By Tim Arango
Initially, the tumbleweeds were removed. After that, an archaeological excavation revealed the posts for the backstop and the bases. Ultimately, vintage black-and-white images discovered in a Los Angeles archive were reviewed to ensure the reconstruction was accurate to the original.
All that remained was to engage in a game of baseball.
For nearly twenty years, Dan Kwong envisioned revitalizing the baseball diamond at Manzanar, the expansive camp in the Mojave Desert where many Japanese and Japanese Americans were confined during World War II, including Kwong’s mother. Prior to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, baseball served as a link between Japan and the United States.
Around 120,000 American citizens and residents of Japanese descent were detained during the war across ten camps in the western United States. When displaced from their homes on the West Coast, they brought along their passion for baseball.
“Coming to these camps, to be in Manzanar, where everything was lost, the one thing they could cling to — the one thing they could retain — was baseball,” Kwong remarked, a performance artist based in Los Angeles.
He added: “On a deeper, symbolic level, it represented Americanness. It signified that this is our game, our culture, we belong here, and we will play even in this place.”
To showcase his initiative, Kwong organized a gathering of players from Japanese American amateur teams in California to Manzanar last month for games, a part of what he termed a living exhibition meant to persist and highlight the history of Japanese internment.
A stretch of dusty field
On a chilly morning that soon transitioned into the blazing sun and warmth of the desert, the sounds and sights of baseball resounded in Manzanar nearly 80 years after the camp’s closure at the war’s end: the crack of the bat, the thwack of ball against leather, the camaraderie of players. Kwong, 69, played first base and batted leadoff for the Li’l Tokio Giants, a team he has been part of for 53 years.
“It’s truly a beautiful manifestation of a community wanting to witness something significant,” he stated regarding the revival of baseball in Manzanar.
Kwong’s aspiration took considerable time to materialize. Initially, the National Park Service, responsible for managing Manzanar as a historical and tourist site, indicated that the baseball field was an archaeological site that should not be disturbed. However, he pressed on, and today the baseball field mirrors its appearance in those historic black-and-white images: a patch of arid soil, all dirt, featuring a pitcher’s mound, foul lines, a backstop, and a small wooden bleacher behind home plate.
“Simple, Zen baseball in the desert,” Kwong describes it.
Japanese American amateur teams have been active in California for over a century, attracting players from teenage high school stars to those in their 60s. In the early years, before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the major leagues, these teams also included Latino and Black players.
Standing on the mound, Michael Furatani, a pitcher for the Lodi JACL Templars, a team from Central Valley, could spot the old guard tower far down the right-field line.
“I imagine I’m picking off a runner, and glancing over my shoulder, you can see the guard tower,” shared Furatani, 60, whose relatives were held in a Wyoming camp during the war. “That realization struck me. Wow, this is where people tried to escape their reality.”
The games coincided with Games 1 and 2 of the World Series, featuring the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani. Many of the amateur participants were excited Dodgers fans, reveling in the previous night’s action when Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers’ first baseman and later the World Series MVP, concluded the match with a grand slam in the 10th inning.
“To me, it’s an integral part of this day,” stated Jon Kaji, whose father was incarcerated in Manzanar.
As a City Council member in Torrance, a city in Los Angeles County’s South Bay region with a significant Japanese American population—approximately 12% of the city’s 147,000 residents—Kaji has been instrumental in establishing friendship agreements with the hometowns of Ohtani and Dodgers’ star pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto. He plans to bring Little League teams from Japan to Torrance next year for games and a visit to the Dodgers.
The process of restoring the field necessitated removing an enormous amount of tumbleweeds. The archaeological dig that located the original backstop posts, along with rusty markers for the bases, also brought to light coins and soda bottles left by onlookers.
Images of the baseball field—captured by Ansel Adams, America’s most renowned landscape photographer, who documented the camp in 1943, and by Toyo Miyatake, a Japanese photographer who was interned and covertly recorded camp life—were carefully examined to enable Kwong, volunteers, and Manzanar’s archaeologist to restore the field closely to its original state. (One of Kwong’s popular phrases while promoting the project playfully referenced the famous line from “Field of Dreams”: “If we build it, they will come. This time willingly.”)
Baseball was not taken from them
Long before Ohtani and long preceding World War II, baseball held a crucial role in the dynamics between Japan and the United States. Horace Wilson, an educator from Maine, introduced baseball to Japan in 1872, igniting a national passion for the sport. Pre-war, American baseball stars visited Japan for exhibition games, which included a squad featuring Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Approximately 100 baseball teams played in Manzanar from 1942 to 1945, attracting crowds of over a thousand spectators for games. Some teams, such as the San Fernando Aces, who claimed a camp championship, entered Manzanar together, bringing along their uniforms and gear.
“America imprisoned its own citizens solely based on race, yet ironically, they didn’t eradicate baseball,” explained Kerry Yo Nagawa, an author and historian of Japanese American baseball. “Instead of rebelling or harboring bitterness for losing everything else — as Japanese Americans could not speak their native language and many faiths were initially suppressed in the camps — they embraced baseball as a cherished constant.”
For many participants — including Furatani and Kaji, who had relatives in the camps — the event was profoundly personal, a chance to reflect on the intertwined narratives of history and baseball.
“Just contemplating what it must have been like back in the ’40s when people were confined here,” Kaji expressed. “To me, baseball has always represented connection.”
