “touches upon race relations, immigration and assimilation, ethnicity, language…as well as being a social barometer of where America has been.”21 Ichiro’s induction, like Jackie Robinson’s in 1962, which prompted renewed recognition of Negro League pioneers, underscores the need to include Nikkei players in baseball’s story. By embracing their contributions, the Hall of Fame will more accurately reflect baseball’s intersection with American history and affirm its values of fairness, equality, and justice.

CONCLUSION

Though largely absent from mainstream recognition, the impact of Japanese American baseball remains visible today—subtle, yet profound. Its legacy is not seen in retired numbers on ballpark walls, but in the names on MLB jerseys. Players of Japanese ancestry, such as Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, Yu Darvish, Shohei Ohtani, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, owe a debt to the Nikkei pioneers who came before them. By the twenty-first century, the national pastime had become the international pastime, a transformation that stands as the enduring legacy of Japanese American baseball.

KERRY YO NAKAGAWA is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and historian dedicated to preserving Japanese American baseball history. As founder and president of the non-profit Nisei Baseball Research Project (NBRP), he has spent decades documenting these untold stories. Nakagawa authored Through a Diamond: 100 Years of Japanese American Baseball and developed curriculum guides with Stanford University’s SPICE program. As a producer and director, his work includes the award-winning documentary Diamonds in the Rough, created with his godfather, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, and the narrative feature film American Pastime. A sought-after expert of Nikkei baseball history, Nakagawa has served as a consultant for numerous major exhibits, including the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Baseball As America and Yakyu exhibits, as well as the National Museum of American Jewish History’s Chasing Dreams exhibition.

BILL STAPLES JR. is a SABR member in Arizona with a passion for researching and telling the untold stories of the “international pastime.” He’s a student of Buddhism who examines Nikkei (Japanese American) Leagues, Negro Leagues, and US-Japan baseball history to explore the themes of civil rights, cross-cultural relations, and globalization. His contributions to the SABR Baseball at Manzanar project are dedicated to his good friend Tetsuo Furukawa (1927-2023), who, at age 15, was incarcerated in Rivers, Arizona. Tets was a pitcher and a poet, who in his later years wrote haikus about his wartime experiences: “Red-laced balls and bats / tribute to barbed wire baseball / lucky we have HOPE.” To see the inspiration for Tets’ haiku, visit Nozomi Park in Chandler, Arizona. To learn more about Bill, visit zenimura.com.

 

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted:

Anton, Todd and Bill Nowlin, eds. When Baseball Went to War (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2008).

Fitts, Robert K. Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

Franks, Joel S. Asian Pacific Americans and Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008).

Mukai, Gary. Diamonds in the Rough: Baseball and Japanese-American Internment. Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), 2004.

Nakagawa, Kerry Yo. Through a Diamond: 100 Years of Japanese American Baseball (San Francisco, California: Rudi Publishing, 2001).

Nelson, Kevin. The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball (Berkeley, California: Heyday Books, 2004).

Pearce, Ralph. From Asahi to Zebras: Japanese American Baseball in San Jose, California (San Jose, California: Japanese American Museum of San Jose, 2005).

Regalado, Samuel O. Nikkei Baseball: Japanese American Players from Immigration and Internment to the Major Leagues (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

Sayama, Kazuo, and Staples Jr., Bill. Gentle Black Giants: A History of Negro Leaguers in Japan (Fresno, California: NBRP Press, 2019).

Staples Jr., Bill. Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011).

Thorn, John, “PIONEERS: Larry Lester,” Our Game (blog), April 29, 2024, https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/pioneers-larry-lester-7d917d33c7a7.

 

NOTES

1 Brian Murphy, “Baseball’s Date of Birth in Japan May Have Come in 1860s”,” MLB.com, May 6, 2025, https://www.mlb.com/news/new-date-for-earliest-baseball-in-japan-may-have-been-found.

2 “Japan Against America,” Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, June 5, 1872: 4.

3 “The Japs as Ball Tossers,” Washington Daily National Republican, June 8, 1872: 4.

4 “The Japs in the Field,” Forney’s Sunday Morning Chronicle (Washington DC), June 9, 1872: 4.

5 Bill Kwon, “Asahi Tradition Still Carries On,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 5, 1981: B1.

6 “Travelers, All-Army and P.A.C. Teams Win,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, December 6, 1915: 13.

7 “Baseball Brevities,” Inter Ocean (Chicago), July 4, 1897: 10.

8 “Japanese for McGraw’s Team,” New York Times, February 10, 1905: 8.

9 “Japanese Players,” The Sporting Life, February 12, 1910: 2.

10 “Around the World with the Giants,” New York Times, January 4, 1914: Sec. 4, 3.

11 “Negroes Uphold Japs on Coast, Declares DuBois,” Kansas City Post, May 19, 1913: 10.

12 Marian L. Smith, “Race, Nationality, and Reality: INS Administration of Racial Provisions in U.S. Immigration and Nationality Law since 1898,” Prologue Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2002, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/summer/immigration-law-1.

13 “Porterville Would Bar Japanese,” Fresno Bee, February 26, 1924:10.

14 “Tokyo Giants Boasts Several Diamond Stars,” Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, May 23, 1935, 10.

15 Alec Yoshio MacDonald, “Giants to Celebrate Fuji Athletic Club on Japanese Heritage Night,” Nichi Bei News, May 11, 2023, https://www.nichibei.org/2023/05/giants-to-celebrate-fuji-athletic-club-on-japanese-heritage-night/; Rob Fitts, “Returning Home: The 1914 Seattle Nippon and Asahi Japanese American Tours,” Nichibei Yakyu: US Tours of Japan, 1907-1958 (SABR, 2022), accessed December 8, 2025, https://sabr.org/journal/article/returning-home-the-1914-seattle-nippon-and-asahi-japanese-american-tours/.

16 “Nipponese On Coast Organize a League,” Anaconda (Montana) Standard, May 01, 1910: Sporting Section, 4.

17 Michael Beschloss, “For Incarcerated Japanese-Americans, Baseball Was ‘Wearing the American Flag,’” New York Times, June 21, 2014.

18 Satoshi “Fibber” Hirayama, telephone interview with author, April 1, 2013.

19 Anthony Castrovince, “Japanese Baseball Exhibit Showcases Bridge to Ohtani at ASG,” MLB.com, July 10, 2023, https://www.mlb.com/news/japanese-baseball-history-exhibit-opens-at-all-star-game.

20 Associated Press, “Black Players Remember Good and Bad Days,” Miami Herald, September 25, 1988, 15D.

21 “GM Teams with Ken Burns on Baseball,” SABR Bulletin, 20, November 1990, 6.

 

Diagrams and articles used stereotypes to differentiate Japanese and Chinese traits. A Department of War comic showed “Japs,” as they were offensively called then, with “lemon yellow” skin, buck teeth, and legs that appeared “joined directly to his chest.”21 In a late December 1941 issue of Time magazine, a writer claimed that “although both have the typical epicanthic fold of the upper eyelid (which makes them look almond-eyed), Japanese eyes are usually set closer together.” The Time article also claimed that “virtually all Japanese are short” and “except for wrestlers—are seldom fat…Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open.…Japanese are hesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time.”22 A Life magazine caption stated that while “Chinese wear rational calm of tolerant realists,” Japanese people “show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics.”23

Yet beyond any crass wartime contrasts, anti-Japanese and anti-Chinese venom in America had long been close-knit. The first major wave of Japanese migrants came to the continental US in the 1880s, as a federal ban on Chinese immigration took hold. With fewer Chinese settlers taking low-wage jobs on West Coast farms, the Japanese newcomers filled the gaps. By 1900 more than 24,000 Japanese people had reached the continental US.24 In time they faced allegations similar to what the Chinese laborers had endured.

California labor leaders were among the first to say Japanese workers were stealing job opportunities from White men. San Francisco dry goods hauler Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant who had advocated for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, told members of his Workingmen’s Party in 1900 that the US should also curb Japanese arrivals.25 San Francisco mayor James D. Phelan told a similar crowd that year that “the Japanese…are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made.”26

Indeed, Japanese immigrants could not be made American citizens, but only because of laws passed by White lawmakers. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited US citizenship to “any alien, being a free White person.”27 An 1870 revision allowed “aliens of African nativity and…persons of African descent” to become citizens as well, but the extension stopped there.28 Entering the twentieth century, Issei—and just about every other Asian-born person—remained ineligible for citizenship.

But Japanese children, whether they were American citizens or not, were not immune from racism. In 1905 the San Francisco Chronicle published a headline that warned of “THE YELLOW PERIL: HOW THE JAPANESE CROWD OUT THE WHITE RACE.”30 In October 1906, under pressure from a new locally formed Asiatic Exclusion League, San Francisco’s board of education relocated 93 Japanese American students to the city’s segregated Chinese American public school.31

The removals incensed Japanese diplomats, who didn’t want their ethnic kin mistreated. In response President Theodore Roosevelt struck an informal deal with Japan’s government. The so-called Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 allowed Japanese students to attend San Francisco’s White schools, all the while ensuring that the US government would not directly ban Japanese immigration. And to appease White exclusionists whom he feared might “perform acts of lawless violence” otherwise,32 Roosevelt persuaded Tokyo to stop giving passports to Japanese workers intent on coming to America. The only Japanese applicants who could move to the US, under the agreement, were those with a parent, spouse, or child already on American soil.33

Many White laborers remained angry, even after the limitations took hold. Hearing concerns that Japanese immigrants were buying land to start their own farms, California lawmakers passed the Alien Land Law of 1913. The legislation forbade all “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” including but not limited to Issei, from owning land in the state.34 Similar laws eventually passed in Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington.35

More actions against Japanese Americans followed. In 1921, fueled by false claims that Japan’s emperor had required Japanese wives in California to give birth at least once a year, California state controller John S. Chambers wrote a magazine article warning that “by 1949 they will outnumber the white people.”36 In 1922 the Supreme Court unanimously reiterated that Issei could not become American citizens.37 In 1924 the federal Immigration Act prevented any more Asians from coming at all. Three years after Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, a State Department report argued, “When war breaks out, the entire Japanese population on the West Coast will rise and commit sabotage.”38

The Japanese people who already lived on the US mainland responded by forming ethnic enclaves. Issei expanded their farms, often with land bought years earlier using their Nisei children’s names. They built schools, churches, gardens, orchards, stores, and recreation halls. They avoided confronting or competing with White farmers, instead choosing the safety of friends and family.

