In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

World War II proved as variegated as their wartime experiences, and only a few had a postwar transition as lucrative as Harada’s. The Department of the Army lifted its internment order in January 1945, and the War Relocation Authority (WRA) closed all of its camps by the year’s end. About 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans held in those facilities returned to their “normal” civilian life after almost three years of captivity at the hands of their own government. Ninety percent of those who had owned land and property before the war had lost everything and had to start from scratch. Upon their release, internees received three dollars in meal money and a ticket back to where they came from, if they chose to go back there; the WRA encouraged Japanese Americans to resettle in areas away from the Pacific Coast. Postwar America’s mainstream society, however, remained inhospitable to Japanese Americans. The California state legislature ’s Joint Committee on Un-­ American Activities, chaired by Jack B. Tenney of Los Angeles, issued a report in 1945 entitled “Japanese Problems in California.”1 Not only officeholders but also some private citizens campaigned to prevent the Japanese internees’ return to the West Coast. In 1944 a small Washington State press circulated a pamphlet entitled The Japs Must Not Come Back! Its author expressed racialized and gendered fear of Japanese Americans. “Samurai-­ indoctrinated” Japanese American citizens “will have the right after the war to settle next door to us and consort with our daughters unless something is done to stop them.” The pamphlet thus proposed removing all Japanese Americans after the war to “Japanese Mandated Islands” in the Pacific, where they would be free to live under a democratic, American form of government but would be far away from white women; this “resettlement” would be necessary because “sexual contact between races ha[s] to be prohibited because the white race wants to survive.”2 Kenichi Zehimura chose to return to Fresno with his family. There, he carried on his lifelong dedication to the game he so loved, coaching Little League Baseball and playing semipro well into his fifties. His sons, Harvey and Howard, who had honed their baseball skills in the internment camp’s “minor league,” grew up to play for the Fresno State University baseball team. After graduation, the Zenimura brothers were recruited to play for EPILOGUE Japanese American baseball players’ field of new dreams after 242 | Epilogue the Japanese professional team Hiroshima Carp in the 1950s. After teaching and practicing art at the assembly center in San Bruno and the internment camp in Topaz, Utah, Chiura Obata resumed his life as a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1945. His Nisei son, Gyo, who managed to elude internment in the camp, studied architecture in St. Louis during World War II. As an accomplished architectural designer, he later cofounded the firm of Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassbaum, the company that designed and built some of the most magnificent ballparks in the United States, including Camden Yards in Baltimore , Coors Field in Denver, and AT�T Park and Pacific Bell (now SBC) Park in San Francisco.3 In the early postwar decade, a number of Nisei players joined the Zenimura brothers in migrating west to their parents’ homeland to fill the rosters of professional baseball in Japan. To cope with the severe talent loss caused by World War II and to introduce new styles of play and techniques from the United States, Japanese pro teams “imported” Nisei players in the early postwar years. One of the pioneers of this mid-­ twentieth-­ century replay of oyatoi in baseball was Kaname “Wally” Yonamine , son of an Okinawa-­ born sugar-­ plantation worker on the island of Maui. He was recruited by the Yomiuri Giants in 1950.4 Yonamine cut his teeth in professional sports in football, joining the San Francisco 49ers upon his graduation from high school in 1948. A superb athlete, Yonamine overcame an injury that cut short his playing career in football and went on to make a name for himself in professional baseball, playing for Salt Lake City, the San Francisco Seals’ farm team. After the 1949 season, Lefty O’Doul, then the Seals’ manager and vice president, gave Yonamine free-­agent status so the Nisei player from Hawaii could play for the Tokyo Giants. Yonamine made his mark on Japanese pro baseball with his aggressive style of play, particularly in base running. He was...

Share