Baseball behind barbed wire - Access to Japan

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1990 by Jay Feldman

Meetings notwithstanding, Kurima won 10 games, as Florin thoroughly dominated the A league, going undefeated in 13 games and, in a contest played before 3,000 spectators (more than half the center's total population), whipped a highly favored, Zenimura-managed all-star team, 7-2, behind Kurima's six-hit pitching.

The lower division title was captured by the Fresno B club, which included the 15-year-old Howard Zenimura and his 13-year-old brother Harvey - both of whom would later play Japanese big-league ball for the Hiroshima Carp in the fifties - and George "Hats" Omachi, now a scout for the Milwaukee Brewers.

IN OCTOBER 1942, the inhabitants of the assembly centers were again uprooted and assigned to one of the ten permanent camps geographically scattered through seven states (California, Arizona, Utah, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas). At every camp, despite characteristically remote locations and inhospitable terrain, one of the first tasks undertaken after resettlement was the building of baseball diamonds.

Most of the group from the Fresno Assembly Center went to Jerome, located on Arkansas swampland. "I was on the clean-up committee, so I was one of the last to leave the Fresno Assembly Center," relates Omachi, 68. "I stayed behind about a month or six weeks. By the time I got to Jerome, they already had a diamond."

At Tule Lake, located on dry lake bottom in northeastern California, volunteers cleared the rocks and seashells from one area, while Bill Matsumoto, head of the warehouse division, used the food-delivery trucks to haul in dirt from the camp farm.

At Manzanar, in the desert near Death Valley, the teams took turns going up to the hills in a dump truck for decomposed granite, and San Fernando Aces catcher Berry Tamura, who worked for the camp fire department, saw to it that the field was well watered down by conducting frequent fire drills on the diamond. Nothing compared, however, with the field that Zenimura built in the Arizona desert at Gila River. As soon as we got to camp my father started looking for a place to build the diamond," recalls Howard Zenimura. "Right near our block was an open space, so we started digging out the sagebrush with shovels, and pretty soon people came by to ask us what we were doing. We told them we were building a ballpark, and then everybody was out there with their shovels clearing that place. When it was all cleared we got a bulldozer and leveled it.

"The fence that surrounded the camp was built of 4x4s strung with barbed wire, so we just took out every other 4x4 till we had enough to build a frame for the backstop. Then we took these long pads that they used to wet down and spread over cement to keep it from drying too fast, and we hung those over the frame to provide a cushion for passe balls, which was very nice. The only catch was, first thing when we went out, we'd have to pick up all the pads and check - you didn't want to go in after a passed ball and find a rattlesnake."

Next they worked on the mound and the infield, scraping the top layer and hand-straining out the rocks and pebbles. They diverted water from a nearby irrigation ditch and flooded the infield to harden and pack it down.