Still, anti-Japanese statements bordered increasingly on irony. White lawmakers who had excluded the Japanese immigrants accused them of being cliquish. In 1940, Japanese Americans comprised only two percent of California’s population and less than one one-thousandth of the continental US population—but suspicions of mass takeovers festered all the same.39

And as more world events unfolded, more messengers joined in.

***

Americans had reason to feel nervous in wartime. On December 10, 1941—less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attack—Japanese troops landed on the Pacific island of Guam.40 Between December 18 and December 24, Japanese submarines attacked eight American shipping vessels off the West Coast and sank two of them.41 Japanese soldiers captured Wake Island on December 23 and Hong Kong on December 25. American parents sent sons off to fight enemy soldiers. Wives and children wondered when reunions would come, if at all.

But in many cases those nerves devolved into blame toward an entire people. “I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior,” Hearst Newspapers columnist Henry McLemore wrote in January 1942. “Herd ’em up, pack ’em off…Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it.”42

Anti-Japanese cartoons attracted parents and youth alike. Children’s author and illustrator Dr. Seuss, whose caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini did not demonize Germans or Italians at large, used stereotypes to mock Japanese people as bucktoothed and pig-nosed.43 Years before releasing Horton Hears a Who!, a 1954 book seen by many as his postwar apology,44 Seuss made up a series of wartime drawings for New York’s PM newspaper: one depicting Japanese people in line to obtain explosives, another showing Japanese cats swarming an American bird.45 Other cartoonists, in publications and posters across the US, drew the Japanese diaspora as a bunch of fanged, squinty-eyed animals: monkeys, bats, snakes, and rats.46 Historian Roger Daniels later summarized the growing belief this way: “The evil deeds of Hitler’s Germany were the deeds of bad men; the evil deeds of Tojo and Hirohito’s Japan were the deeds of a bad race.”47

Newspaper headlines ranged from misleading to inaccurate: “JAP BOAT FLASHES MESSAGE ASHORE”; “JAPANESE HERE SENT VITAL DATA TO TOKYO”; “CAPS ON JAPANESE TOMATO PLANTS POINT TO AIR BASE.”48 On December 11, 1941, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reader could have easily seen a subheading on the paper’s front page—“Flaming Arrows Planted by 5th Columnists to Guide Foe Toward Seattle”—without reading the next page: “[Assistant to the governor Ross] Cunningham told the Associated Press that the fires had been set by white men who had been clearing land.”49

Articles about the FBI confiscating guns, ammunition, radios, and cameras from Issei often lacked crucial details. Issei families had used these items for recreation or farming, not arsenal-building. Most confiscated weapons had come from a licensed gun shop and a general store warehouse, not homes.50 To quote a Justice Department spokesperson at the time: “We have not found a single machine gun, nor have we found any gun in any circumstances indicating that it was to be used in a manner helpful to our enemies. We have not found a single camera which we have reason to believe was for use in espionage.”51

More Americans either chose to ignore certain facts or were never exposed to them at all. They took the confiscations as proof that Issei had sent images abroad, communicated with Japanese bases and battleships, and aspired to topple America’s tunnels, bridges, highways, and ports.

An extreme faction came to believe this: Even if these immigrants weren’t plotting anything bad in America yet, the chance that they might was bad enough.

***

Roosevelt told his aides what he really thought of Japanese people. He used the word “treacherous.”52 He spouted a theory that their “skull pattern, being less developed than that of Caucasians, might be responsible for their aggressive behavior.”53 Perhaps, he suggested in private, an old Chinese tale about them descending from baboons held merit.54

The president’s proclamation on January 14, 1942, required noncitizens from Italy, Germany, and Japan to register with the US Department of Justice, but a growing crowd wanted the White House to go further—especially on Japanese matters. Los Angeles-based congressman Leland Ford sent identical letters to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Attorney General Francis Biddle on January 16. Ford demanded that “all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in inland concentration camps…[I]f an American-born Japanese, who is a citizen, is really patriotic and wishes to make his contribution to the safety and welfare of this country, right here is the opportunity to do so.”55

Lieutenant General John DeWitt, who oversaw the Army’s West Coast defense operations, had seesawed for weeks on the issue of removing the Japanese population, but nearing January’s end he sounded like a longtime believer. “The fact that nothing has happened so far [on the West Coast] is more or less ominous,” he said on January 24.56 In other words, in his view, the absence of sabotage made sabotage more likely.

However twisted DeWitt’s logic was, more American institutions bought it. The Los Angeles Times editorial board, whose December 10 headline had read “LET’S NOT GET RATTLED,” reversed course.57 A January 28 editorial stated that “the rigors of war demand proper detention of Japanese and their immediate removal from the most acute danger spots.”58 On February 2 the board said Nisei were just as dangerous as their Issei relatives: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched…So a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents…grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”59 By early February, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, California governor Culbert Olson, and state attorney general Earl Warren each favored removing Japanese Americans.

Attorney General Biddle did not like the trend he was seeing. Though he had already approved the formation of limited evacuation zones, he got the sense that personnel within the Department of War were looking to oust more Japanese people from their West Coast homes. In early February he handed war officials a press release to co-sign: “The Department of War and the Department of Justice are in agreement that the present military situation does not at this time require the removal of American citizens of Japanese race.”

The officials—Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, Army Provost Marshal General Allen W. Gullion, and Major Karl Bendetsen—rejected Biddle’s document.60

The attorney general answered back with a refusal of his own. On February 9 he denied DeWitt’s request to establish larger evacuation zones in Washington and Oregon. In a letter later that day to Secretary of War Stimson, he wrote, “No reasons were given for this mass evacuation.…The Department of Justice is not equipped to carry out any mass evacuation.”61

Even Stimson, a former US attorney under two presidents, held legal reservations. He disclosed, in his diary, his fear that the mass removal of Japanese American citizens would “make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system.”62

Stimson and McCloy sought advice from their commander in chief. On February 11 they asked Roosevelt whether he would allow the Department of War to evacuate Japanese “citizens as well as aliens” not just from the existing evacuation zones but from “the entire strip DeWitt originally recommended, which involves a number of over 100,000 people.”63

Roosevelt’s answer was cryptic. According to Stimson, the president said to “go ahead and do anything you think necessary…[but] be as reasonable as you can.”64

The Pentagon leaders took the president’s response as a blessing. “We have carte blanche to do what we want as far as the president’s concerned,” McCloy told the newly promoted Colonel Bendetsen. “The president specifically authorized the evacuation of citizens.”65

The exclusion effort was taking shape. DeWitt submitted a formal recommendation of it on February 13, saying the “Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second- and third-generation Japanese…have become ‘Americanized,’ their racial stains are undiluted.”66 Influential newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann wrote that the Pacific Coast was “officially a combat zone.…Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”67 A February 16 column by conservative commentator Westbrook Pegler proclaimed, “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”68

Biddle pleaded. In a February 17 memo to Roosevelt, he repeated what both the FBI and the presidentially commissioned Munson Report had found: “[T]here is no evidence of planned sabotage.”69 He accused “Armchair Strategists” like Lippmann and Pegler of “shouting fire! in a crowded theater; and if race riots occur, these writers will bear a heavy responsibility.”70

But neither the attorney general’s nor First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s private objections stopped the evacuation plan from becoming official. On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order authorized the Department of War “to prescribe military areas…from which any or all persons may be excluded.”71

Japanese Americans were not mentioned in the order. Nor were any specific races, ethnicities, or nationalities. No person of Japanese ancestry in the US had been—or would be—charged, tried, or convicted of crimes against America. Yet there was no doubt: The order targeted them.

 

 

As Japanese Americans on the West Coast awaited further instruction, it soon became clear what would not happen under Executive Order 9066.

Immigrants from other Axis nations would, by and large, not have to move. True, neither Germany nor Italy had directly hit Pearl Harbor, but the decision to keep most German and Italian Americans in place was also about familiarity; San Francisco mayor Angelo J. Rossi’s father was from Italy; New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio, the San Francisco native whose record-setting 56-game hitting streak less than a year earlier had captivated the nation, was the son of Sicilians. At a congressional hearing to discuss mass migrations, former US attorney Chauncey Tramutolo said, “To evacuate the senior DiMaggios would…present, I am sure you will agree with me, a serious situation.”72 Indeed, military leaders ultimately agreed that they could tell the loyal Italians and Germans apart from the disloyal—without hauling or jailing them based on ethnicity alone. And most Italian and German immigrants who were arrested received hearings, trials, and chances to prove their innocence.

Most Japanese Hawaiians would not have to move either. This seemed odd to some, as Hawaii was the site of the Pearl Harbor disaster, sat closer to Japan than California did, and had a higher percentage of Japanese descendants than any of the 48 US states at the time.73 But Hawaii’s large Japanese population—about 160,000, nearly 40 percent of the territory’s total count—was precisely why its businesspeople did not want them all gone; the place needed their labor and spending money.74 While General John DeWitt pushed for mass removal of Japanese Americans from the mainland under Executive Order 9066, Hawaii military governor Delos Emmons resisted similar large-scale roundups in Hawaii, though about 1,500 Japanese Hawaiians would wind up in mainland camps before the war’s end.75

Meanwhile, enthusiasm remained high for removing Japanese populations from California, Oregon, and Washington. Two days after President Roosevelt signed his executive order, a San Francisco Chronicle editorialist wrote, “We have to be tough, even if civil rights do take a beating for a time.”76 A March 1942 poll showed that 93 percent of Americans supported moving Japanese noncitizens from the West Coast; 59 percent wanted American-born Japanese people moved as well.77

Some high-profile Nisei concurred. The Japanese American Citizens League, founded in 1929 to advocate for American citizens of Japanese descent, cooperated in hopes that doing so would show all Americans how pro-American they were. JACL leader Mike Masaoka told Congress in 1942, “With any policy of evacuation definitely arising from reasons of military necessity and national safety, we are in complete agreement.”78 The Doho, a Los Angeles-based Japanese newspaper, published an editorial stating that “this is no time to holler that our civil liberties and constitutional rights are being denied us.”79

Critics of the order made dire appeals. Many Issei warned their Nisei children that even if they complied and went wherever the soldiers with guns told them to, other Americans would still see them as less than. A letter to the president, signed by educational reformer John Dewey and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr among others, argued that removing Japanese people would resemble “the totalitarian theory of justice practiced by the Nazis in their treatment of the Jews.”80 Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. stressed that the financial impact on Japanese American communities would prove disastrous, to which Roosevelt replied, “I am not concerned about that.”81

With the president holding firm, the restrictions became reality. The president assigned DeWitt to rid the West Coast of anyone who was so much as one-sixteenth Japanese, regardless of citizenship.82 Less than a week later, the US Navy ordered about 500 Japanese American families on California’s Terminal Island to leave within 48 hours.83 A proclamation issued on March 2 split California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona into two military areas. An executive order signed on March 18 created the War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian agency tasked with relocating Issei, Nisei, and their families to places inland.

