Japanese Americans returned to Manzanar National Historic Site over the weekend for a landmark event — the first baseball games played there since World War II. The site is where the former Manzanar War Relocation Center is based — one of 10 camps that imprisoned thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II.
Baseball was the most popular sport at the time, so when people of Japanese descent were forced into incarceration camps, they built fields and formed teams. Games at Manzanar attracted thousands of spectators from within the camp; it was one of the few joys of life there.
The National Park Service, which runs the historic site, proposed to rebuild the ball field to give visitors a sense of what life was like there, and Santa Monica-based artist Dan Kwong wanted to take it a step further. He dreamed of bringing current Japanese American baseball teams to play on the restored field — in part as a tribute to his mother, who was incarcerated at Manzanar with her family.
“I grew up hearing her stories about Manzanar and life in Manzanar, and I've been visiting here since I was a kid,” Kwong says.
Kwong has played in the Japanese American baseball league in Los Angeles for 53 years, so he felt the role of director of the Manzanar Baseball Project was almost made for him. For the past year, he went to Manzanar numerous times to help clear the old field of tumbleweed and rabbit brush, install steel posts and fencing for the backstop, and build wooden bleachers.
The weather conditions at Manzanar can be extreme – in fact, just weeks before the game, a windstorm knocked down two of the steel posts.
“Knowing that four-by-four posts were ripped down in a windstorm that was not out of the ordinary for this area kind of gives you a perspective on what it was actually like to live out here,” said Jesse Chakrin, executive director of The Fund for People in Parks, which provided a grant for the baseball field’s restoration.
The posts were still missing at gametime, but the players, coaches, and spectators didn’t seem to notice. They were too busy taking in the dirt baseball diamond and the significance of playing there again.
Cousins Kevin Issa and Brett Takeuchi show off the vintage baseball gloves they used for the game. Photo by Meghan Coyle.
“For most of us here, we have some ties to this event and this place, so it's almost surreal to see it all and just be here,” says player Kevin Issa, whose grandparents were incarcerated at Manzanar.
Brandon Zenimura, who also played in one of the games, is the great-grandson of baseball legend Kenichi Zenimura, the “Father of Japanese American Baseball” and “Dean of the Diamond,” who helped build the baseball field at Gila River War Relocation Center, another incarceration camp in Arizona.
“There's an air about being in the field, being in the outfield, or just being in the dirt and knowing that there's some history there,” Zenimura says about playing at Manzanar. “So the fact that we're at this place, at this time, doing this is very special.”
But that all changed on Oct. 26th when Japanese American ball players from all over California gathered at Manzanar for a double header.
The first game was between the two oldest Japanese American teams from Northern and Southern California, the Lodi JACL Templars and the Li’l Tokyo Giants. The Lodi team has been around since 1915.
Kwong invited players for an all-star game in the afternoon, complete with vintage-inspired uniforms he designed. Kwong even worked with a Hollywood prop company to borrow 1940s mitts for the players to use in the game.
“Seeing these guys, not only in the old uniforms, but with the old gloves, how funny and amusing,” Kwong says. “It really tickles me because it really feels like time travel.”
Kwong hopes these exhibition games become an annual tradition that will one day be open to the public. Next year, he plans to build a 22-foot announcer booth and scoreboard like the original Manzanar field had.
“If my mother were here to see this, she would be so happy, and I know she'd be very proud,” he says. “All of her family were in Manzanar during the war, and I do like to imagine all of them looking down on us and smiling and saying, ‘Yeah, go for it.’”
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