Baseball behind barbed wire - Access to Japan

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1990 by Jay Feldman

As usual for any game involving the Manzanar team, there was a better-than-average turnout. "Our fans had an organized rooting section led by Kibeis," says Berry Tamura. "They had the flags, just like you see in Japanese stadiums today. We sure drew the crowds; they all wanted to see our cheerleading team." The Manzanar fans also included a prominent group of burly fishermen from the harbor community of San Pedro who had a well-deserved reputation as a hotheaded bunch, always ready to mix things up.

With Jim Tamura pitching for Manzanar, the score was knotted at 5-5 after nine innings. In the top of the fourteenth, Poston broke through for three runs. In the Manzanar half, with a runner on second and two out, shortstop George Tamura - younger brother of Jim and Berry - got a hit, advancing the runner to third. The next batter belted a fly ball into the gap in left field.

Nishimoto was umpiring at first base.

"The leftfielder went up and jumped," he relates, and the ball was deflected off his glove, but the centerfielder, who was backing him up, caught it. Red Tanaka, the third-base umpire, and I both raised our hands, 'Out!' Oh, boy! The Manzanar fans couldn't take it, and they started storming out on the field."

The Manzanar rooters claimed the ball was trapped. George Tamura, 64, describes the ensuing melee: "This fellow who was a real close friend of ours, he went after the whole Poston team himself, right into their dugout. He got hit over the head with a chair. I saw his dad going in there, pulling him out with a bloody head. That really started it. All these big bruisers came out of the stands with fire in their eyes. We were in the infield, and we held everybody back."

In the pandemonium, the umpires and the Poston centerfielder had to be escorted back to their blocks. After things settled down a bit, the player who claimed he caught the ball, he came to our block with his father and mother and apologized to my friend's family," continues George. After that he quit baseball. Later on, we asked our friend why he went into the dugout like that, and he told us he felt sorry for Jim, that Jim was pitching such a good game, he hated to see him get robbed of a win."

The incident is briefly mentioned in BASEBALL: Tule Lake Center 1944, a 74-page, camp-published book about the 44 season: "True rabidness of the local diamond fandom was unveiled during this colorful brawl which saw differences of opinion voiced by the spectators and fists fly between a few of the more rabid baseball followers. This incident gained center-wide recognition as well as the attention of out-of-town newspapers."

On the less tempestuous side, it should be noted that the four Tomooka brothers led the Guadalupe team - which had transferred basically intact from Gila to the Taiseiyo (Pacific) League Championship, and went on to take three straight from the Tule Lake Nippons, winners of the Taiheiyo (Atlantic) Division title, for the overall camp crown.

AFTER THE WAR, the Japanese-American community faced rebuilding from scratch. "Until about 1950, life was very hard," says Fujimoto, who teaches applied behavioral science at the University of California at Davis, "and baseball continued to play an important role - not only as a recreational outlet for the younger people, but in allowing a lot of the older people to come back together. They could take a Sunday afternoon and go to a ballgame. "My experience playing and watching baseball in camp helped me get resettled because I knew so much about the game.