The government’s initial goal was to have Japanese Americans leave “voluntarily.” Historians have since used quotation marks because, in the words of journalist John Hersey, “it was obvious to those who ‘voluntarily’ moved that they were being pushed out.”84 At any rate, 4,889 residents left the newly carved military jurisdictions, resettling for the most part in Colorado or Utah.85

But the “voluntary” exodus stopped there. Between Military Areas No. 1 and 2, there still lived more than 112,000 Japanese Americans, at least 70,000 of them American-born.86 Some had driven hundreds of miles to look for new homes, only to be turned away by armed White vigilantes and “NO JAPS WANTED” signs.87 Others opted not to try at all, in part because the continued freeze on Issei bank accounts left them with little money. Moving would have been expensive, especially to a different state. In what increasingly seemed like a lose-lose situation, they tried convincing themselves to stay where they were—with people they knew—for as long as they could.

Government officials answered back with tighter demands. Congress passed a law that criminalized violations of any military decree stemming from Executive Order 9066. Violators risked a $5,000 fine and one-year imprisonment.88 On March 24, 54 Japanese families from Bainbridge Island, Washington, received six days’ notice to report to a nearby fairgrounds and bring only what they could carry.89 On March 29 the military stopped allowing “voluntary” relocation. A curfew took effect for all enemy aliens and “persons of Japanese ancestry” who still lived within the military areas: 8 PM to 6 AM, with no movement allowed anytime “more than five miles from their place of residence.”90

The last day of March brought an even more sweeping move. Notices of exclusion orders began covering store windows, poles, fences, and bulletin boards all along the West Coast, with this heading: “INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY.”91 From the moment these were posted, heads of households had to register with local military offices. Families often had less than a week to surrender at a designated place.

Few Japanese Americans knew where the government would take them. None knew how long they would be gone. What they did know, by reading the signs, was that the forced removals applied to “aliens and non-aliens alike.” “The term ‘non-alien’ might have been used,” author David K. Fremon later wrote, “because the government was ashamed to admit that it was rounding up and detaining United States citizens.”92

Each person could bring one suitcase, sometimes two. They could keep whatever clothes, bedding, cups, silverware, and toiletries fit. Some had helpful non-Japanese neighbors who agreed to care for their homes, pets, cars, furniture, and heirlooms in their absence. But for many, surrendering to the US government meant leaving behind lifetimes of belongings.93

“For the first time in 81 years,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported on May 21, 1942, “not a single Japanese is walking the streets of San Francisco.”94

***

A handful resisted. At 11 PM one night, Minoru Yasui walked outside his Oregon home, deliberately violating a curfew. Gordon Hirabayashi entered a Seattle FBI office and told agents he would not register for evacuation. Bay Area native Fred Korematsu tried escaping mass roundup by undergoing eye surgery to look less Japanese, only to be caught and convicted of violating military orders. Sacramento native Mitsuye Endo filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing her incarceration was unlawful. All four would take their cases to the US Supreme Court. Only Endo’s case would succeed, with a 9-0 ruling that ultimately let Japanese people walk freely again, but that wouldn’t happen until late 1944.

Relief, to many Japanese Americans on the West Coast, felt far away in Spring 1942. Without trial or proof of guilt, most were stuffed inside buses and trains, often with window shades down. Only when they neared their destination did the wheels slow and shades go up. From behind the window glass, they saw barbed wire, searchlights, watchtowers, and soldiers with machine guns.95 They arrived at what the government called an “assembly center,” a harmless-sounding term for yet another cramped space.

Most of the 15 or so military-run assembly centers stood on converted fairgrounds or racetracks—and it was obvious. Tarpaper barracks replaced Ferris wheels and roller coasters. Families slept in horse stalls that reeked of manure. Straw-filled sacks became beds. Floors were either asphalt or dirt. Thin walls destroyed any sense of privacy. Showers and toilets lacked partitions. Black dots gathered on the yellow flypaper that adorned dining halls. Food poisoning was common. One could only wonder where all the horses had gone.96

The assembly centers stayed filled for months, until the WRA finished building what it generously called “relocation centers.” These camps were more isolated and permanent, with 10 in all: Gila River and Poston in Arizona, Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, Granada in Colorado, Minidoka in Idaho, Topaz in Utah, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, and Jerome and Rohwer in the Arkansas marshlands. At each, the scenes of armed guards, watchtowers, thin walls, and tight quarters were similar.97

***

Acknowledgment took years, and even then, it came with limits. The Supreme Court’s December 1944 ruling in Ex parte Mitsuye Endo declared that the WRA had “no authority to subject citizens who are concededly loyal to its leave procedure,” but the justices stopped short of denouncing mass detentions without due process.100 The camps closed in 1946, after World War II had ended, but that didn’t change the fact that many Japanese Americans no longer had homes to return to. For the most part, whatever items the Issei and Nisei families could not fit in their suitcases in 1942 were long gone, as were businesses and jobs. The Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act of 1948 provided some help, but it was mostly limited to property loss; and due to strict documentation requirements, the $148 million worth of claims yielded many denials and only $37 million in compensation.101

The coming decades brought somewhat deeper amends. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 allowed Asian immigrants, including Issei, to become American citizens. In 1960 President Dwight Eisenhower gave Nisei civil service workers retirement and sick-leave credit for time lost during the war. A series of federal actions allowed Issei to redeem their once-frozen Japanese bank funds—and eventually convert their yen into dollars using a more generous prewar rate.102 And on February 19, 1976, President Gerald Ford issued a proclamation rescinding Executive Order 9066: “Learning from our mistakes is not pleasant, but as a great philosopher once admonished, we must do so if we want to avoid repeating them.”103

A nine-member congressional panel appointed by President Jimmy Carter advanced Ford’s message. From July to December 1981 the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians heard testimony from more than 750 people, including former detainees, government officials, and historians.104 The result was a 467-page report that declared Executive Order 9066 “not justified by military necessity.”105 The commission agreed that the order had been a “grave injustice” caused by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”106

In 1983, a year after the report’s release, a federal judge reversed Fred Korematsu’s conviction. By January 1988 all charges against Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui, as they pertained to evading detention more than 40 years earlier, were dropped.107 In time all three received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.108

A formal White House apology finally came on August 10, 1988. President Ronald Reagan, himself a former governor of California, signed the Civil Liberties Act into law. The legislation—sponsored by California representative Norman Mineta (a Heart Mountain survivor) and Hawaii senator Spark Matsunaga—promised a presidential apology letter and tax-free $20,000 payment to any surviving Japanese American wrongly detained during World War II. “Yet no payment can make up for those lost years,” Reagan said upon signing the act. “So, what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong.”109

Still, however unprecedented they were, the act and Reagan’s admission were not fix-alls. The per-person reparations were far less than the $220,000 proposed by the National Council for Japanese American Redress years earlier.110 Tens of thousands of camp survivors died before they could ever receive a presidential apology or redress.111

“I remember my dad’s reaction,” said Don Wakamatsu, whose father was born in the Tule Lake camp and received a $20,000 check, “that it was too little too late.”112

But for Wakamatsu, a former Chicago White Sox catcher who in 2009 became Major League Baseball’s first Asian American manager, seeing his father open the check marked a beginning.113 He decided then, while he still could, to ask him about the camp experience, all that had preceded it, and the lessons to carry forward: “Any time you can talk about it, it immortalizes it a bit more.”114

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 The numbers of Americans dead and wounded, as well as the numbers of American ships and aircraft damaged or destroyed, come from “Overview of the Pearl Harbor Attack,” Naval History and Heritage Command, accessed June 2025, https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/p/the-pearl-harbor-attack-7-december-1941.html.

2 “USS Oklahoma—Pearl Harbor National Memorial,” National Park Service, accessed June 2025, https://home.nps.gov/perl/learn/historyculture/uss-oklahoma.htm.

3 Lila Perl, Behind Barbed Wire: The Story of Japanese American Internment During World War II (New York: Benchmark Books, 2003), 7.

4 The only dissenting vote came from Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist representative from Montana. Historian James L. Dickerson notes that Rankin cast her vote “with tears streaming down her cheeks.” James L. Dickerson, Inside America’s Concentration Camps: Two Centuries of Internment and Torture (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010), 61-62.

5 A copy of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is available at “Alien and Sedition Acts (1798),” National Archives, accessed July 2025, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/alien-and-sedition-acts.

6 The text of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Proclamation 2525 is available here: “Proclamation 2525—Alien Enemies, Japanese,” American Presidency Project, accessed June 2025, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-2525-alien-enemies-japanese.

7 Harry H.L. Kitano, Japanese Americans and Internment (Paramus, New Jersey: Globe Fearon, 1994), 30; Louis Fiset, “President Franklin Roosevelt Signs Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942,” History Link, April 13, 2016, https://www.historylink.org/file/310.

8 Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 50.

9 John C. Davenport, The Internment of Japanese Americans During World War II: Detention of American Citizens (New York: Chelsea House, 2010), 2.

10 Charlotte Taylor and Deborah Kent, The Internment of Japanese Americans (New York: Enslow, 2016), 40.

11 Taylor and Kent, 40.

12 David K. Fremon, Japanese American Internment in American History (Springfield, New Jersey: Enslow, 1996), 26.

13 Fremon, 22; Taylor and Kent, 32-33.

14 Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and David Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Bantam Books, 7th printing, 1974), 5-6.

15 Perl, 42.

16 Those who had been arrested and were in custody by December 10 came from the following backgrounds: 857 were German, 147 were Italian, 924 were Japanese residents of the continental US, 367 were Japanese residents of Hawaii. (See Perl, 42.)

17 The 1940 census counted just under 127,000 Japanese residents of the continental US. Another 158,000 or so lived in Hawaii, which was not yet a state but a US territory. See Perl, 42-43; Alice Yang Murray ed., What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 8.

18 Eleanor Roosevelt’s column was distributed by United Feature Syndicate. It appeared on newspaper pages across the US, including the Cincinnati Post, December 16, 1941: 6.

19 “President Warns Against Persecution of Aliens,” Sacramento Bee, January 5, 1942: 18.

20 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 42-43.

21 A Pocket Guide to China (Washington, DC: War and Navy Departments, 1942), 66-67.

22 “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” Time, December 22, 1941, 33.

