In an internment camp, all they had was baseball. They’re back to play.

Two baseball teams of Japanese Americans who played a game on an unearthed and restored baseball field that had not seen a game in 75 years, at the site of a Japanese internment camp in Manzanar, Calif., Oct. 28, 2024. For nearly two decades, Dan Kwong had the dream of restoring the field at the sprawling camp in the Mojave Desert where thousands of Japanese and Americans with Japanese ancestry were incarcerated, including his mother, during World War II. (Hana Asano/The New York Times)

By Tim Arango

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 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,” said Kwong, a performance artist in Los Angeles.

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.”

To unveil his project, Kwong brought ballplayers from Japanese American amateur teams in California to Manzanar last month to play games, part of what he described as a living exhibition that he hopes will continue and draw attention to the history of the Japanese internment.

A patch of dusty land

On a brisk morning that soon gave way to the searing sun and heat of the desert, the sounds and sights of baseball returned to Manzanar, nearly 80 years after the camp closed at the conclusion of the war: the crack of the bat, the smacking of ball on leather, the chatter of ballplayers. Kwong, 69, was playing first base and batting leadoff for the Li’l Tokio Giants, a team he has played with for 53 years.

“It’s really this beautiful expression of a community of people who wanted to see something happen,” he said of the return of baseball to Manzanar.

Kwong’s dream took a long time to be realized. At first, the National Park Service, which manages Manzanar as a tourist site and museum, said the baseball field was an archaeological site that couldn’t be disturbed. But he persisted, and today the baseball field looks much as it does in those old black-and-white pictures: a patch of dusty land, all dirt, with a pitcher’s mound, foul lines, a backstop and a small wooden grandstand behind home plate.

“Simple, Zen baseball in the desert” is how Kwong describes it.

Japanese American amateur teams have played in California for more than a century, drawing players ranging from teenagers who star on their high school teams to people in their 60s. In the early days, before Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues, the teams also fielded Latino and Black players.

Standing on the mound, Michael Furatani, a pitcher for the Lodi JACL Templars, a team from the Central Valley, could see the old guard tower far down the right-field line.

“I pretend I’m picking somebody off, and I look over my shoulder and you can see the guard tower,” said Furatani, 60, whose relatives were imprisoned in a camp in Wyoming during the war. “That really kind of sunk in. Holy smokes, this is where guys tried to forget.”

The games were sandwiched between Games 1 and 2 of the World Series, which was headlined by the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Japanese megastar Shohei Ohtani. Many of the amateur ballplayers were Dodgers fans still basking in the heroics of the previous night, when Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers’ first baseman and eventual World Series most valuable player, ended the game with a grand slam in the 10th inning.

“To me, it’s part of this day,” said Jon Kaji, whose father was in Manzanar.

As a City Council member in Torrance, a city in the South Bay region of Los Angeles County with a large number of Japanese American residents — about 12% of the city’s population of 147,000 — Kaji has helped secure friendship agreements with the hometowns of Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a Japanese star pitcher for the Dodgers. He plans to bring Little League teams from Japan to Torrance next year to play games and see the Dodgers.

Restoring the field first required clearing an enormous number of tumbleweeds. The archaeological dig that discovered the original posts for the backstop, and rusty pegs that marked the bases, also unearthed coins and soda bottles left behind by spectators.

Photographs of the baseball field — taken by Ansel Adams, America’s most famous landscape photographer, who took pictures of the camp in 1943, and by Toyo Miyatake, a Japanese photographer who was incarcerated and who surreptitiously documented camp life — were scrutinized so that Kwong, volunteers and Manzanar’s archaeologist were able to restore the field almost exactly as it had been. (One of Kwong’s slogans, as he was promoting the project, was a play on a famous quotation from “Field of Dreams”: “If we build it, they will come. This time willingly.”)

They didn’t take away baseball

Long before Ohtani and long before World War II, baseball was an important part of the relationship between Japan and the United States. Horace Wilson, an educator from Maine, introduced baseball to Japan in 1872, and the country fell in love with the sport. Before the war, American big leaguers traveled to Japan for exhibition games, including a team with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig as members.

Roughly 100 baseball teams played in Manzanar between 1942 and 1945, drawing crowds of a thousand people or more to watch games. Some teams, like the San Fernando Aces, who won a camp championship, entered Manzanar together, bringing with them their uniforms and equipment.

“America imprisoned their own Americans only because of their race, but the irony is that they didn’t take away baseball,” said Kerry Yo Nagawa, an author and a historian of Japanese American baseball. “And instead of rejecting it, being bitter, because they took everything else away — Japanese Americans couldn’t speak their native language, many of the faiths you couldn’t practice in the camps initially — baseball was the one thing they gravitated to and embraced.”

For many of the participants — like Furatani and Kaji, who had relatives in the camps — the event was deeply personal, an opportunity to reflect on history and baseball.

“Just thinking about what it was like back in the ’40s when they were stuck here,” Kaji said. “To me, baseball has always been about connection.”