Going for BrokeWhen the check came to reimburse us for what happened
during the war, I was more amused than relieved. Twenty thousand dollars.
The average pro baseball player makes over a million dollars a year now.
But it can’t be helped. These are different times. For me, what happened
after the war was more important—one game in particular. It occurred
exactly forty-four years ago, in the middle of August 1949, but I can
still remember nearly every pitch because there was a major league scout
in the stands that day and because after that game, everything would be
different.
In many ways it was typical, played against a local
all-star team on whatever field we could find, at a high school in
Portland in this case. The crowd spilled out of the bleachers and lined
the field on either side, women in high heels with umbrellas, men in suits
with hats. It reminded me of the time I had spent in the city seven years
earlier, people pressed against the fence to see how the Army had us
living in horse stalls.
By the fourth inning I began to realize I was pitching
especially well. The first batter in the inning had grounded out; the
second struck out swinging. Now I faced their third hitter. That’s when
I looked up at the scoreboard and saw all those zeros. In baseball, it’s
bad luck to think about pitching a no-hitter, so I blocked everything out
of my mind except what my father had taught me: to remain balanced, in
control, prepared for anything. I went into my windup and fired a
fastball, landing with my body square to home plate, ready to field a bunt
or a line drive. The batter was a tall, blonde kid with thick forearms,
but he couldn’t get his bat around quickly enough to connect with my
pitch.
When Tommy Ishikawa, my catcher, called for a curveball
next, I nodded. Not wanting to hang it and let this guy drive it deep, I
aimed low, and it tailed away from his swing. As the umpire signaled
strike two, someone in the crowd yelled, “Herro, Jap boy!” But I
didn’t care what he said. I was an American. I reached back and threw so
hard the ball smacked into the catcher’s mitt and made a noise that
echoed off the bleachers. The batter never moved.
The umpire yelled out and jerked his thumb over his
shoulder. Tommy pulled off his glove, shaking his hand and rubbing it. I
walked off the field and didn’t hear a thing the crowd said.
I was the star pitcher on the Nisei All-Stars. I was an
American.
♦♦♦
I was born November 13, 1927, the year the great Babe
Ruth hit sixty home runs. Every morning that summer as I grew in my
mother’s womb, my father read the sports pages and marveled out loud at
the Babe’s enormous talent, listening to Yankees games on the radio
whenever we could get them in Wapato, Washington, in the heart of the
Yakima Valley. Like fallow earth, I accepted the seeds of my father’s
love of the Yankees and baseball even before I was born.
My father had seen the Babe when he was still a pitcher
with the Boston Red Sox and played against the St. Louis Browns on his way
to a second twenty-win season. My father never tired of describing the
Babe’s ferocious curveball, perhaps because the big man later took part
in two tours of Japan that helped bring about professional baseball in
that country, before the war put everything on hold.
“He would be the best pitcher today if he weren’t
also the best hitter,” my father often told my mother, who became
interested in the game when my older brother Frank began playing. Frank
was a shortstop like my father, but because I grew quickly, and because of
my father’s early admiration of the Babe, it was determined that I would
be a pitcher. As soon as I could pick up a baseball with both hands, I
would roll it to where my father stood only a couple of feet away, and he
would slowly back up as I learned to roll it farther and farther. When I
could hold the ball in one hand, he taught me to throw, and we would play
catch until it was too dark to see.
“The boy is too young,” my mother protested. “He
is going to get hurt.”
“No, yakyuu will make him strong,” my father
said. “It will discipline his body and mind.”
Of course, I was told all of this later, after I had
indeed grown disciplined and strong because of yakyuu—baseball.
My father taught me to prepare for a game the same way we prepared our
fields for planting every spring, to believe in the manager and adhere to
his strategy as part of the natural order of all things. It was the
Japanese way.
I am Nisei, second-generation Japanese and by
birth an American, my parents Issei, the first generation,
forbidden for years to naturalize. Despite the ocean between them, my
father kept in touch with his relatives in Japan, who wrote to him of
baseball’s growing popularity there. Sitting at our wooden kitchen table
with his wire-rimmed reading glasses on, he would sometimes translate for
me the strange black markings that arrived on wispy paper in thin
envelopes. Their lives did not sound much different from ours: the worry
of long days in the fields and fluctuating farm prices, the pleasure of
baseball on the weekends. But in many ways, my aunts and uncles and
cousins remained as mysterious as the language they wrote in. I’d never
met any of them. The Babe’s tours were my main connection to my
father’s country. My heroes were the American players, like Joe DiMaggio
and Dizzy Dean, and I never doubted that one day I would become one of
them.
♦♦♦
Growing up a farm boy during the Depression wasn’t as
bad as it might sound. As non-citizens, my parents weren’t allowed to
buy land, but they leased twenty acres on the Yakima Indian Reservation
that we kept in potatoes, hops, cantaloupes, and onions. We never seemed
to have much money, but we never went hungry, for we also tended a large
garden of tomatoes, corn, squash, cabbage, beans, cucumbers, and other
vegetables my mother would jar or pickle to keep us through the winter, as
well as a flock of chickens and a cow.
