Within the spring of 1942, 15-year-old Momo Nagano wanted a strategy to fill her time.
She was once imprisoned on the Manzanar Relocation Middle in conjunction with roughly 10,000 people of Eastern ancestry. When she’d arrived along with her mom and two brothers, she’d been horrified.
The detention facility was once situated in the midst of the wilderness, about 225 miles northeast of Los Angeles. As I describe in my e book “When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II,” barbed cord surrounded the fringe and armed squaddies peered down from guard towers. The bogs and showers lacked walls, and Nagano was once pressured to face in lengthy strains for hours in mess halls that served canned meals. Her mattress was once a steel cot. She was once directed to stuff straw right into a bag for a makeshift bed. She didn’t know whether or not she and her circle of relatives would ever have the ability to go back to their Los Angeles house.
Momo Nagano, in {a photograph} taken throughout her time spent on the Manzanar Relocation Middle.
Courtesy of Dan Kwong, CC BY-SA
In the future, {the teenager} determined to select up a glove and play softball. Her son, Dan Kwong, instructed me in an interview that Nagano ended up taking part in catcher for The Gremlins, one of the most camp’s many ladies’s softball groups.
“In one game, a batter connected with the ball and then threw the bat, clocking my mom in the nose, breaking it,” he stated. “But despite her injury, she still enjoyed playing, even though she didn’t think her team was very good.”
80 years later, the descendants of prisoners – akin to Nagano’s son, Kwong – are taking part in baseball once more in Manzanar. Because of an effort spearheaded by way of Kwong, a baseball box at the web site has been restored so that you can each have a good time the resiliency of such a lot of prisoners and memorialize this darkish length in U.S. historical past.
An enormous removing effort
After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. govt wrongly assumed that Eastern-descended West Coast citizens could be extra dependable to Japan and offered an espionage possibility.
So on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an govt order that gave the U.S. Military the authority to forcibly take away all first-generation immigrants from Japan and their American-born descendants from their West Coast houses.
In March 1942, U.S. squaddies started transporting the detainees to transient detention websites below Military jurisdiction. The Manzanar web site opened on March 21, 1942, and it ultimately changed into considered one of 10 long-term detention facilities, colloquially referred to as “the camps.”
In line with Duncan Ryȗken Williams, the director of The Irei Challenge, which has compiled essentially the most complete checklist of the ones detained, just about 127,000 other folks of Eastern ancestry have been incarcerated between 1942 and 1947, when the closing camp closed. Two-thirds of them have been Americans. Maximum have been imprisoned in the course of the warfare, and all have been held with out hearings or fees leveled towards them.
6th-grade boys play softball throughout recess on the Manzanar Relocation Middle on Feb. 10, 1943.
Francis Leroy Stewart, courtesy of California State College Dominguez Hills Gerth Archives & Particular Collections
A love of the sport
Adjusting to their new grim truth, the detainees embraced the Eastern spirit of “gaman,” because of this to bear hardship with dignity and resilience. They arrange an training machine and coordinated an array of actions. They usually right away arranged baseball and softball video games.
Many Eastern American households had already advanced a keenness for the 2 sports activities.
Horace Wilson, an educator from Maine, is credited with introducing baseball to Japan within the early 1870s. In 1872 the Yeddo Royal Eastern Troupe changed into the primary Eastern other folks to play baseball on U.S. soil. When younger Eastern males began immigrating to the U.S. within the overdue nineteenth century, they introduced with them a love of The us’s interest.
Kerry Yo Nakagawa, the director of the Nisei Baseball Analysis Challenge, has written concerning the vanguards of Eastern American baseball. At a time when gamers of colour have been excluded from Primary League Baseball, proficient Eastern American ballplayers akin to Kenichi Zenimura shaped groups that barnstormed the rustic. They even performed along Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition sport in Fresno, Calif., on Oct. 29, 1927.
Lou Gehrig, 2nd from left, and Babe Ruth, 3rd from proper, pose with Eastern American ballplayers at an exhibition sport. Kenichi Zenimura is 3rd from left.
