The Greatest Game Ever Played Behind Barbed Wire
So, I have a special bonus for you today. This baseball story, “The Greatest Game Ever Played Behind Barbed Wire,” was originally published as a paid post at Narratively … but they wanted to give it to JoeBlogs readers for free. It’s really a beautiful story by Lisa Heyamoto, and it was named Grand Prize Winner of the inaugural Narratively Profile Prize. I think you’ll like it.
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The pitcher’s mound at Zenimura Field was a hand-packed pile of dry earth, rising a regulation 15 inches above a dusty patch of Arizona desert. Tets Furukawa stood at its summit with the weight of the game on his sloped teenage shoulders. The ninth inning had just ended. The score was tied at 10-10.
Tets’s fingers flexed in his left-handed glove, its Tony Lazzeri signature worn thin with daily use. A crowd of thousands was spread out in a half moon before him, placing last-minute bets on an uncertain outcome. The desert sun blazed on the arid field. The clouds draped like cobwebs across a cobalt sky. It was April 18, 1945, and a team the Tucson newspaper had derisively dubbed the “Jap Nine” was threatening to unseat the Arizona State champions.
Tets’s teammates stood ready behind him, cleats gripping the earth, while his coach sat in the dugout, arms folded on his five-foot, 105-pound frame. There was no need for guidance at a moment like this. Tets had to deny his opponents an 11th run or his team would lose what they would later regard as the most significant baseball game of their lives.
Few would have predicted it would come to this. The Tucson High School Badgers had been steamrolling teams all over the state, and the trophies were piled as high as the praise. They’d gone undefeated for three straight years, and the college recruits were already knocking.
Tets’s Butte High School Eagles were a very different team. Though they were also undefeated, their games weren’t the kind that made the newspaper. They were the official high school team of the Gila River Relocation Center, prisoners of the United States government. They didn’t even have matching uniforms.
But Tets Furukawa wasn’t thinking about that. Tall by Japanese-American standards at 5-foot-8, he stood on his home field mound in his hand-me-down jersey, his baseball cap shading his smooth, open face. He was preparing to face his 42nd batter of the day, and this was the one that counted the most.
Ganbare, he told himself. Don’t give up. His name meant “steel” in Japanese, and he would have to be that strong right now.
So with the crowd falling silent and the batter at the plate and an unthinkable victory within his reach, Tets cradled the ball between hand and glove, drew both arms above his head, rocked back on his heel to wind up for the throw and in one fluid movement, unleashed the ball.
Three years and four months earlier, Tets’s family was listening to the radio on a rare lazy Sunday in Guadalupe, California, when a voice broke through with an urgent announcement.
“We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin,” the radioman said in a practiced clip. “The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air.”
All eight family members were stunned into silence.
At 14 years old, Tets wasn’t sure what to make of the news, but he took a cue from his ashen-faced parents. On December 7, 1941, Guadalupe was a tiny farming town off the Central Coast of California. Nearly every inhabitant was of Japanese descent.
It was a town that hosted two Japanese churches off its modest main drag and a community sumo pit near the family-run Masatani Market. A 30-foot clock marked the center of town, which jeweler Henry Katayama had shipped through the Panama Canal at great cost and commotion, and it bore his name in deep engraving.
It was the sort of enclave that made white communities nervous. “Clustering,” they called it, and muttered that the Japanese were not assimilating into American life — even as they often made it clear that they were unwelcome.
Tets’s father, Kameo Furukawa, was an immigrant from Kumamoto, Japan, who had boarded a 1906 ship across the Pacific in search of a better life. He found it in the form of a 200-acre artichoke farm, where he grew, picked and packed the bristly thistles for $2 a crate.
The family lived in a converted schoolhouse in the Santa Maria Valley, on acreage Kameo Furukawa — unable to own land due to his Asian heritage — leased from white farmers in another man’s name. It was a well-worn loophole the first generation, or issei, had found to skirt a law meant to keep immigrant laborers from competing with white landowners. So he did his legal business as “George Sakamoto,” a young family friend who lent his name to those in need.
But as West Coast Japanese farmers became both established and prosperous, resentment from their white neighbors grew. Anti-Asian sentiment had been building for years, finding expression everywhere from lawless thugs in unlit alleys to “No Japs Allowed” signs in restaurant windows to discriminatory laws passed in the marbled halls of government buildings.
Pearl Harbor would turn a long-simmering prejudice into full-blown hostility.
That night, Tets’s father blacked out the windows of their home on government orders, drawing shades and curtains to thwart enemy attack. But he feared conflict of a subtler strain. He walked outside to check for stray lights, and wondered if there were darker days to come.
That night, someone took a deer rifle to the Katayama clock, stuttering its face with bullet holes and riddling the community with fear. The next day, word began spreading that the FBI had picked up several issei men suspected of strong ties to their native country. Within a week, the dirt road that ran past the Furukawa farm began rumbling with the heavy wheels of Army trucks, each filled with a dozen soldiers on their way to scan the ocean for Japanese submarines.
For 14-year-old Tets, it was a period of fuss and excitement in a place with little of either, and he would run to the fence each morning to gaze at the solemn procession.
But everything changed on the night of February 18, when the FBI stood on the schoolhouse stoop. Kameo Furukawa was under arrest, accused of being a Japanese spy.