Besides being a farmer, my father was a baseball star
for the Wapato Nippons, who won the Mt. Adams League pennant in 1934 and
’35. But while I admired his strong throwing arm and the way he hit line
drives, there were things I didn’t understand about him. He talked of
how he hoped to become an American citizen, but he still practiced Búkkyo,
the Buddhist religion of his father. He meditated every morning and
evening, waking up even earlier than I did to perform my chores. He never
seemed to get very excited about the game I loved, whether he won or lost.
Though there was talk he might be recruited to play for the Seattle Asahis
in the Nisei Baseball League, I couldn’t tell how much he cared.
I looked up more to my only brother, Frank. He was four
years older than me, and even more than my father, he wanted to be
American—not just legally, which he was, but in every way. He smoked
Pall Mall cigarettes and listened to the boogie woogie and big band music
of “Lux” Lewis and Benny Goodman, and though I’d never been anywhere
outside of the Yakima Valley, I imagined he could swing dance as well as
anyone in Portland or Seattle, maybe even St. Louis or New York. He knew
all the movie stars by name—Myrna Loy was his favorite—and he would
sneak these calendars into the house with color drawings of beautiful
American women with very short skirts and tight sweaters, or sometimes no
clothes at all.
Whenever we could, usually on a Sunday afternoon when
our chores were light and he wasn’t with a steady girlfriend, he would
drive us into Wapato to watch a movie and then eat a snack at the
drugstore and listen to the jukebox. Frank always ordered a vanilla
milkshake with an egg broken into it. We had stopped going to Yakima
because they wouldn’t let us into the theater, saying our clothes were
dirty even if we hadn’t been in the fields that day. But for the most
part, we were treated well in Wapato.
One time, though, when I was about twelve and Frank
sixteen, he got into a fistfight with an older boy who insulted us in the
street. I was already Frank’s five-foot-seven, but he weighed thirty
pounds more and had four extra years of baling straw in his arms.
“What did you say?” he asked loudly so that the
other boy, who had passed us, could hear him.
The boy turned around and walked back. He was tall, much
taller than Frank, and his gums seemed too loose around his teeth. I
watched his face turn from pale to bright pink. “I said go back where
you came from,” he said. “We don’t need you here stealing our
jobs.”
“I was born in this country same as you,” Frank
said, squaring his shoulders so that for a moment he looked bigger than he
really was.
“Yellow devil,” the boy said in a way that seemed he
was spitting at us. Without warning Frank punched him in the face and
didn’t let up, pounding the boy while he stood there, dazed. Blood ran
from his nose, and a drop of it spattered onto my good white shirt. I
watched it run in a small stripe down my chest pocket before soaking in,
and my first thought was that our parents would be angry. When I looked
up, the boy lay on the ground, Frank standing over him with both fists.
“Around here, we call cowards yellow,” he said.
I forgot all about my shirt then and only wanted to be
like Frank—a tough American kid.
♦♦♦
We didn’t have radar guns in 1949, but I threw as hard
as any of the major leaguers. More importantly, I could throw the ball
where I wanted it. Going into the bottom of the fifth inning of that game
against the local all-stars, I hadn’t even allowed a runner to reach
base. Finally, with two outs, I walked their shortstop. The crowd cheered
like they had just won a pennant.
I was still trying not to think too much about my
no-hitter, but I couldn’t help looking into the bleachers. Earlier that
summer, I had thrown a shutout against the Pacific Northwest League
champs, and after the game my manager pointed out a scout for the Brooklyn
Dodgers, a stocky man with dark, curly hair who stuck a notebook in his
jacket pocket before disappearing in the parking lot. I couldn’t help
wondering if he was there among all those screaming fans in Portland. We
had been told some scouts might be covering the game—to see the white
players, I knew, not my team, but I was pitching so well, I thought I
stood a chance of being discovered.
Japanese Americans weren’t allowed to play in the
major leagues after the war—an unspoken agreement but as binding as a
contract—and there were no full-time, professional Japanese American
leagues. We got by playing anyone we could—high school and college
teams, town teams, other Nisei teams. Sometimes we played
exhibitions against the Negro League ball clubs, though they didn’t last
much longer after Jackie Robinson finally reached the big show in 1947.
We were almost the first non-whites to make it. In 1941,
Henry Honda, a Nisei from San Jose and a pitcher just like me,
signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians. Many of us in the Yakima
Valley became excited, especially the players and their families. We were
working our field when two of my father’s teammates, Kenichi Ono and
Tsuneo Yasuda, drove up in Kenichi’s Plymouth. He jumped out waving a
letter from his cousin in California, which he read out loud when my
father, Frank, and I joined them.
“Do you know what this means?” Kenichi asked when he
had finished reading.
I wasn’t yet fourteen, but I knew. Someone from our
culture had made it. My father, though born overseas, could now show that
the seeds he had sown in his new country had taken root and grown deep. He
stood with his hands in the pockets of his overalls. Tsuneo reached out
and grasped him by the shoulder.
“Perhaps Joe will be next,” he said. “Everyone is
talking about how good he is already.”
My father didn’t look at me. Instead, he pulled out
his right hand and placed it on Tsuneo’s shoulder, and the two men stood
connected like that for a moment. My father’s face showed no emotion.
“We will see,” he said. “We will see.”