23 “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” Life, December 22, 1941, 81.

24 The 1900 US Census counted 24,326 Japanese people, with most on the nation’s West Coast. This count predates the admission of Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona into the continental United States.

25 Richard Koichi Tanaka, America on Trial! Beginning of Japanese in America, Evacuation and Its Effects on Future Generations of Japanese Americans (New York: Carlton Press, 1987), 22-24.

26 David A. Neiwert, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005), 18.

27 “Naturalization Act of 1790,” 1 Stat. 103 (enacted March 26, 1790), accessed June 2025, available at https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1790naturalizationact.pdf.

28 Transcript of “Naturalization Act of 1870,” ImmigrationHistory​.org, accessed June 2025, https://immigrationhistory.org/item/naturalization-act-of-1870/.

29 Text from the amendment is available here: “Constitution of the United States: Fourteenth Amendment,” Constitution Annotated, accessed June 2025, https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/.

30 “The Yellow Peril: How the Japanese Crowd Out the White Race,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 1905: 6.

31 Peter H. Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 10-11.

32 Theodore Roosevelt, “Sixth Annual Message,” December 3, 1906, transcript provided by University of California – Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, accessed June 2025, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/sixth-annual-message-4.

33 Shiho Imai, “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed June 2025, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Gentlemen%27s%20Agreement/.

34 The text from California’s 1913 law is available here: “Webb-Haney Alien Land Law,” In Time and Place, accessed June 2025, https://www.intimeandplace.org/Japanese%20Internment/reading/constitution/alienlandlaw.html.

35 The following is a list of western US states that passed pre-World War II laws or amendments banning non-citizen land ownership: Arizona (1921), New Mexico (1921), Washington (1921), Idaho (1923), Montana (1923). Oregon, whose legislators had voted in 1859 to prevent Chinese immigrants from owning land, passed a separate law in 1923 that mirrored California’s 1913 act.

36 John S. Chambers, “The Japanese Invasion,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1921: 26.

37 Takao Ozawa, a Japanese-born businessman who had been living in the United States for two decades, sought to challenge laws that barred Japanese immigrants from becoming US citizens. His case, which became known as Ozawa v. United States, reached the US Supreme Court in 1922. In a unanimous ruling, the court upheld the ban.

38 Irons, 19.

39 The 1940 US Census counted 131,669,275 people in the continental US. Estimates from that same year – and within the same boundaries – placed the number of Japanese Americans at 127,000. (See “Current Population Reports: Population Estimates,” Bureau of the Census, June 30, 1950, available at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1950/demographics/P25-42.pdf. See also “Japanese American Relocation,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed June 2025, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/japanese-american-relocation.)

40 “Guam in World War II,” National Park Service, accessed June 2025, https://www.nps.gov/articles/guamwwii.htm.

41 Glenn Barnett, “War on the West Coast,” WWII History, December 2020/January 2021, 56.

42 Henry McLemore, “Why Treat the Japs Well Here?” San Francisco Examiner, January 29, 1942: 9.

43 Richard H. Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: New Press, 1999), 16, 140-44, 150, 153-54.

44 Seuss dedicated Horton Hears a Who! to a friend he had met during a postwar visit to Kyoto, Japan. One of the most quoted lines from the book is “a person’s a person no matter how small.” See Minear, 263; Donald E. Pease, Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 93. In a 2019 interview, Minear said of the book, “[Seuss] doesn’t come out and explicitly say he’s recanting his earlier views, but it’s a very different take.” Fiona Macdonald, “The Surprisingly Radical Politics of Dr. Seuss,” BBC News online, March 2, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190301-the-surprisingly-radical-politics-of-dr-seuss.

45 Minear, 65, 145.

46 Kieran Robertson, “When Art Meets Army: The Dangerous Propaganda of World War II,” OhioHistory.​org, June 8, 2017, https://www.ohiohistory.org/when-art-meets-army-the-dangerous-propaganda-of-world-war-ii/; Lucy Davidson, “5 Examples of Anti-Japanese Propaganda During World War Two,” History Hit, November 26, 2021, https://www.historyhit.com/examples-of-anti-japanese-propaganda-during-world-war-two/; “‘Jap Trap,’ World War II Propaganda Poster,” History Matters, accessed June 2025, https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/8332/.

47 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 33.

48 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 33.

49 R. B. Bermann, “Fires Set to Aid Enemy Planes: Flaming Arrows Planted by 5th Columnists to Guide Foe Toward Seattle,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 11, 1941: 1-2.

50 John Hersey, “A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions,” in John Armor and Peter Wright, Manzanar (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 22.

51 Hersey, 22.

52 Dickerson, 62-63.

53 Geoffrey S. Smith, “Racial Nativism and Origins of Japanese American Relocation,” in Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano eds., Japanese Americans, from Relocation to Redress (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 80.

54 Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 120.

55 Hersey, 34.

56 Stetson Conn, “The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast,” in Kent Roberts Greenfield ed., Command Decisions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1959), 94.

57 “Let’s Not Get Rattled,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1941: 1.

58 “Facing the Japanese Issue Here,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1942: 4.

59 W. H. Anderson, “The Question of Japanese-Americans,” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1942: II-4.

60 Frank F. Chuman, The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese Americans (Del Mar, California: Publisher’s Inc., 1976), 157.

61 Hersey, 41.

62 Robinson, 105.

63 Conn, 104.

64 Daniel S. Davis, Behind Barbed Wire: The Imprisonment of Japanese Americans During World War II (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), 36-37.

65 Conn, 104. See also Chuman, 159.

66 The recommendation was later published as John L. DeWitt, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943), 34.

67 Walter Lippmann, “The Fifth Column on the Coast,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1942: II-4.

68 Westbrook Pegler, “Fair Enough,” Atlanta Constitution, February 16, 1942: 12.

69 Hersey, 44-46.

70 Irons, 61.

71 The text from Executive Order 9066 is available here: “Executive Order 9066: Resulting in Japanese American Incarceration (1942),” National Archives, accessed June 2025, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066.

72 National Defense Migration: Hearings Before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration (Part 29: San Francisco Hearings) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 11128.

73 Through the end of World War II and for more than a decade thereafter, Hawaii remained a US territory – not a state. It did not become a state until August 21, 1959, about 7½ months after Alaska’s admission.

74 According to the 1940 US Census, 423,330 people lived in Hawaii that year. Population: First Series, Number of Inhabitants – Hawaii (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1942), 1. (See also “Japanese Americans and the Wartime Experience in Hawaii,” National World War II Museum, accessed June 2025, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japanese-americans-wartime-experience-hawaii.)

75 Perl, 41.

76 “Facts Force America to Stop Pussyfooting,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 21, 1942: 12.

77 The poll was conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion. “Americans and the Holocaust,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed June 2025, https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/main/japanese-american-internment.

78 National Defense Migration…San Francisco Hearings, 11137.

79 Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 79.

80 Robinson, 160.

81 Robinson, 142.

82 Perl, 48-50.

83 Davenport, 36.

84 Hersey, 54-55.

85 Hersey, 54-55.

86 Fremon, 8.

87 Michael Burgan, The Japanese American Internment: Civil Liberties Denied (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Compass Point Books, 2007), 36.

88 The penalties were encoded in what became known as Public Law 503. A copy of the act is available on In​ternm​entAr​chive​s.​com, accessed June 2025, https://www.internmentarchives.com/showdoc.php?docid=00104&search_id=9609.

89 Roger Daniels, The Decision to Relocate the Japanese Americans (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1975), 54; Jennifer Ott, “Bainbridge Island’s Japanese American Residents, First to Be Incarcerated Under Executive Order 9066, Are Removed from Their Homes on March 30, 1942,” History Link, https://www.historylink.org/File/8277, September 12, 2007.

90 Given that the curfew applied to all enemy aliens within Military Area No. 1, Italian- and German-born noncitizens were technically subject to the restriction. However, as historian Roger Daniels later noted, the curfew was “not generally enforced or susceptible of enforcement against White people.” (See Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 85.)

91 Perl, 46.

92 Fremon, 39.

93 Fremon, 43.

94 A copy of the San Francisco Chronicle article, “S.F. Clear of All but 6 Sick Japs,” is available on the Museum of the City of San Francisco website, accessed June 2025, http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist8/evac19.html.

95 For more on the trips to the Japanese American assembly centers, see Hersey, 6-7; Taylor and Kent, 10-11; Wakatsuki Houston and Houston, 14.

96 More descriptions of the assembly centers are available in Dickerson, 78; Fremon, 48-49; Perl, 52; Bryan J. Grapes (Ed.), Japanese American Internment Camps (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2001), 21-22.

97 More descriptions of the trips to – and arrivals at – the WRA camps are available on Dickerson, 90; Irons, 73-74; Perl, 62; Taylor and Kent, 59.

98 The WRA’s “daily Relocation Center population reports” counted 111,999 arrivals between the opening of the camps and closure of assembly centers on October 30, 1942. (See Final Report, Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1943], 380.)

99 Fremon, 38.

100 Excerpts from the Supreme Court’s decision are available at “Ex parte Endo, 323 US 283 (1944),” Justia, accessed June 2025, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/323/283/.

101 “Civil Liberties Act,” National Park Service, accessed June 2025, https://www.nps.gov/miin/learn/historyculture/civil-liberties-act.htm.

102 The redemption of deposits from US branches of Japanese banks came piecemeal. In 1957 the Office of Alien Property said accountholders would be able to convert their assets, but only using a postwar rate of “approximately 360 yen to the dollar, as opposed to the prewar rate (which [had been] in effect when the assets were seized) of approximately 4 yen to the dollar,” as noted in Mitchell T. Maki et al., Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Urbana, IL:University of Illinois Press, 1999), 60-61. In early 1967 the federal government agreed to offer the prewar rate to those who had already submitted certificates for redemption. A US Supreme Court decision that April extended access to the prewar rate, to include Japanese accountholders who had not yet submitted. (See also “Minorities: A Wrong Partially Righted,” Time, April 21, 1967: 25.)

103 A copy of President Ford’s proclamation, entitled “An American Promise,” is available at Brooke Clement and Dr. Richard Weld, “Termination of Executive Order 9066,” National Archives, accessed June 2025, https://ford.blogs.archives.gov/2024/05/02/termination-of-executive-order-9066/.

104 Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1982), 1.

105 Personal Justice Denied, 18.

106 Personal Justice Denied, 18.

107 For Minoru Yasui, the dropping of charges came posthumously. Yasui died two years earlier, in 1986.

108 Korematsu received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. Hirabayashi, who died in 2012, posthumously received the medal in 2012. Yasui received a posthumous medal in 2015. Mitsuye Endo died in 2006 and in 2024 received a posthumous Presidential Citizens Medal, the United States’ second-highest civilian award.

