Baseball behind barbed wire - Access to Japan

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1990 by Jay Feldman

I was in seventh grade when I got out of camp. I met a lot of kids my own age who played, but they didn't know strategy.

They didn't know how to warm up; they didn't know how to do infield practice. That was all stuff I knew very well. The school I went to had a team, and the principal saw right away that I knew quite a bit, and he put me on the team. I was a shrimp, a foot shorter than a lot of these kids, but I was able to make the team because of what I knew about baseball from camp."

In August 1988, President Reagan signed a Congressional bill granting a redress payment of $20,000 to every living survivor of the internment camps. In October 1990, 48 years after FDR issued the internment order, the first payments were made.

More than forty years after the closing of the camps, many internees point to baseball as one of the few bright spots of a dark time. Matsumoto: "I think baseball was the main salvation against the loneliness of the camps. More than anything else, it got people together. If it hadn't been for baseball, it would have been unbearable."