But when he pulled his hand away, I could see it was
shaking.
♦♦♦
Henry Honda never played an inning in the major leagues.
On December 7, 1941, a Sunday, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They
might as well have burned our family farm.
Frank and I were drinking milkshakes at the drugstore in
Wapato when the news came on the portable Zenith that always sat on the
shelf above the blenders. Everyone in the place became quiet, but the soda
jerk turned up the radio anyway. Frank quickly pulled some money from his
shirt pocket and placed it on the counter.
“Come on, let’s go,” he said. “We’re done
now.” When I tried to finish the last of my milkshake, he took it from
my hands and set it down. “Didn’t you hear me? I said we’re done.”
He looked at me hard. Everyone turned to watch us as we put on our
jackets, and I felt their eyes burning into our backs as we left.
The next time we drove by that store, a sign hung in the
front window: “No Japs Wanted.” Other stores where we had shopped and
socialized put up similar signs. Just like that, people who had been our
friends and neighbors and co-workers became distant strangers or even
vocal enemies. It was like being born a second time, only in a foreign
land, with different stories in my ears.
It’s an irony in life that sometimes our most trying
times open doors to greater experiences, like threshing wheat to strip
away the coarse husks and get to the sweet kernels of grain. It’s an
even greater irony that sometimes it doesn’t work this way at all, that
the trying times signal an end to a way of life and the beginning of a
long exile. I never wanted to leave our family farm in the heart of
Central Washington’s most fertile valley, the only place I had ever
called home. Shikata ga nai, was all my father said. It can’t be
helped.
♦♦♦
Everything happened fast, and the uncertainty of our
situation made it seem to move faster. Within a week of Pearl Harbor, my
parents’ bank account was frozen. Frank, now eighteen and with his own
bank account, could withdraw money only if he showed his birth
certificate. That didn’t last long, but then my parents had to turn in
our radio at the Wapato Police Station and register at the post office as
enemy aliens.
In February, as we prepared for the new growing season,
we heard rumors that we would be evacuated into the interior of the
country. A month later, a man from the Farm Security Administration told
us they would watch our farms and equipment. Taking advantage of sacrifice
prices wouldn’t be tolerated, he said. It would be considered
un-American. But it happened all over the place. Kenichi Ono had just
invested $125 in his 1936 Plymouth and only got $25 for it. Tsuneo Yasuda,
who had been among the first settlers in the valley to transform the
sagebrush desert into a garden, received a third of what his Allis
Chalmers tractor was worth. We simply stored our tractor and truck and
potato digger in the barn and housed our animals with the Cavanaughs, a
white family up the road who seemed sympathetic.
In late May, when we should have been watching our hops
vines spiraling clockwise toward the sun, the Army sent in an artillery
unit to oversee the relocation of all Japanese Americans in the Yakima
Valley, including non-aliens, as they called citizens like my brother and
me. Suddenly we had less than a week to prepare for our leaving. We were
told we could only bring what we could carry. We wouldn’t be allowed to
harvest our crops, and plowing them under would be considered sabotage.
On the last day of the month we were “processed” in
the Wapato Junior High School gymnasium, where I had gone to school. Other
Nisei helped by acting as clerks. Everyone was civil, including the
artillerymen. Though they looked fierce with their guns and green
fatigues, they were more kind than most of our white neighbors had been
since the bombing. One soldier, a corporal named Joe, treated my friends
and me especially well, sneaking us chocolate bars and showing us magic
tricks, such as making a coin disappear from his hand and then reappear
behind his ear. He smiled and mussed the hair on our heads. He said he had
an uncle, a businessman, who had visited Japan on a steamship in the 1920s
and brought back stories that didn’t sound anything like the letters my
father read to me, stories of busy market streets, exotic colors and
smells, and the most beautiful, polite people on earth. Corporal Joe
himself had always hoped to visit one day, and now he was afraid he was
going to get his wish.
Less than a week later, my family and I were loaded on a
train bound for Portland. People clutched suitcases full of clothes but
also crates of books or heirloom China, typewriters, lamps, cooking pots.
My mother brought an assortment of sewing tools, my father his Buddhist
shrine. Frank brought his collection of big band records, though we had to
leave the phonograph behind. I, naturally, took my baseball equipment. I
still believed in the future then, still held onto my father’s dreams I
had soaked up in my unborn sleeping. Very slowly, though, I woke up and
learned to believe what my eyes saw before me.
The Army had called in the infantry to help herd us onto
the train. Kenichi Ono’s family was ahead of where we stood in line on
the platform. An infantryman poked Mrs. Ono in the arm, causing her to
drop a framed picture she carried. The glass shattered as it hit the
ground, ruining the frame, but Kenichi bent over to retrieve the picture.
When he did so, the infantryman shoved him, almost knocking him down.
“Giddyup there, Old Paint!” the infantrymen said,
laughing. He looked around to see if his buddies had heard him, and they
laughed, too. He then kicked away the picture and its broken frame. “You
won’t be needing that at the glue factory.”
Several others were rough as well, and the artillerymen,
who had watched over us for a week and a half, wore tight faces. Some
began muttering their disgust so that we could hear them. The infantryman
who had shoved Kenichi boarded the train and began directing people,
grabbing them by their arms and pushing them into the first open seats,
whether or not they were near their loved ones. When Kenichi and his wife
became separated, he protested. The soldier laughed again, though this
time without his mocking smile.