109 A transcript of Reagan’s remarks from August 10, 1988, is available at “Remarks on Signing the Bill Providing Restitution for the Wartime Internment of Japanese-American Civilians,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, accessed June 2025, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-signing-bill-providing-restitution-wartime-internment-japanese-american.

110 Maki et al., Achieving the Impossible Dream, 125.

111 The US Office of Redress Administration distributed $20,000 payments to affected Japanese Americans who were still alive as of August 10, 1988. About 82,000 checks went out. (See “World War II Japanese American Incarceration: Researching an Individual or Family,” National Archives, accessed June 2025, https://www.archives.gov/research/aapi/ww2/genealogy).

112 Hugo Kugiya, “Seattle Manager Hopes What He Does Highlights Who He Is,” New York Times, December 26, 2008: B12.

113 Don Wakamatsu played in 18 major-league games, all for the 1991 Chicago White Sox. He managed the Seattle Mariners from 2009 to 2010, and the Texas Rangers in 2018.

114 Vahe Gregorian, “History Hits Home for Wakamatsu,” Kansas City Star, July 5, 2015: B1.

 

SOCIAL, CULTURAL, AND RECREATIONAL LIFE

Each residential block had a block manager who was elected by inmates.43 The War Relocation Authority (WRA) 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.44 The Free Press included a social calendar and other articles reminding inmates of the upcoming events of social, religious, and athletic groups.45 Bannai said the extensive options for social activities were designed to “keep the morale of the population in camp up, which was good. You had to do that, otherwise it was a very depressing situation.”46

Inmates’ residential block served as their social anchor. Wilbur Sato recalled that whenever someone in his block prepared to leave Manzanar for good, residents held a block party and sang “Auld Lang Syne” to wish that person well. Blocks also organized dances and Christmas parties.47

Social cliques surfaced at Manzanar much as they had existed outside of camp. Some of the camp’s social clubs consisted mostly of inmates who previously had lived in the same neighborhoods. For example, the Manzaknights was a club for Japanese American males started who had come primarily from downtown Los Angeles and the Boyle Heights neighborhood east of downtown. The group had different chapters based on age that planned club activities.48

Throughout the camp, young children played games using almost anything they could find. Saburo Sasaki, who arrived at Manzanar as a boy, recalled how he and his friends collected empty wooden fruit and vegetable crates discarded by mess halls. The boys created a fort with the pieces of wood. Even food scraps became props.

“Every so often, the kitchen would throw out maybe a batch of potatoes because they got too old and they’d rotted,” Sasaki remembered. “Well, we’d go over and get those potatoes and then we’d fight by throwing them at each other from the fort. Then, one of them got infested with scorpions, and that was the last time we played around with forts.”49

Some inmates used their free time to fish along the stream that passed through camp. Noboru Kamibayashi was among those who cast lines into the water, but he was rarely successful. “I tried my luck, but it was no good.”50

Many sports were played at Manzanar, including baseball, softball, football, basketball, wrestling, track, judo, and golf.51

EVENING ACTIVITIES

The lack of street lights at Manzanar meant that outdoor activities came to an end at sundown. Spotlights attached to the guard towers rotated, creating an eerie effect as these pools of light cut through the darkness.52 Evenings were the time for movies, concerts, dances, athletic events, judo class, scouting, religious meetings, and talent shows.53

Music was a prominent element in the camp’s social life. Bruce Kaji, who played the trombone, joined friends at the camp to form a swing-dance band and helped them choose its provocative name, the Jive Bombers.54

Until an indoor space was constructed for movies, the camp showed films on an outdoor screen with no admission fee. Towru Nagano appreciated the outdoor theater because it reminded him of a drive-in theater back in Los Angeles. Outdoor films appealed less to Bo Sakaguchi, who often found the weather too chilly.55

 

Sixth-grade boys enjoy a game of baseball at recess time. (Photo by Francis L. Stewart, War Relocation Authority / UC Berkeley Bancroft Library)

 

WHAT THE DIAMOND MEANT

Like football, baseball and softball at Manzanar were played in the camp’s firebreak zone, which was a sandy, open area without trees or brush.56 Because the entire baseball diamond was dirt, teams would occasionally water the field before a game, so conditions wouldn’t become dusty.57

Inmates took turns driving a dump truck to the surrounding hills to look for decomposed granite, which was placed in the infield, dugouts, and bleacher sections to help prevent clouds of dust during games.58

By the summer of 1942, nearly 100 men’s baseball and 14 women’s softball teams had been formed. For many inmates, baseball and softball brought a degree of normalcy to camp life. This feeling was enhanced by inmates playing under team names that were drawn from the communities that they were forced to leave, such as the San Fernando Aces and San Pedro Gophers. Jim Morita said the typical uniform at Manzanar “wasn’t too fancy.” Players would simply fashion a sweatshirt into a baseball jersey by printing their names on the back.59

The White officials who managed the camp were probably surprised by the skill and tenacity that inmates displayed on the diamond. These officials were likely unaware that the first Japanese American baseball team in California had been organized decades earlier, in 1903.61

Life at Manzanar was difficult for all inmates and deeply traumatic for some. Yet strolling onto a baseball or softball field, or playing the role of spectator, offered moments of solace for many who lived there. “Without baseball,” said one inmate, “life at Manzanar would be miserable.”62 Even getting dressed for a ballgame instilled a special feeling within Takeo Suo. “Putting on a baseball uniform was like wearing the American flag,” he recalled.63

Dan Kwong, whose mother was incarcerated at Manzanar as a child, said, “You could take a group of people, take away everything they have. The way the Japanese American community responded was we’re gonna live life. We’re gonna build gardens. We’re gonna make music. We’re gonna play baseball.”64

GENERATIONAL IMPACTS

Daily life at Manzanar had both good and bad effects on the Issei, the older Japanese Americans who had been born in Japan.

On the one hand, work at the camp was usually less demanding for this generation than what they had faced before the war. Bannai said that older adults “went into hobbies, recreational activities that they were never able to do when they were outside [the camp] because they were seven days a week, maybe, working like blazes to earn a living.”65

On the other hand, a life of leisure was not what every Issei valued. Losing their prewar jobs meant that many members of this generation were no longer doing work that was meaningful and fulfilling.

“In the eyes of an 11-year-old, this was a great time,” said Okui. “We played all the time. We had this whole outdoors. We had dozens of friends. There was never a lack of something to do. For the older people, there was always a lack of something to do…a sense of boredom.”66

The social dynamics of the camp also diminished the stature of the Issei. For example, Manzanar’s communal conditions led many children and teens to eat meals with their friends instead of their parents. Consequently, the family unit lost some of its importance.

MATTHEW JACOB is a member of SABR’s Bob Davids chapter, and he has written multiple articles that were published by Baseball Research Journal. He is also coauthor of Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). Besides telling the story of how Saperstein formed and showcased the Globetrotters basketball team, this biography explores the key roles that he played in Negro League baseball and MLB’s integration. Matthew is a Detroit Tigers fan, and he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

 

NOTES

1 “Japanese Americans at Manzanar,” National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/manz/learn/historyculture/japanese-americans-at-manzanar.htm.

2 “Paul Bannai Interview Segment 18,” Densho Digital Repository, December 28, 2000, 3:34 to 3:40, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-128-18/.

3 “Hikoji Takeuchi Interview Segment 13,” Densho Digital Repository, November 7, 2002, 3:01 to 3:42, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-manz-1-10-13/.

4 Sarah Bone, National Park Service, email to author, March 25, 2025.

5 “Camp Life,” National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, Virtual Museum Exhibit, https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/manz/campLife.html.

6 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 3 of 4,” California Revealed, September 11, 1993, 21:00 to 22:23, https://californiarevealed.org/do/a2bff7e2-24f0-4411-90fd-0476cafe23d5.

7 “Frank Kitamoto Segment 16,” Densho Digital Repository, April 13, 1998, 0:27 to 1:00, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-35-16/.

8 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 4 of 4,” California Revealed, September 11, 1993, 13:19 to 14:02, https://californiarevealed.org/do/a2bff7e2-24f0-4411-90fd-0476cafe23d5.

9 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 1 of 4,” California Revealed, September 11, 1993, 18:07 to 18:29, https://californiarevealed.org/do/a2bff7e2-24f0-4411-90fd-0476cafe23d5; Mas Okui conjured the term “chilblained” to refer to chilblains, inflamed and blistered skin caused by prolonged exposure to cold, damp air.

10 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 2 of 4,” California Revealed, September 11, 1993, 1:17 to 2:06, https://californiarevealed.org/do/a2bff7e2-24f0-4411-90fd-0476cafe23d5.

11 “Aiko Herzig Interview Segment 9,” Densho Digital Repository, March 20, 1994, 1:23 to 2:16, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1002-8-9/.

12 “Aiko Herzig Interview Segment 9,” 2:49 to 3:23.

13 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 2 of 4,” 2:07 to 2:26.

14 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 4 of 4,” 15:08 to 15:25.

15 “Japanese Americans at Manzanar.”

16 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 2 of 4,” 1:36 to 1:56.

17 “Daily Life,” National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, Virtual Museum Exhibit, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/manz/dailylife.html.

18 “Chapter 10: Operation of Manzanar War Relocation Center, March-December 1942: Manzanar Under the WCCA,” National Park Service, accessed August 9, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/manz/hrs10.htm.

19 “Chapter 10: Operation of Manzanar War Relocation Center, March-December 1942: Manzanar Under the WCCA.”

20 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 4 of 4,” 17:35 to 18:16.

21 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 2 of 4,” 6:03 to 8:11.

22 “Yuri Matsunaga Interview, Part 2 of 3,” California Revealed, February 24, 2006, 23:54 to 24:04, https://californiarevealed.org/do/d19f1610-ef9d-4708-a724-b9842f313b7d.

23 “Michiko Wada: Interview Segment 8,” Densho Digital Repository, November 20, 2014, 2:18 to 2:23, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-manz-1-162-8/.

24 “Chapter 10: Operation of Manzanar War Relocation Center, March-December 1942: Education,” National Park Service, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/manz/hrs10j.htm.

25 Glen Kitayama, “Manzanar,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed February 13, 2025, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Manzanar#cite_ref-33.

26 “Chapter 10: Operation of Manzanar War Relocation Center, March-December 1942: Education.”

