Baseball in the Japanese internment camps

August 19, 2008 12:54 PM

Baseball behind barbed wire. Japanese-Americans brought baseball with them when they emigrated to America. The game had been introduced to Japan, so the story goes, by American Professor Horace Wilson in the 1870s. When Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans were relocated to internment camps during World War II, playing baseball was one of the few freedoms allowed them by camp directors.

Independent producer/filmmaker, actor, researcher, and writer Kerry Yo Nakagawa founded the The Nisei Baseball Research Project to preserve the history of Japanese American Baseball; his research has resulted in several non-fiction books and American Pastime, a feature-length fictional treatment of the internment camp baseball story.

posted by nanojath (4 comments total)

That and cross-scratching.
posted by Artw at 1:10 PM on August 19, 2008

It's as American as apple pie and internment camps.
posted by Astro Zombie at 1:15 PM on August 19, 2008 [2 favorites]

And torture.
posted by empath at 2:33 PM on August 19, 2008

Interesting stuff, thanks!
posted by languagehat at 6:34 PM on August 19, 2008