“My, my, the horsey talks,” he said. “Might have
to put a bridle and bit on this one.”
My family was already seated, but I remained standing in
the doorway to the car, clutching my baseball mitt to my chest. The
artilleryman I knew as Corporal Joe moved past me and up to the other man.
Both wore identical stripes on their sleeves.
“You’re out of line,” Corporal Joe said. “Me and
my boys don’t like what’s going on.”
“Maybe you should mind your own damn business.”
“Watch your mouth. There are women and children
here.”
“I won’t have you telling me what to do.” He
shoved Corporal Joe’s shoulder, and Joe pushed back with both hands.
They grabbed each other’s shirts and began wrestling, each trying to
gain an advantage, before falling into an empty seat, the infantryman’s
feet slipping out from under him. Corporal Joe jerked the man up and
smacked him hard, sending his head through the window. There was the crash
of glass and the faint tinkling of pieces hitting the platform, an excited
sound like rain among the soldiers. All of us remained completely silent,
though Frank stood up in his seat, his forearm muscles clenching and
unclenching.
Later, sometimes, I would think of Corporal Joe when I
pitched, the ball a coin that disappeared before the batter could hit it.
I would think of Frank, something in me rising, causing me to feel taller
than I really was.
♦♦♦
In the bottom of the sixth, their leadoff batter got
their first hit of the game. He lined it hard into left field, and after
he saw that he couldn’t stretch it into a double, he hustled back to
first base and clapped loudly. Again the crowd became noisy, pressing the
field, and I could almost feel their heat against me.
Then I saw him, the Brooklyn scout, leaning forward with
his elbows on his knees, expectant, like a catcher calling signals. It was
definitely him, the same curly hair, the same notebook in his pocket. The
runner on second took a big lead, but I didn’t think he would try to
steal, especially on the first pitch. He did, taking third base easily,
and I was angry at myself for letting my guard down. I was thinking too
much about the scout and not enough about the game at hand.
The next batter hit a fly ball to right field, too
shallow for either runner to tag up. The man on first then tried to take a
big lead, but I held him close, stepping off the mound several times and
once throwing in his direction. Some in the crowd booed, but I didn’t
care. The man at the plate worked the count full before I struck him out.
Then the tall, blonde kid with thick forearms came up
again. My first two pitches were good fastballs on the outside corner, and
he missed one and fouled the other away. With two quick strikes on him, I
should have backed off and thrown an off-speed pitch, but I came at him
with another fastball. It hung a little, and he lofted it high into the
air. For a moment, it stood out against the American flag flying above the
scoreboard in center field, one large star blotting out the background of
other stars, before it fell into my center fielder’s glove near the
fence to end the inning.
♦♦♦
In Portland, we were held on the Pacific Livestock
Exposition grounds, where the Army had converted horse stalls into
apartments by dividing each stall into two rooms with a swinging door and
throwing up a coat of whitewash. The floor was covered with two inches of
dust when we moved in. My mother immediately took charge and directed
everyone, including my father, to clean the place up. As we did, we
discovered that underneath the dust, linoleum had been laid directly over
manure-covered boards, and that everything had been whitewashed with the
walls—spikes and nails sticking out, spider webs, horse hair, hay. We
slept in individual folding cots on straw mattresses. There were no
private toilets, only public latrines; no fresh eggs, fish, or vegetables,
nothing like my mother’s okonomiyaki, fried batter pancakes she
made with cabbage, onion, and beef, only long mess hall lines for Army
rations, though rice was served once a day. We lived like this for three
months until we were again shipped by train to the Heart Mountain
interment camp in Wyoming.
The shades were drawn on our railroad car the entire
trip. When we finally arrived at a siding—no station house, only a
platform—we stepped off and gathered our baggage, the sun behind us
rising over farmland, revealing broad stripes of darkness in the desert in
front of us: row upon row of barracks covered in heavy black tar paper.
Our new home was set on a flat, treeless bench surrounded by sagebrush and
buffalo grass, a barbed-wire fence and eight guard towers. Behind it, to
the northwest, a squared-off, eight-thousand-foot peak loomed over the
high desert like another guard tower. Heart Mountain.
We had been forced to trade our two-bedroom frame house
with a fruit cellar and an attic for a sixteen-by-twenty-foot room. When
we first moved in, it was furnished with a stove, a droplight, and four
steel Army cots with mattresses. As before, my mother took over arranging
the room into a livable space. She pushed two cots together into a corner
to form her and my father’s marriage bed, partitioning it off with
curtains she sewed and hung herself. She scavenged wood that she directed
my father to build tables and shelves from, and potted plants that she
patiently coaxed into bloom. The camp was composed of four hundred and
fifty barracks, each exactly alike, divided into twenty blocks by unpaved
streets. The nearest toilet was over a hundred feet from our room.