27 Mas Okui, interview by Martha Nakagawa, Segment 16, Los Angeles, California, April 25, 2012, Friends of Manzanar Collection, Densho Digital Archive, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-densho-1003/ddr-densho-1003-13-transcript-31ec95a099.htm.

28 “Chapter 10: Operation of Manzanar War Relocation Center, March-December 1942: Education.”

29 Kitayama.

30 “Manzanar,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed February 13, 2025, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Manzanar#cite_ref-35.

31 Masako Nagano, letter to Joe Nagano and Towru Nagano, October 14, 1944, courtesy of Joe Nagano, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Densho Digital Repository, http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-153-121-mezzanine-4c535a6dfe/.

32 “Taira Fukushima Interview Segment 12,” Densho Digital Repository, August 9, 2011, 0:11 to 0:15, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-manz-1-124-12/.

33 “Michiko Wada: Interview Segment 6,” Densho Digital Repository, November 20, 2014, 4:19 to 4:31, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-manz-1-162-6/.

34 “Japanese Americans at Manzanar.”

35 “Paul Bannai Interview Segment 22,” Densho Digital Repository, 0:30 to 3:11, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-128-22/.

36 “Camouflage Net Factory at Manzanar,” National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, accessed August 13 2025, https://www.nps.gov/places/camouflage-net-factory-at-manzanar.htm.

37 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 2 of 4,” 3:35 to 4:01.

38 “Japanese Americans at Manzanar.”

39 “Harry Ueno Interview Segment 12,” Densho Digital Repository, February 18, 1994, 0:34 to 0:48, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1002-7-12/.

40 “Mary Kageyama Nomura Interview Segment 18,” Densho Digital Repository, July 9, 2009, 0:51 to 2:59, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-255-18/.

41 “Noboru Kamibayashi Segment 9,” Densho Digital Repository, April 23, 2019, 9:27 to 10:23, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-477-9/.

42 “Taira Fukushima Interview Segment 14,” Densho Digital Repository, August 9, 2011, 1:03 to 2:37, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-manz-1-124-14/.

43 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 1 of 4,” 22:21 to 22:57.

44 “Daily Life.”

45 “Social Calendar,” Manzanar Free Press, June 2, 1942: 4.

46 “Paul Bannai Interview Segment 18,” 1:32 to 2:04.

47 “Wilbur Sato Interview, Part 2 of 5,” California Revealed, March 17, 1999, 21:31 to 21:58, https://californiarevealed.org/do/02fcd4b7-c6d4-4eb7-800c-7e971bbb71f1.

48 “Bruce T. Kaji Interview Segment 15,” Densho Digital Repository, July 28, 2010, 0:10 to 1:35, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-289-15/.

49 “Saburo Sasaki Interview, Part 7 of 9,” California Revealed, May 4, 2005, 20:03 to 20:48, https://californiarevealed.org/do/2827b834-b55e-432a-ba56-950008c18b80.

50 “Noboru Kamibayashi Segment 9,” 4:27 to 5:52.

51 Kitayama.

52 “Wilbur Sato Interview, Part 2 of 5,” 15:15 to 15:39.

53 “Wilbur Sato Interview, Part 3 of 5,” California Revealed, March 17, 1999, 12:39 to 14:23, https://californiarevealed.org/do/02fcd4b7-c6d4-4eb7-800c-7e971bbb71f1.

54 “Bruce T. Kaji Interview Segment 14,” Densho Digital Repository, July 28, 2010, 0:32 to 2:11, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-289-14/.

55 Kitayama.

56 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 2 of 4,” 11:05 to 11:56.

57 Jim Morita, telephone interview with author, March 21, 2025.

58 Kerry Yo Nakagawa, “Manzanar: Family, Friends, and Desert Diamonds Behind Barbed Wire,” The National Pastime, Endless Seasons: Baseball in Southern California (Society for American Baseball Research, 2011), https://sabr.org/journal/article/manzanar-family-friends-and-desert-diamonds-behind-barbed-wire/.

59 Jim Morita, interviewed by Sarah Bone, Manzanar National Historic Site: Oral History Project, July 17, 2023.

60 Nakagawa.

61 Rachel Ng, “The Moving Story of Bringing Baseball Back to Manzanar, Where Thousands of Japanese Americans Were Incarcerated During World War II,” Smithsonian, March 27, 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/moving-story-of-bringing-baseball-back-to-manzanar-where-thousands-of-japanese-americans-were-incarcerated-during-world-war-II-180986312/.

62 “Manzanar Baseball,” Manzanar National Historic Site, updated on October 3, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/places/manzanar-baseball.htm.

63 “Manzanar Baseball.”

64 TODAY, “Baseball Returns to Former Japanese American Internment Camp,” YouTube, November 10, 2024, 1:54 to 2:08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBjmCfzv_bE.

65 “Paul Bannai Interview Segment 19,” Densho Digital Depository, December 28, 2000, 0:22 to 0:46, https://ddr.densho.org/interviews/ddr-densho-1000-128-19/.

66 “Mas Okui and Sue Embrey Interviews, Video 2 of 4,” 14:07 to 14:23; 15:34 to 15:36.

 

Three noted photographers captured life at Manzanar in different ways.19 Dorothea Lange was an activist and social reformer whose work drove home the injustice of incarceration. The despair that pervaded the camp was unmistakable in her photos. Adams was less overtly political. He shot not only the landscapes for which he was known but also individual portraits and glimpses of daily routines—people carrying on with as much dignity as they could.

As for Miyatake, two of his most famous photographs from Manzanar can be read as quiet protest. One depicts three boys staring longingly into the distance, two of them grasping the barbed wire. Another features a disembodied hand with a pair of wire cutters threatening to snip a strand of fence despite a menacing guard tower looming overhead.

The bulk of his photos, though, are closer to Adams’s in tonality—picnics, family photos, children walking to school, drivers making deliveries, women at the salon getting their hair done. Yet there was a certain intimacy in Miyatake’s work that Adams couldn’t quite capture. “Adams was more of a landscape photographer. A lot of his portraits didn’t look as comfortably taken as my grandfather’s,” said Alan Miyatake. “[Toyo’s] pictures always felt like they were documenting camp life from within. It felt like Adams was viewing it as an outsider.”20

Some Japanese Americans of later generations criticized Miyatake for glossing over the darkness of Manzanar. For example, he made a point not to shoot the December 1942 revolt that culminated in soldiers firing into a crowd and killing two detainees. But William Mason, former archivist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, felt those detractors missed the point. “The Manzanar photographs are by an insider, and for that reason alone they are considered historically important. Just because the pictures look as though some people enjoyed their years at Manzanar doesn’t subtract from their historic value.”21

Among the photos were many images of baseball and softball, two sports that provided a sense of togetherness in a place of isolation. Some were team photos, while others were action shots set against the stunning backdrop of the Inyo Mountains or the Sierra Nevada. All were evidence of a community doing its best to maintain a sense of normalcy and a connection to their country’s traditions. In 2023 and 2024, performance artist Dan Kwong and his crew of volunteers used Miyatake’s photos to help the National Park Service rebuild Manzanar’s main ballfield to resemble its wartime appearance.22

It is unclear how deeply Miyatake was into baseball. In his later years he followed the Dodgers at least a little, but he also worked all the time, so he probably wasn’t a diehard fan. Alan Miyatake was surprised, however, to discover Toyo in the team photo of the Shochu Gumi Block 20 ballclub. “Once I saw that, I realized he must have had some kind of love for baseball,” Alan said. “Why else would he be in that picture?”23

***

After the war, Toyo abandoned most of his cutting-edge artistic work. His style of impressionist photography wasn’t hot anymore, and that community of groundbreaking Japanese American creators was gone. “You got everything taken away from you, and you’re all put in these prison camps, and you come back—I think you’re pretty much just in survival mode,” said Alan Miyatake. “You’re just thinking of making a living.”24

He clearly succeeded at that. Toyo was the pre-eminent photographer in Little Tokyo and achieved a kind of celebrity status. He photographed Crown Prince Akihito in his studio, was the official photographer for the annual Nisei Week celebrations, and was a frequent freelance contributor to The Rafu Shimpo newspaper. Everyone recognized him, whether he was strolling the streets in his signature black beret or tooling around in his beloved white ‘57 Thunderbird convertible. In 1978, he was honored as the grand marshal in the Nisei Week parade.

He also mentored his children and grandchildren in photography and helped them take an increasingly active role in the business. He was a kind and patient teacher, not the stereotypical Issei taskmaster. To see him stage a portrait was to watch a master at work. “His forte was lighting,” Alan Miyatake recalled. “He would say, ‘Photographing Asians is not like photographing Caucasians. We don’t have big eyes. We don’t have sharper features. You really have to know how to light an Asian to bring out the depth.’ I used to watch him and think, ‘Holy smokes!’”25

Toyo’s wife of 50 years, Hiro, died in 1972. She had been central to the success of his studio, especially in the early days, making sure the money came in and the bills got paid, which freed Toyo to pursue his art. Eight months after her death, Toyo was felled by a severe stroke. He recovered, but passed along the day-to-day responsibilities of the business to his sons Archie, Bob, and Tabo.26

Long after his death on February 22, 1979, Little Tokyo still remembers. Between Second and Third Streets is a road called Toyo Miyatake Way. At the corner are the Sakura Crossing Apartments, where one can find an image of the man in a full-size bronze relief, dedicated in 2011.27 His studio thrives today under the stewardship of the third and fourth generations of Miyatakes.

For all his professional success and artistic sophistication, Toyo’s most enduring legacy was born of a jury-rigged camera held together by a drain pipe inside a small wooden box. Like most of his work at Manzanar, his baseball and softball photos are hardly subversive. They are almost mundane. Yet the lack of drama makes them all the more unsettling. Here are everyday scenes of the American pastime thriving—but confined inside the most un-American of places.

JAMES FORR is a recovering Pirates fan living in the heart of Cardinals country. His book Pie Traynor: A Baseball Biography, co-authored with David Proctor, was a finalist for the 2010 CASEY Award. He is also a two-time SABR Baseball Research Award winner as coeditor (with Rob Fitts and Bill Nowlin) of Nichibei Yakyu: US Tours of Japan, Volumes 1 and 2.

 

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited below, the author also consulted: Miyatake, Toyo, “A Life in Photography: The Recollections of Toyo Miyatake,” interviewed by Enid H. Douglas, Oral History Program of Claremont Graduate School, 1978, Stanford University Archives, California Artists Files, Box 12, Folder 1.

 

NOTES

1 Mark Jones, “Man With a Secret and a ‘Historic Duty,’” Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1978, Part IV, 17-19.

