Japanese Americans play historic baseball games at prison camp to recall a pastime — and a lifeline

MANZANAR, Calif. — Swinging at the first pitch on a hallowed baseball field was 23-year-old Logan Morita. As the crowd fell quiet, he thought of a great-uncle, Jimmy Masatoshi Morita, who 80 years before played for a baseball team at Manzanar, one of 10 Japanese American concentration camps the U.S. government erected during World War II. 

Painstakingly rebuilt in the barren landscape of the camp, the field hosted games Saturday for the first time since it closed in the 1940s. Players from the Japanese American League, along with friends and relatives of former incarcerees, played in a tribute to the baseball teams formed at prison camps across the country during the era.  

Logan Morita, an electrical engineering student at the University of California, Davis, had never been to a Japanese incarceration camp before and was struck by the power of place, how it captured his family’s history in a way that doesn’t jump off the pages of a school textbook.

“It’s honestly a surreal experience,” he said. Morita, a native of Lodi, reflected on the arduous journey his grandparents and great grandparents made to reach California’s high desert and the unforgiving sun baking the field of play. “It says that they’re resilient,” he said, pointing out the baseball field, garden and school that Japanese Americans built behind barbed wire. No matter the conditions, “they just get back up,” he said.

As it was during WWII, baseball at Manzanar isn’t just about the score or a winning record. The attendees at the weekend games said it was about a reclamation of space, community and power. The game seems so simple, but what it represents is boundless. Back when barbed wire restricted freedom, Manzanar players found solace on a field that organizers and volunteers have now rebirthed and made their own.