My father worked hard at what my mother asked of him but
showed little interest in the rest of camp life. When over a thousand men
left on work release to help with the fall harvest nearby and in southern
Montana, my father stayed behind. Instead of topping sugar beets, he
squatted in the dirt street for hours and caught my pitches. We never
spoke of the war or our situation, only yakyuu. He often nodded and
muttered, “Good, good,” or shook his head and said, “No, like
this,” correcting me on some mechanical aspect of my pitching. Clouds of
dust rose under our feet, and the wind peppered us with small pebbles. We
played together like this many nights, until the cold became too much and
the high-powered searchlights clicked on and began sweeping the fence line
between guard posts. Then we would go to our room, chilled to the bone,
covered in dust.
I followed the World Series in our camp newspaper, the Heart
Mountain Sentinel, as the Cardinals beat the Yankees four games to one
in St. Louis and New York. Though it was only the first week of October,
it had already grown too bitter in northern Wyoming for my father and me
to play.
♦♦♦
I was five-foot-nine when I entered Heart Mountain at
the age of fourteen. I never grew another inch. Five-foot-nine was short
for a power pitcher even in those days, but I was fast. My father taught
me how to use my whole body when I pitched—how to use my windup to
generate energy, to gain power from my legs as well as my right arm, to
keep myself centered.
I did sit-ups and push-ups every day, ran sprints up and
down D Street in every season but winter, and my skinny boy’s frame
filled out to one hundred and seventy pounds. My father found a discarded
tire, and propping it up against a backstop he made of scrap lumber, he
watched me throw through the ring over and over, retrieving each toss.
Eventually, I could hit my target nine times out of ten from sixty feet,
six inches away—the distance of the pitcher’s mound to home plate.
At the camp high school, I made friends more slowly. I
began hanging out with Harry Okagaki more than the others, partly because
he was smart and a good second baseman, and partly because I was sweet on
his sister, Sue. I saw them both often as my parents became good friends
with Mr. and Mrs. Okagaki, who had been farmers also, in California.
Once, Mr. Okagaki joked that we might all stay there
permanently, like Indians on a reservation, and he and my father laughed.
It made me sad, thinking of the reservation lands we had leased and left
behind. When my father and I were alone in our apartment, I asked him why
he and the other Issei seemed to be taking this experience lightly.
“In all the time since I came to America, I never had
more than a day off work,” he said, smiling widely. “Here, it is like
having a vacation for the first time.”
“Harry doesn’t see any difference between this and
what the Nazis are doing,” I protested, confused. “He says we should
stand up to the government and fight.”
My father didn’t say anything for a long time, and
when he finally did, he looked at the curtains my mother had stitched from
mismatched scraps of cloth, pale purple orchids dividing one half of the
room, Scotch plaid the other.
“When one loses something, it makes one angry and want
to fight. But when one loses everything…” his voice trailed off, and
he cleared his throat. “Then what is there to fight for?”
♦♦♦
After my no-hitter was over, the guys all relaxed and
slapped me on the back and shoulders, telling me what a good game I was
pitching. Their pitcher had scattered several hits by then, but the game
was close, and most of the crowd had stayed to watch and curse and cheer.
Tommy called for mixing up my pitches and speeds for
their leadoff hitter. After seeing fastballs all game, his timing was
thrown completely off when I tossed him two slow curves. I then threw him
a fastball to keep him honest and followed it up with a changeup. He was
so eager to hit it out of the ballpark that he overswung and hit a pop-up
that our second baseman swallowed up. I thought I would try the same thing
with their second hitter, but this time my changeup just floated up
there—it had no movement at all—and he clubbed it deep into
left-center field. By the time our center fielder came up with the ball
and fired it back to the infield, their batter stood on second base. I
intentionally hit the next batter between the shoulder blades on the first
pitch. He glared at me for several seconds before spitting in the dirt and
jogging to first base. I now had a chance to force them into a double
play, but still angry at myself for giving up the double, I couldn’t
settle for a ground ball, I wanted to keep them from touching the ball at
all. Their next two batters both struck out.
As I walked off the mound, I noticed for the first time
that my pitching shoulder felt sore, but I went right past my manager on
my way to the bench without saying anything. I didn’t want him to think
I couldn’t handle it. I had already struck out eleven, but we still only
led 2-0, and I was determined to go for broke.
♦♦♦
Late in January 1943 it was announced that a special
combat unit would be opened up to those who passed a loyalty examination,
which all Nisei seventeen and older were asked to fill out. For
many, questions twenty-seven and twenty-eight were troublesome:
Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the
United States wherever ordered?
Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United
States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all
attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance
or obedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government,
power, or organization?
My friend Harry and I argued a lot over this, as he was
seventeen and I almost so. The worst time was right after Frank became one
of the first in camp to complete his questionnaire and volunteer.
“Why should we swear loyalty to a government that’s
made us prisoners in our own country?” Harry asked. “They’re
treating us like shit.”
He wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Some in camp
had even asked to be repatriated to Japan, especially many of the Kibei,
who were born in the U.S. but schooled in Japan. They forgot that the
Japanese were the enemy. When I told Harry so, he spat and scuffed the
spittle into the ground.
“The United States government is the enemy,” he
said.
“We’re citizens of the United States,” I reminded
him, repeating what Frank had told me.
“This place we’re at now,” Harry said, pointing at
the machine gun in the guard tower above us, “does it seem like America
to you?”
“We won’t be here forever,” I said. “We should
try to make the best of it.”