2 Archie Miyatake, interviewed by Martha Nakagawa, Densho Digital Archive, Densho Visual History Collection, denshovh-marchie-02-, August 31 and September 1, 2010, Segment 3, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-densho-1000/ddr-densho-1000-299-transcript-1f7b340a3b.htm.

3 Jerry Belcher, “Toyo Miyatake, Noted L.A. Photographer, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1979, Part II, 7.

4 Archie Miyatake, interviewed by Martha Nakagawa, Segment 3.

5 Kenneth H. Marcus, Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 27.

6 “Art Shows Briefly Noted,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1929, Part III, 18; “The Artistic Cameraman,” Buffalo Times, February 8, 1931, Rotogravure Section, 2; Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray, directed by Robert A. Nakamura, 2001, posted June 9, 2021, by Japanese American National Museum, YouTube, https://youtu.be/siKsiWGH73A?si=SNdAxqPrguiwozda.

7 Ken Chen, “Toyo Miyatake’s Indelible Record of Life inside the Manzanar Internment Camp,” Aperture, August 17, 2023, https://aperture.org/editorial/toyo-miyatakes-indelible-record-of-life-inside-the-manzanar-internment-camp/.

8 Their first-born daughter, Shigeko, died as an infant in 1923. The other children were Archie, Bob, Richard (known as Tabo), and Minnie.

9 Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray.

10 Archie Miyatake, interviewed by Martha Nakagawa, Segment 12; Archie Miyatake, interviewed by Alisa Lynch, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, MANZ 1007 (transcript), July 22, 2002, 33.

11 Alan Miyatake, telephone interview with author, January 14, 2026.

12 Alan Miyatake.

13 Archie Miyatake related this story in multiple interviews. Although other details were consistent, at different times he described the man from California Hardware as either “the owner” or “a salesman.” Salesman is a broader term (whoever it was, he was taking an order, and therefore selling), so that is the term we are using in this chapter.

14 Jennifer Hattam, “Celebrating 100 Years of Ansel Adams,” Sierra, January 1, 2002, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2002-1-january-february/feature/celebrating-100-years-ansel-adams.

15 “Photo Studio to Hold Grand Opening Monday,” Manzanar Free Press, April 10, 1943, 1.

16 “Photo Studio Temporarily Closed Due to Lack of Photographer,” Manzanar Free Press, May 29, 1943, 1.

17 Archie Miyatake, interviewed by Martha Nakagawa, Segment 21.

18 Jones.

19 Lost LA, Season 4, Episode 2, “Three Views of Manzanar: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Toyo Miyatake,” directed by Matt Bass, aired October 22, 2019, PBS SoCal, https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/episodes/three-views-of-manzanar-ansel-adams-dorothea-lange-and-toyo-miyatake.

20 Alan Miyatake.

21 Jones.

22 Susan H. Kamei, “Baseball Returns to a Japanese American Detention Camp After a Historic Ball Field Was Restored,” The Conversation, October 17, 2025, https://theconversation.com/baseball-returns-to-a-japanese-american-detention-camp-after-a-historic-ball-field-was-restored-265954.

23 Alan Miyatake.

24 Alan Miyatake.

25 Alan Miyatake.

26 Archie’s given name was Atsufumi. Tabo’s given name was Richard.

27 “Toyo Miyatake Relief Dedication Held in LA,” Nichi Bei News, February 24, 2011, https://www.nichibei.org/2011/02/toyo-miyatake-relief-dedication-held-in-la/.

 

Disaster of a different sort brewed across the Pacific. As Japan engaged in increasingly active and aggressive expansion, tensions rose. In what must have felt like an annual ritual after he turned 18 years of age, Mitsui was ordered to appear before the Japanese council to reassert his American residency and to obtain a waiver from Japanese military service.

Baseball’s popularity in San Fernando really peaked when pro ball came to town.12 The Seattle Rainiers, who were the Pacific Coast League champs in 1939-41 and who regularly trained in warmer climates before their regular season began, chose San Fernando’s Recreation Park for spring training in 1940-42, and again in 1945-46. Once and future major-league players on the Rainiers’ roster, including Lloyd Brown, Jo-Jo White, Dick Barrett, and future Hall-of-Famer Earl Averill, entertained the local fans before they returned to Seattle.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, upending the lives of the Mitsui family. “We gathered in Burbank,” Mitsui recalled. “We didn’t ride a train. We got on buses. We got herded into these buses and directly into Manzanar.”

Detainees were allowed to carry only two bags each. In most cases, families gave away their possessions, or sold them at dreadful discounts. The Mitsui family was fortunate to have a friend, Pete Andres, who owned Valley Tire, the largest tire shop in San Fernando and the sponsor of Mitsui’s softball team. Andres sympathized with the Mitsuis’ plight and stored their belongings or sold them on their behalf for fair market value during their incarceration.

With the harsh reality setting in that Mitsui and many other Japanese Americans were being detained in camp barracks in the desert landscape of Manzanar for an unknown length of time, Mitsui welcomed baseball as a way to increase morale. Before the end of 1942, the men and boys in camp had formed themselves into nearly 100 teams and 12 leagues.14 That’s 1,500 young men! The women, too, formed teams and leagues. As the population grew, more and more baseball and softball fields were built. Population hit its peak of 10,046 in Manzanar on September 22, 1942,15 and there were at least 10 fields according to a report filed during the rehabilitation of the site.16

In the summer of 1942, Mitsui’s San Fernando Aces tallied 20 wins against one loss, the best record in Manzanar’s “National League.”17 Right-hander Pete Mitsui hurled two of those wins while his brother Sat, a southpaw,18 won 10 games for the Aces, including a one-hitter and a two-hitter.19 The team’s third pitcher, Hiro Hino, picked up the other eight wins. At the end of the season, 10 Aces players received all-star recognition, including Sat (first team) and Pete (honorable mention).20

Mitsui worked double-duty that summer as he also coached the Windy City Slickers in the “Manzanar League.” “[The] Slickers improved since Pete Mitsui took over the coaching job,” boasted the Manzanar Free Press.21

In October 1942—“just to get out” and make a little extra money—Mitsui took a work assignment at an Idaho Falls sugar beet farm under the camp’s temporary agricultural furlough employment program, where he “topped the beets,” removing the leafy green tops from the roots before the beets were stored or shipped. (Sugar beets were used to produce the industrial alcohol that was vital in the production of both synthetic rubber and ammunition.)22 When the growing season ended, he returned to camp.

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.23 Mitsui had known Ayako and her family since his school days. Born on April 10, 1920, Ayako was six years younger than Pete. According to Mitsui, their wedding was the first one held at the Manzanar camp, after which the newlyweds moved to new quarters in Block 8. Ayako’s sister, Kuniko, announced her engagement to Sgt. Kuni Nakao, who was serving overseas, at the same time Ayako announced hers.24

After the wedding, Mitsui was back to his organizing ways. He served on the advisory board that produced the first Fourth of July carnival for the residents,25 and he was installed as the men’s athletic director for the newly formed Young Buddhist Association.26 Not only did Mitsui play for the YBA fastpitch softball team that summer, but he also was selected as a pitcher for the league all-star game held in September.27 Across the diamond, Pete’s brother Satoru, who played for the Yogores team that season, was the first baseman for the opposing all-star squad.

In February 1943, the War Relocation Authority issued its much-maligned “loyalty questionnaire” to the residents at all the camps. Specifically, Question 27 (which asked if the respondent was willing to serve in the US armed forces) and Question 28 (which asked if the respondent was willing to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese Emperor) were perceived as confusing and a poorly conceived attempt to determine loyalty.

Mitsui answered “yes” to the first question, but “no” to the second. He explained, “If I had said ‘Yes’ to that question, I would have been a man without a country. I would not be a US citizen and [would] forsake Japanese citizenship. How can they force me to do that?” The practical outcome was that, unlike those who responded “No” and “No,” Mitsui was eligible to leave camp permanently, provided he could show evidence that he had secured a satisfactory job and housing.

Instead, he and Ayako elected to go to the Paul labor camp near Burley, Idaho, on a temporary work furlough.28 Officially named Camp Rupert, the Paul camp was constructed in 1943 and housed more than 500 Italian and German prisoners of war in 1944.29 Years later, their daughter Patti said her parents told her that the Idaho adventure was their honeymoon.30 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.”

After their furlough, the couple returned to Manzanar, and Mitsui was back to his City Hall job—and baseball. As told in fuller detail in another article in this publication, eight top-level teams competed for the Manzanar Baseball Association crown in 1943. The games were played on the League Baseball Field, the largest field in Manzanar, built to major-league specifications, with two benches, four bleachers, and plenty of standing room for spectators.31 League play ran from September 1943 through January 1944. On Thanksgiving Day in 1943, Jimmie and George Tamura, Ben Yoshiwara, and George Sugawara represented the Aces in the all-star game.

The Aces and Sears nine successfully navigated through the first two rounds of the postseason to set up the duel for the championship. George and Jimmie Tamura, Mas Nakadaira, and Billy Sugawara led the Aces to a 13-3 win over Sears to capture the banner in February 1944, making them the best baseball team behind barbed wire.

Mitsui played little or no baseball after that championship run. He and Ayako went on another lengthy furlough later that year, on that occasion to a farm in Ontario, Oregon. (According to one report, 10,000 Japanese Americans who resided outside the evacuation zones avoided confinement but were employed in essential wartime trades, such as harvesting sugar beets in eastern Oregon.)32

The Manzanar Free Press reported that Mitsui went to Ogden, Utah, with his brother Sat for one week in May 1944.33 No reason was given, but perhaps it had something to do with Sat’s plans after Manzanar. On April 7, 1945, Sat married Akiko Sakamoto, whom he had met in Manzanar, at the Salt Lake City Buddhist Church. Witnesses at the wedding were Grace Maruki and Masaru Nakadaira, Sat’s teammate who can be seen kneeling next to Sat in the 1939 softball team photo.34

By Spring 1945, Mitsui’s family had all moved out of the Manzanar camp. Mitsui’s parents and younger sister Mitsuko relocated to New Jersey where they worked at Seabrook Farms, a large producer of canned food during World War II. Sat was in Salt Lake City. Their sister Chiyemi and her husband Frank Ishida, who served in the US Army as a translator, were in Manzanar initially before they were stationed at Camp Savage in Minnesota.35 (They all moved back to California when the war ended.) Mitsui again considered the permanent departure decision and he and Ayako officially left the camp on May 15, 1945.36

Pete Andres, Mitsui’s friend at the Valley Tire shop, offered him a job repairing tires, a pickup truck to commute to and from work, and a place to stay if he and Aya came back to San Fernando. It was a generous gesture that Pete and Aya gladly accepted. Just two years later, however, Andres suffered a heart attack and died. “He wasn’t even 50 when he passed away,” Mitsui said.

