article from The Conversation

In the spring of 1942, 15-year-old Momo Nagano needed a way to fill her time. 

She was imprisoned at the Manzanar Relocation Center along with approximately 10,000 other people of Japanese ancestry. When she’d arrived with her mother and two brothers, she’d been horrified. 

The detention facility was located in the middle of the desert, about 225 miles northeast of Los Angeles. As I describe in my book “When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II,” barbed wire surrounded the perimeter and armed soldiers peered down from guard towers. The toilets and showers lacked partitions, and Nagano was forced to stand in long lines for hours in mess halls that served canned food. Her bed was a metal cot. She was directed to stuff straw into a bag for a makeshift mattress. She didn’t know whether she and her family would ever be able to return to their Los Angeles home.

One day, the teenager decided to pick up a glove and play softball. Her son, Dan Kwong, told me in an interview that Nagano ended up playing catcher for The Gremlins, one of the camp’s many women’s softball teams.

“In one game, a batter connected with the ball and then threw the bat, clocking my mom in the nose, breaking it,” he said. “But despite her injury, she still enjoyed playing, even though she didn’t think her team was very good.” 

Eighty years later, the descendants of prisoners – such as Nagano’s son, Kwong – are playing baseball again in Manzanar. Thanks to an effort spearheaded by Kwong, a baseball field on the site has been restored as a way to both celebrate the resiliency of so many prisoners and memorialize this dark period in U.S. history.

READ the rest of the article at The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/baseball-returns-to-a-japanese-american-detention-camp-after-a-historic-ball-field-was-restored-265954