“I am, by not taking that damn examination. When your
time comes, you shouldn’t, either, instead of going along with it like
your brother.”
“My brother,” I said, my voice rising, “wants to
fight for the rights of all of us. He’s not willing to just stand around
and do nothing.”
“Well, I’m not willing to lift a finger for
Uncle Sam until they give me back my rights.”
“You’re just making it harder on yourself. These
questions are meaningless.”
“They’re trying to trick us. If we answer yes to
twenty-eight, then they’ll say that proves we were loyal to the emperor
in the first place.”
After a long protest, all the Nisei registered by
the end of March. Harry, like many, gave qualified answers to questions
twenty-seven and twenty-eight, writing “yes, when my rights as a citizen
are restored” for both. In August, he was sent with nine hundred others
to the Tule Lake camp in California, where the Army sent all the
“trouble makers.” His mother, father, and sister, who had written
unconditional yes’s on a similar questionnaire, decided to go with him
rather than break the family apart. I never saw them again.
I deeply missed the Okagakis, especially Harry and Sue,
but my loyalty remained where it had to, with my family: my mother, who
made sure I kept up my studies and excelled in school as well as baseball.
My father, who squatted in the dust for hours to catch my pitches without
complaining. And Frank, who had joined the Army to show everyone what a
hell of a fighter and good American he was. By then he was in Camp Shelby,
Mississippi, training with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit
composed entirely of Japanese Americans.
♦♦♦
For me and many others in camp, our only chance for
escape was yakyuu. We called game days B.B.C. Days—Baseball Crazy
Days. The Issei were especially B.B.C. While it was common to hold
raffles or pass around a hat after games, the Issei donated the
most. At some camps, like Gila River, they raised enough to fund bus trips
for their team to play ours. Many even bet on games.
My mother got together with other Heart Mountain War
Mothers to put their worry to good use by outfitting our team, sewing
uniforms out of mattress ticking and carefully saving flour to mark the
batter’s box and foul lines on the field. My mother had learned a lot
about the game and could talk strategy now, such as when to hit to the
opposite field or sacrifice to move a runner up. My father helped recruit
and organize the team and a small crew of umpires. He turned down an offer
to coach but continued to train me.
Baseball in the camp did something no other experience
during the war could: it brought out the fire in both of my parents. When
they watched me play, they were able to show the emotion I often felt but
otherwise rarely saw.
“Great pitch, Joe! But remember to follow through!”
“That was smart hitting! Way to go with the pitch!”
“Run it out, run it out!”
My father even swore, the only time I ever heard it from
him: “Open your damn eyes, ump!” Or, “That was a hell of a game.”
Ironically, it was while playing that I found my own
quiet space within. I still couldn’t understand my father’s Buddhism,
but I began to see that pitching was like prayer or meditation for me. It
was like planting within the seasons. It was a natural thing. Kokoroyama,
I started calling the pitcher’s mound. Heart Mountain. Raised fifteen
inches off the ground, it was enough to give me an alpine advantage over
my opponents, like a sniper in a high place.
Some of the men in our camp were good ballplayers; like
my father, they had starred on Japanese American teams before the war. But
they couldn’t hit me. For the first time, I understood my power. If I
thought of Frank or Harry or Sue, I became nervous, acted like a boy, but
on the baseball diamond I could beat grown men at their own game. Rather
than relying on my fielders behind me, I could force hitters to make outs
by throwing the ball by them. And that’s what I did, game after game,
sometimes pitching both ends of a doubleheader, all through the summer,
through the World Series, as the Yankees beat the Cardinals this time four
games to one, and beginning again the next spring.
♦♦♦
Around this time, internees who were cleared based on
their answers to the loyalty questionnaire were encouraged to leave Heart
Mountain for good, though they still couldn’t go back to their homes,
they had to settle elsewhere. Because of this, my father and mother
refused, instead remaining in camp as most of the others did.
One afternoon late in the summer of 1944, one of the
administrators who had become close friends with my father, a man I knew
as Mr. Franklin, came over to our apartment, accepting my mother’s usual
offer of tea but refusing my father’s challenge to a game of Go. I lay
on my cot and pretended to study algebra while listening to them.
“Thank you, Mrs. Suguro,” Mr. Franklin said when my
mother handed him and my father each a steaming cup and set the pot on the
table between them. I think my father knew what was coming, though he
waited patiently for his friend to speak.
“I won’t beat around the bush,” Mr. Franklin said.
“You know you’ve been cleared to leave the center. Officially, we’re
encouraging as many people as we can to do so. Personally, I think you
should. Uncle Sam will even provide transportation to your destination and
a little pocket money besides.”
“Sounds like prisoners being paroled,” my father
said slowly.
“I’m serious,” Mr. Franklin said. “You know how
I feel about this whole situation, but you’re not prisoners here, at
least not anymore. You can resettle anywhere you want—outside of the
restricted Pacific defense zone, of course.”
“Wapato is in that zone.”
“Yes, it is. But the country is much larger than
Wapato.”
My father’s voice was quiet, but it carried great
finality. “We will wait here until the end of the war.”
“Listen.” Mr. Franklin leaned forward on his chair
and rubbed his hands together. “My sister and brother-in-law live in St.