After Andres’ death, Mitsui moved to South Gate and partnered with his brother-in-law, Frank Ishida, who ran a retail flower nursery with Chiyemi called the Uneeda Garden Nursery. It was a family business, as Mitsui’s wife, his parents, and his sister, Mitsuko, helped at the nursery, too. (Sat and Akiko did not work at the nursery; Akiko was a librarian at Beverly Hills High School Library,37 and Sat worked for a company that manufactured comforters before he died in a car accident on Thanksgiving Day in 1993.)38

Mitsui was naturalized as a US citizen on November 11, 1954. Naturalization was unavailable to Issei before 1952. He and Ayako had three children: Patti was born in San Fernando, Peggy and Brian were born when the family lived in South Gate. With work and family life keeping Pete very busy, he no longer had time to play baseball.

In about 1957 or 1958, the family moved to a Japanese American community established in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, about 12 miles west of the nursery. After Chiyemi’s death in 1971, Mitsui bought out Ishida’s share and worked in the nursery with his son Brian, who operated the business after Mitsui retired in the 1980s.

The Los Angeles riots of 1992 tore apart Crenshaw and other neighborhoods, stirring Pete and Aya to move to Fullerton around 2001.39 While in Crenshaw and Fullerton, Mitsui kept active with gardening, bowling (he once scored a perfect 300), golf, dancing, and poker, until heart surgery slowed him down around age 88.40

Mitsui spoke frequently about his baseball and wartime experience, not with bitterness but rather with purpose. He participated in several presentations and dedications commemorating baseball in San Fernando and Manzanar. He was an important contributor to the Nisei Baseball Research Project, which was founded by Kerry Yo Nakagawa in 1996 and featured at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1998.41 Mitsui’s actions at Manzanar and in the years thereafter blended courage and optimism with the competitive spirit of an athlete, and his testimony was a tribute to his family and his culture.

Pete Mitsui died of natural causes on August 31, 2011, at the age of 97, in San Luis Obispo, California, where he had lived since 2006.42 He and Ayako, who died on January 28, 2021, at the age of 100, are buried at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes. Their daughter, Peggy, predeceased Mitsui. At the time of this writing, their son Brian and his wife Joanne made their home in Carlsbad outside of San Diego. Their daughter Patti and her husband Geoff lived in Westlake Village, outside of Los Angeles.43

In Patti’s words, “Pete enjoyed every minute of life and found it wondrous and the world beautiful.”44

About a year before Mitsui passed, Terry Cannon, founder of The Baseball Reliquary, an organization “which celebrates pioneers and trailblazers” beyond their statistics, published a list of the 12 high school baseball players from the greater Los Angeles area who, in his opinion, made the greatest contributions to baseball culture. Jackie Robinson from Pasadena is on the list. Pete Mitsui from San Fernando High is also on the list.45

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 Cory Mitsui, Pete Mitsui’s grandson, who spoke with the author by telephone on February 12 and February 26, 2025, and followed up with several e-communications from both him and his Aunt Patti, Pete’s daughter (hereafter referred to as “C. Mitsui-Pasculli interview”); and to Sarah Bone, Manzanar National Historic Site Park Ranger, for providing documents and other resource material from the National Park Service.

All information about and quotes from Pete Mitsui not otherwise cited are from two recorded archival interviews:

• Pete Mitsui. Interviewed by Richard Potashin, 2007, Manzanar Oral History Project Interview #1150, Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service.
• Interview of Pete Mitsui, April 24 and May 21, 1993, “Japanese American Farmers in the San Fernando Valley Before and After WWII—Oral History Project,” Department of Asian American Studies, California State University, Northridge, California, Densho Digital Repository, https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-csujad-31-8/.

 

NOTES

1 George Tamura, interviewed by Rose Masters, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, MANZ 1442, June 30, 2016, 36.

2 Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Japanese American Baseball in California: A History (Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2014), 62.

3 Nakagawa, 108-112, 131-133.

4 Ichigi [sic] Mitsui, World War I Selective Service System draft registration card, September 12, 1918, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Independence, California.

5 Nakagawa, 13, 60-61.

6 Nakagawa, 62; Steve Henson, “For Some, Baseball Was More Than a Pastime,” Los Angeles Times, September 29, 1997: A1, A20.

7 San Fernando High School, one of the oldest schools in the district, formed its first baseball team in 1899. “History of Athletics,” San Fernando High School, accessed September 12, 2025, https://sanfernandohs.lausd.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=4425760&type=d&pREC_ID=2661977.

8 Tamura, 30.

9 “Diamond Dusters: S.F. Aces,” Manzanar Free Press, January 19, 1944: 4.

10 Stanley Speer, “Four First-Rate Hurlers Top Bargain Softball Program at Fiedler’s Fairfax Diamond,” Los Angeles Evening Citizen News, July 23, 1937: 10.

11 Pete Mitsui oral history interview transcript, Japanese American Farmers in the San Fernando Valley Before and After WWII Oral History Project, CSU Northridge Japanese Americans in the San Fernando Valley Oral History Project Collection, Densho Digital Repository, April 24, 1993 (Part 2, May 21, 1993), 26, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-csujad-31/ddr-csujad-31-8-transcript-cd0b04d368.pdf.

12 “‘Back to Baseball’ Movement Is Launched by 20-30 Clubs,” San Fernando Valley Times, November 4, 1941: 5; Dan Raley, Pitchers of Beer: The Story of the Seattle Rainiers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 98, 330; Dennis Snelling, The Greatest Minor League: A History of the Pacific Coast League, 1903-1957 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012), 307.

13 “Roster of Manzanar Residents: June 1, 1942 – December 31, 1944,” Sheet 110 of 251, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Independence, California.

14 National Park Service, “Manzanar Baseball,” accessed May 8, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/places/manzanar-baseball.htm.

15 National Park Service, “War Relocation Centers: Manzanar,” accessed May 8, 2025, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/war-relocation-centers.htm.

16 Jeff Burton, “League Baseball Field Rehabilitation Manzanar National Historic Site Determination of No Adverse Effect,” July 22, 2022, Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, Independence, California.

17 “Final National League Standings,” Manzanar Free Press, August 31, 1942: 4.

18 “Pitching Duel in Star-Ace Tilt,” Manzanar Free Press, April 17, 1943: 4.

19 Pete Ohtaki, “For Pete’s Sake,” Manzanar Free Press, September 11, 1942: 4.

20 “Fernando Players Dominate National All-Star Lineup,” Manzanar Free Press, September 11, 1942: 4.

21 Roy Hoshizaki, “Second Sight,” Manzanar Free Press, August 31, 1942: 4.

22 Cassie M. Gray-Jeffries, “False Freedom: Japanese Americans in Eastern Oregon During the Internment Period,” Academia.edu, June 1, 2015, 24, https://www.academia.edu/search?q=%20False%20Freedom:%20Japanese%20Americans%20in%20Eastern%20Oregon%20during%20the%20Internment%20Period.

23 Ayako Mitsui obituary, Fukui Mortuary, accessed June 22, 2025, https://www.fukuimortuary.com/obituary/ayako-mitsui.

24 “Three Engagements Announced,” Manzanar Free Press, February 6, 1943: 3.

25 “Carnival Plans Complete,” Manzanar Free Press, June 26, 1943: 1.

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

27 “AA All-Stars to Tangle Sunday,” Manzanar Free Press, September 4, 1943: 4.

28 “149 Furlough Workers Slated for Beet Fields,” Manzanar Free Press, September 13, 1943: 1-2.

29 “The Paul Prisoner-of-War Camp,” Discover Area Guides, accessed May 12, 2025, https://discoverareaguides.com/the-paul-prisoner-of-war-camp/.

30 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

31 Burton.

32 Gray-Jeffries, 3.

33 “As They Come and Go,” Manzanar Free Press, May 6, 1944: 2, and May 13, 1944: 2.

34 “Satoru Mitsui Akiko Sakamoto Wed in Salt Lake City,” Manzanar Free Press, April 21, 1945: 2.

35 Camp Savage, where Ishida served, had a military school for Japanese Americans to teach Japanese to English-speaking soldiers. On one occasion, Ishida interviewed Japanese prisoners in the Philippines and obtained information that led to the US bombing of Kobe, Japan, where the enemy manufactured munitions. See “Interview of Frank Kiyoshi Ishida by Robert M. Kasper, Jr.,” July 18, 1973 [transcript]. California State University, Fullerton, Japanese American Oral History Project, Online Archive of California, accessed July 18, 2025, https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft3v19n830;NAAN=13030&chunk.id=d0e119&toc.id=&toc.depth=1&brand=oac4&anchor.id=p3.

36 “Roster of Manzanar Residents: June 1, 1942 – December 31, 1944.” On January 2, 1945—two weeks after Ex parte Endo, the Supreme Court decision which held that the US government could not detain a citizen who was “concededly loyal” to the United States—President Roosevelt lifted the West Coast exclusion. However, it took months before all incarcerees were able to leave. See Rachel Ng, “The Moving Story of Bringing Baseball Back to Manzanar, Where Thousands of Japanese Americans Were Incarcerated During World War II,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 27, 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/moving-story-of-bringing-baseball-back-to-manzanar-where-thousands-of-japanese-americans-were-incarcerated-during-world-war-II-180986312.

37 Tani Mitsui Brown, “Discover Nikkei: A Hapa Girl in Vietnam,” Discover Nikkei, a project of the Japanese American National Museum, October 24, 2013. https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2013/10/24/hapa-girl-in-vietnam. (Tani Brown is the granddaughter of Satoru and Akiko Mitsui.)

38 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

39 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

40 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

41 Emily Hawks, “Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project, Discusses the Little Known History of Japanese American Baseball,” International Examiner, December 13, 2023, https://iexaminer.org/kerry-yo-nakagawa-founder-of-the-nisei-baseball-research-project-discusses-the-little-known-history-of-japanese-american-baseball/.

42 Pete Mitsui obituary, Los Angeles Times, September 11, 2011: A38.

43 C. Mitsui/Pasculli interview.

44 Patti Mitsui Westen, email to author, July 12, 2025.

45 Terry Cannon, “Terry Cannon’s All-Time Southland Baseball All-Stars,” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2010, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-jul-12-la-sp-0713-cannons-team-20100713-story.html.

 

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

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.

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.