Frank Kamiyama, courtesy of the circle of relatives of Taizo Toshiyuki and the Nisei Baseball Analysis Challenge
“Every pre-war Japanese American community had a baseball team and they brought their love of baseball with them to the assembly centers and their camps,” Nakagawa defined to me. Despite the fact that Zenimura was once pressured to depart his Fresno house and pass to a camp in Gila River, Arizona, he quickly had a baseball diamond and a 32-team league up and working.
Patriotism at the diamond
“Watching baseball played at a semi-pro level was entertainment and also gave them a sense of normalcy and community,” Nakagawa stated.
The ManzaKnights have been one of the most 100-plus groups shaped on the Manzanar camp.
Courtesy of the Maruki Circle of relatives/Manzanar Ancient Website
However for individuals who felt their loyalty to the U.S. was once unfairly puzzled, baseball was once additionally a formidable strategy to categorical their id as American citizens, particularly for the U.S.-born youngsters of Eastern immigrants. Takeo Suo, who was once incarcerated at Manazarer, recalled, “Putting on a baseball uniform was like wearing the American flag.” Or, as Nakagawa put it,
“What could be more American than playing the all-American pastime?”
After the warfare was once over and the camps closed, those that’d been imprisoned had to concentrate on rebuilding their lives. Many have been not able to go back to their prewar hometowns. For many who ended up again at the West Coast, baseball endured to play a very powerful position.
As Eastern American journalist and sports activities historian Chris Komai defined in a program on the Eastern American Nationwide Museum, “Baseball was a way for them to reestablish their communities while they dealt with antagonism and discrimination. Through the games they stayed connected with their friends and relatives who were now scattered.”
Postwar neighborhood baseball gave upward push to the Southern California Nisei Athletic Union Baseball Leagues and different leagues that also perform. Kwong started taking part in for the Nisei Athletic Union in 1971 and does in an effort to at the moment.
Rebuilding a dusty box of goals
Nagano instilled in her son a dedication now not solely to baseball but in addition to social justice. A efficiency artist, Kwong phases a one-man play, “Return of the Samurai Centerfielder,” to make clear this episode in historical past in the course of the lens of taking part in baseball at Manzanar. Two years in the past, he got down to repair the primary Manzanar ball box and to carry baseball again to the web site as a tribute to his overdue mom and different Manzanar detainees.
Operating with Goto, the web site arborist, volunteer development manager Chris Siddons, Manzanar archaeologist Jeff Burton and different Manzanar web site group of workers, Kwong and his crew have restored the sector virtually precisely because it was once. They moderately scrutinized archival footage, some taken by way of famed panorama photographer Ansel Adams and others snapped by way of studio photographer Toyo Miyatake, who’d been imprisoned at Manzanar. Miyatake’s footage have been equipped by way of his grandson, Alan Miyatake.
Organizers used archival fabrics – akin to this 1943 Ansel Adams {photograph} of a three-hitter on the Manzanar camp – to revive the sector.
Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
From November 2023 to October 2024, volunteers cleared sagebrush, dug put up holes and poured concrete, enduring intense warmth, sturdy winds and constant mud.
On Oct. 26, 2024, baseball returned to Manzanar after greater than 80 years sooner than an invitation-only target market. Within the inaugural sport, Kwong’s Li’l Tokio Giants beat the Lodi JACL Templars. Within the sport that adopted, gamers donned customized Nineteen Forties-style uniforms and used antique baseball apparatus lent by way of Historical past For Rent prop space. Most of the gamers have been descendants of Eastern American citizens who’d been incarcerated at Manzanar and different camps.
That day, Kwong was once emotional as he stated, “Mom would have gotten such a kick out of this.”
Kwong’s crew has finished an announcer’s sales space in time for this yr’s grand opening, a doubleheader open to the general public. The video games have been at first scheduled for Oct. 18, 2025, however were postponed because of the U.S. govt shutdown.
The brand new announcer’s sales space below development on the restored Manzanar ball box.
Dan Kwong, CC BY-SA
For Kwong, staging a historic reenactment of ways detainees performed ball at the back of barbed cord can pay tribute to their resilience, connects camp survivors and descendants with their previous, and permits them to percentage their tale with the American public. He hopes the video games can turn into an annual tournament, a routine birthday celebration.
His motto: “In this place of sadness, injustice, and pain, we will do something joyous, righteous, and healing. We will play baseball.”
