Baseball behind barbed wire - Access to Japan

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1990 by Jay Feldman

What did you do in the war, daddy?" For many Japanese-Americans who were wrenched from their normal lives and interned during Warld War II, the answer as, We played baseball."

The drawings illustrating this story are from a tattered pamphlet titled BASEBALL: Tule Lake Center 1944, the season's records from an internment camp in California.

Joy Feldman, 47, grow up in Brooklyn with the Dodgers. He lives in Davis, California, where he writes for Sports Illustrated and is a mon. ager/player for a team in an over-thirty hard. ball league. He's working on a hitting instruction book for teenagers, due from Simon & Schuster next spring. His lost article in Whole Earth Review was " Baseball in Nicaragua" (Fall 1987).

-Richard Nilson

IN MAY 1942, Kenichi Zenimura looked out over the barren landscape of the Fresno Assembly Center, and he knew exactly what needed to be done. "Every time my dad went someplace, if there was no baseball park, he'd make one," says Howard Zenimura, 63.

From the second decade of this century, baseball was the most popular recreation in the Japanese-American community, and at five feet tall and 105 pounds, Kenichi Zenimura, "the dean of Nisei baseball," was the most influential figure in the sport. Born in Hiroshima in 1900, "Zeni," as he was affectionately called, was introduced to baseball as a boy when his family moved to Hawaii. In 1920, he settled in Fresno and played shortstop for the town team; in 24, he organized the first tour of a California team to Japan. By the 1930s every community had a Nisei (second-generation) team, ardently supported by the Issei (first-generation) immigrants. "The Issei were crazy about baseball," says Pete Mitsui, 76, who played for the San Fernando Aces in the thirties and forties. "It was all community-oriented. The communities didn't intermingle like they do now, you see, and the ballclub was an important part of the community identity, so they really wanted us to do well."

"There were tremendous rivalries between towns adds Hugo Nishimoto, 73, who played for and then managed the Newcastle team. "The Issei used to bet a lot of money on those games. If we won, they would take us out to a big dinner." The outbreak of war changed everything. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which would lead to the evacuation and internment of virtually the entire JapaneseAmerican populations of California, Oregon and Washington, of which approximately two-thirds (77,000) were American citizens. Most families were given little more than a week to get ready. People sold cars, furniture, refrigerators, and other large articles for a fraction of their worth, taking only money and whatever possessions they could carry with them. The majority of the evacuees were sent to temporary assembly centers" like that in Fresno - mostly converted county fairgrounds - while the government hastily prepared ten permanent camps.

The transition was abrupt and shattering.

For a people whose culture stressed personal decorum and hygiene, and placed a premium on privacy, the indignities of camp life represented an acute aberration. Living quarters - barracks arranged in blocks - were severely cramped. Meals were served in large mess halls; toilets and bathhouses were communal.

One of the first problems facing the internees was to establish some sense of normalcy in the face of totally disrupted patterns of life. Cultural, recreational and work activities took on tremendous importance. There were schools for the children, and many adults were employed within camp by the government at standard G.I. wages.

Baseball played a major role in the effort to create a degree of continuity. At the Fresno Assembly Center, there was nothing there but the fairgrounds, but Zeni had everything for a baseball diamond planned in his mind," recalls Herb "Moon" Kurima, 77, who managed and pitched for the Florin Athletic Club. "He lined up tractors, lumber, carpenters, and we started work on the grounds. Within a week, everything was ready." Two leagues were formed - a six-team "A" division, and an eight-club "B" circuit. Many of the better draft-age players were already in the Armed Forces, so Kurima and the other managers had to patch together teams from the available talent - aging veterans and inexperienced high-school kids. Through a friend in Sacramento, Kurima sent for his team's uniforms and equipment, which he'd had the foresight to collect and put in storage before evacuation. Behind Kurima, whose blazing fastball and pinpoint control had made him one of the dominant pitchers in pre-war Nisei baseball, the Florin club quickly established itself as the team to beat, and Kurima, who was still recovering from injuries incurred in a near-fatal auto accident in April 1941, found himself the target of the other managers' dirty tricks.

"Every time Florin had a game against some strong team like Hanford or Bowles, these guys would call a meeting in the afternoon," says Kurima. "It was 100 degrees, and on a game day, I needed to take a rest, but they would hold a meeting to try and tire me out."