Louis. I’ve already written them a letter and talked with them over the
phone. They’d be happy to let you stay with them until you can find some
work and a place of your own to live. The city’s begging for labor right
now because of all the boys who are overseas.”
My mother, who had been scrubbing the top of our
coal-fired stove, wiped her hands on a towel and walked behind where my
father sat.
“We have our own boy overseas,” she said.
“Yes, I know,” Mr. Franklin said quietly. He took a
sip of tea. “How about it? No one knows how long this war will last.
It’s better than staying here.”
“So we won’t find in St. Louis what we see here?”
my father asked, referring to the “No Japs Allowed” signs that had
appeared in the neighboring towns of Powell and Cody.
“I can’t promise you that,” Mr. Franklin said.
“But people are starting to change their minds. A lot of Issei
like you have bought war bonds, Matsuo, and folks like that. It says
something to them, and so does all your hard work and the way you’ve put
up with this situation so well. And men like your son…” He glanced at
my mother and then back at my father. “Look, if you don’t mind my
saying, they’re getting some terrific press for the job they’re doing
fighting the Nazis.”
The newspapers and newsreels were full of praise for the
442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose motto was “Go for Broke.” News was
often many weeks behind, and in his letters Frank wasn’t allowed to tell
us exactly where he was, but we and the rest of the country knew this
much—he and his fellow soldiers were some of the best in Europe.
“But I’ll be blunt,” Mr. Franklin continued.
“Good press or no, now or later, you’ll be more welcome in the Midwest
than you will in the West.”
“Everything I ever worked for my whole life is back on
my farm,” my father said. “I am willing to wait.” My mother put a
hand on his shoulder, and he reached up and touched it. “We are willing
to wait.”
My mother turned again to the stove while my father
leaned back in his chair and smacked both hands to his thighs. “So, Bob,
what are you doing tomorrow afternoon?”
“My wife and I had talked about going to Powell,”
Mr. Franklin said, sounding flustered. “She wants to buy some seeds for
her flower garden.”
“You should stay and watch my son Joe pitch. It’s a
B.B.C. Day.”
“No,” Mr. Franklin muttered, “it’s just crazy.
These are crazy days.” He set his empty cup on the table. “Tell you
what, I’ll think about sticking around for the game. You think about
leaving, okay?” He picked up his hat. “Thank you again for the tea,
Mrs. Suguro.”
♦♦♦
During our turn at bat in the eighth inning we had
scored another run, so we now led 3-0, but I still didn’t feel
comfortable letting up. A couple of mistakes and one swing of the bat, and
they would be right back in the game.
The first batter hit a weak groundball to my first
baseman, and the second struck out swinging, but then my catcher made an
uncharacteristic error. After I struck out the next batter, Tommy let the
third strike pop out of his glove, and by the time he had chased it down,
the batter was safe at first.
I saw my manager stand and walk to the end of the bench;
a moment later Hank Miwa, a left-hander, started warming up. I don’t
think our manager was as worried about me as he was about the two
left-handed hitters they had coming up. But back in those days, starting
pitchers were expected to complete their games, and for me it was
especially a matter of pride that I did so. That Brooklyn scout was in the
stands.
That’s when the tall, blonde kid came up again. After
how deep he had hit the ball his last time up, I was determined not to
throw him too many fastballs, since that’s what a power hitter likes
best. Tommy called for a mix of off-speed pitches and curves, and I
agreed, keeping them low. The blonde kid took a golf swing at the first
pitch and missed. Then he settled down and let the next three go by, two
for balls, one on the outside corner for a strike. The count was now two
and two, which meant it was time for my best pitch. I gave it to him.
But this fastball got away from me, and it hung—not
much, but it came in at his waist, and he turned and connected like he had
been waiting for it all his life. The ball went sailing into left-center
field, but I knew this one wasn’t coming back down into my fielder’s
glove. It cleared the chain link fence by twenty feet and landed another
fifty feet behind it, bouncing in the gravel parking lot and rolling all
the way to the school.
The score was suddenly 3-2, but they acted like they had
just won the game. The whole team greeted this kid at home plate, and the
crowd was jumping up and down in the bleachers. I looked at the Brooklyn
scout, but he remained sitting without an expression on his face, writing
in his notebook.
So when the next batter stepped to the plate, I decided
to shake off almost any call that wasn’t a fastball. My arm was very
sore now, heavy and numb, but I knew I would have to ice it down after the
game as usual anyway, so I just did what I had to and forgot all about the
pain, striking out the hitter on three pitches. When I thought of my
brother Frank and what he had gone through, it made my job easier.
♦♦♦
In one of his letters to me, Frank wrote that the 442nd
got their motto from the Hawaiian Nisei in his unit. It was pidgin
English used by some of the island dice-rollers to mean “go all out.”
Frank wrote this only to me and not in any of the letters he sent my
parents because he didn’t want them worrying that he had begun gambling.
Then Frank’s letters stopped coming. We learned from
the Army that he had earned a Purple Heart; later, another soldier, a
corporal like Frank, returned to camp on leave and filled us in on the
details. While fighting in Italy, Frank was hit in both ears by shrapnel
from an exploding shell. He spent six weeks in a field hospital, and his
hearing still wasn’t perfect when he faked his way through an exam so he
could rejoin his unit. He was with them when they liberated the small
village of Bruyers in Southern France after three days of fighting, and
shortly after when they saved the Lost Battalion.
