In an Internment Camp, All They Had Was Baseball. They’re Back to Play. In an Internment Camp, All They Had Was Baseball. They’re Back to Play.
The New York Times
As Shohei Ohtani played in the World Series, Japanese American ballplayers returned to Manzanar for the first baseball games in the internment camp since World War II.
First, the tumbleweeds were cleared. Then, an archaeological dig found the posts for the backstop and the bases. Finally, old black-and-white photographs unearthed in an archive in Los Angeles were examined to make sure everything was reconstructed exactly as it had been.
All that was left was to play baseball.
For nearly two decades, Dan Kwong had the dream of restoring the baseball field at Manzanar, the sprawling camp in the Mojave Desert where thousands of Japanese and Americans with Japanese ancestry were incarcerated during World War II, among them Mr. Kwong’s mother. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, baseball was a source of connection between Japan and the United States.
As many as 120,000 American citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned during the war in 10 camps across the American West. When they were forced from their homes on the West Coast, they brought baseball with them.
“To come to these camps, to be in Manzanar, where you have lost everything, the one thing they could hold on to — the one thing they could keep — was the game of baseball,” Mr. Kwong, a performance artist in Los Angeles, said.
He continued: “And then on a deeper, symbolic level, it was an expression of Americanness. It was like, this is our game, this is our culture, we are a part of this, and we are going to do it even here.”