These men had become cut off from the rest of their
regiment in the dense woods of the Vosges Mountains. They were surrounded
by Germans. Mines were everywhere. It took Frank and his men another three
days of fighting with grenades and bayonets before they could make their
rescue.
It’s hard for me to talk about this.
Frank was shot again while leading a charge up the ridge
that had originally been the objective of the Lost Battalion. Sometimes I
wonder if he even heard it coming, but I suppose it doesn’t really
matter, the things bullets say. He was posthumously awarded the
Distinguished Service Cross for his actions and sent home in a flag-draped
coffin. That may have been the only decent thing the United States
government did for us. While we were living in tar-paper shacks with
corrugated tin roofs and playing baseball in homemade uniforms, Frank
slept quietly under polished wood and bright, crisp stars and broad
stripes.
My brother is an American hero.
♦♦♦
By the middle of 1945 we were loaded up on the trains
again, this time to leave for our homes in the West. After living at the
camp for so long, it was hard saying goodbye to the many Issei and Nisei
friends we had made, and to the little Sansei—third-generation
Japanese Americans, five hundred and fifty born behind barbed wire. As we
were packing, Mr. Franklin and his wife visited us one last time and tried
to give us fifty dollars.
“It’s not from the government, it’s from us,”
Mr. Franklin said. My father refused, though they shook hands while my
mother and Mrs. Franklin exchanged kisses. I walked out to the baseball
diamond and stood on the mound one last time. I looked at the wasteland of
tar paper and desert around me, at Heart Mountain in the distance. Then I
yelled as loudly as I could. Then I cried.
As I already mentioned, we had left everything on the
farm. We didn’t have much, but it was all gone when we finally returned,
even our animals. The Cavanaughs, the neighbors we had trusted, wouldn’t
tell us what had happened, wouldn’t talk to us at all. In some of the
businesses in Wapato and Yakima, many of the hateful signs were still up
or replaced with new ones. Our house was full with Frank’s absence.
There was nothing for us there. Shikata ga nai.
So my mother and father moved to St. Louis after all,
she taking a job as a seamstress, he a lathe operator, neither’s hands
ever to work the soil again. I moved from the valley but stayed in the
region to play baseball. Several years went by before I rejoined my
parents.
♦♦♦
I nodded at the signal from Tommy calling for a fastball
and then stared hard at the batter. He didn’t move, so I waited just a
second more until I saw him nervously twist the handle of his bat and rub
the dirt in the batter’s box with his left foot. Then I looked to the
runner at first before firing toward the plate. The batter swung and
missed.
The runner, on base from only my second walk of the
game, had taken a very big lead. I threw over there a couple of times to
keep him close and then nodded at my catcher again. I threw another
fastball, but the batter connected with this one and sent it sailing far
down the left field line before it curved foul into the crowd standing
several rows deep beyond the end of the bleachers. I became angry at
myself for throwing the ball over the middle of the plate like that. My
next pitch was yet another fastball, high and inside. I imagined it was a
hand grenade. The batter nearly fell over trying to get out of the way.
“Watch it, Jap!” he yelled, pointing his bat at me.
I took the ball back from my catcher like I hadn’t heard a thing. The
runner on first took an even bigger lead, but I didn’t bother keeping
him close this time. The game was over. The runner took off as I reared
back and threw as hard as I could, sending it low and away. The batter
flailed at the pitch and missed completely. Four fastballs, three strikes.
The batter slammed his bat to the ground and started
arguing with the umpire, waving his arms at me, and then my teammates were
around congratulating me. I had lost my shutout but allowed only three
hits and struck out fifteen, making outs when I needed them the most.
It’s hard to pitch much better than I did, so I looked for the scout
from Brooklyn. After all, this was at least the second time that he had
seen me pitch so well.
He stood and tucked the notebook into his jacket pocket
and walked out onto the field. But instead of approaching me, he walked up
to the kid who had hit the home run and began talking with him. The scout
put his two fists together as if holding a bat and took an imaginary
swing; he then shielded his eyes with his right hand over his brow as if
watching something sail far, far away. The blonde kid laughed and looked
down. The scout nudged him, and the kid laughed again and made a muscle
with his forearms. The scout gave them a good squeeze and then slapped the
kid on his back before the two turned and walked together toward the
school beyond the fence.
I knew then that I would never pitch in the major
leagues. I just stood on the mound and watched them until they were gone.
It couldn’t be helped. There was nothing I could do.
Some people in the crowd started yelling, or I finally
heard them, every word, it seemed, as if there were cowardly devils
scratching at my ears. “You got lucky, Jap,” shouted one voice.
“You’re not wanted here,” came another. “Why don’t you go
home?” I simply walked off the field with my head up. They could say
whatever they wanted. When I pitched, I was more than a ballplayer. When I
wore a Nisei All-Stars uniform, they were the enemy, and they would not
win.
Originally published in Scent
of Cedars: Promising Writers of the Pacific Northwest
Copyright © 2002, 2006 by Jeff Fearnside