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Tets Furukawa stood over his bed, tucking the last of his possessions into a hand-sewn duffel bag. There were his favorite Levi’s, a good pair of cords, some standard white T-shirts and a few pairs of shoes. Everything he thought he’d need for the uncertain days ahead.
Even if he had room to take them, many of his boyhood treasures had been burnt or buried in the days following Pearl Harbor. His prized judo uniform was gone, along with anything else that carried a whiff of Japanese militarism. Up and down the West Coast, Japanese families were burying centuries-old samurai swords in little-used fields, burning family crests set with Japanese characters and discarding any reminder that they were the wrong kind of immigrant.
Certain that another Pearl Harbor was one whisper away, the U.S. government began tracking Japanese residents. Having already arrested many prominent business and community leaders, authorities set an 8 p.m. curfew for the rest of the population, and hinted at more extreme measures to come.
It happened on February 19, 1942. After months of pressure from West Coast officials, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed the government to incarcerate more than 120,000 residents of Japanese descent in camps, most of which were in isolated pockets of the country’s interior.
Accused of no crime and given no trial, they were to report to assembly centers with nothing more than what they could carry. There, they would live in temporary shelters while the government constructed what were being called “relocation centers,” where they would be interned for the duration of the war. Most of them were American citizens, including Tets Furukawa.
He zipped closed his duffel and made his way through the spotless schoolhouse. His mother had scrubbed everything to a final gleam, determined not to bring haji, or shame, on the family even now. He walked outside, where his oldest sister was waiting with the family’s 1937 Chevy sedan, ready to take them to the center of town. Unable to sell or store their belongings, the Furukawas would simply lock the schoolhouse door and drive away.
Gaman, the family said to each other. Persevere when things get tough. But it was hard to make the best of it on a day like today. Tets’s father was still in FBI custody and his mother was crying in the family’s front yard. His sister was nine months pregnant and on her way to the hospital. She would give birth to her son the very next day.
For Tets, the final blow came when Chibi, their little white farm dog, came trotting up to the Chevy door. There was no place for pets where the family was going. They would have to leave the dog behind.
The Furukawas arrived in the center of Guadalupe to see their town transformed. Soldiers lined the familiar streets, their shadows stretched long in the late April sun. They wore wedged garrison caps, carried rifles and marched in formation while their new charges stared.
Hundreds of Japanese wearing their Sunday best stood in clusters on the sidewalk, involuntary spectators of a terrifying parade. Some couldn’t help marveling at all the commotion, but most simply stood there, their hands limp at their sides.
Before long, a line of Pacific Greyhound buses pulled into the town, and tidy lines formed to get onboard. Escorted by military personnel, the caravan set off on the hours-long drive to the assembly center in Tulare, California, the evacuees’ home for the next four months.
Once they arrived, Guadalupe’s Japanese were shaken to find that the assembly center was nothing more than the county fairground, where they would live in converted horse stalls. Manure had been whitewashed right into the walls.
A tangle of barbed wire encircled the area, and armed sentries stood watch in imposing guard towers. The evacuees looked on as the rifles turned toward them.
Tets unpacked that night to the foreign sounds of other families, every snort and whisper audible through the temporary walls.
He unzipped his duffel bag, seeking the comfort of home. And there, nestled in his bundle of clothes, was something he had not expected to see.
It was his Tony Lazzeri baseball glove, his companion in a hundred schoolboy games. He’d ordered it from a Montgomery Ward catalog, and the signature stamped onto its buttery palm had earned the Yankee a lifelong fan.
Tets picked it up, the familiar smell of sweat and leather taking him back to his hometown diamond, where he’d spent countless Sundays cheering on the Guadalupe team, too young to join its ranks.
His mother must have snuck it in.
He slipped it on and punched its palm. He didn’t have much, but now he had baseball.
Two unpacked suitcases stood in the corner of Block 28, Barrack 13C, collecting the dust that would blow up through the floorboard cracks and coat everything with a grimy film.
Kenichi Zenimura had left them there the day he arrived at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona in August 1942, and he had refused to touch them for two long weeks.
The room in which he sat was 20 by 24 feet — impossibly small to house him, his wife and their two sons. Four Army-issue cots were the sole pieces of furniture, and the only semblance of privacy was a sheet strung on a wall-to-wall wire.
Their quarters were housed in a long, low barrack, stationed in a row of identical structures. Beyond them lay sagebrush and yellow-spined cacti, a vast swath of nothing that licked at the horizon.
Zenimura’s family was supposed to go to a camp in Jerome, Arkansas, along with the rest of their tight-knit Fresno community. But his wife had lung problems and was prescribed a drier climate, so here he was in Arizona, isolated and depressed.
He was not the kind of man given easily to stillness, and a barbed-wire cage was impossible to bear. For him, freedom was found on the baseball diamond, and the crack of a bat was the sound of the gods.
Like many Japanese immigrants, he’d brought his passion for the sport to the shores of his new country. A schoolteacher named Horace Wilson had introduced baseball to Japan in the 1870s as a way to encourage more physical education, and a few years later, a Japanese engineer returned from the United States to form the first team. Universities began adopting the sport, and America’s pastime found a Japanese home.
Zenimura had honed his skills on the converted sugar cane fields of plantation-era Hawaii, where his family had moved when he was a boy. He left Oahu with back-to-back island championships, but no high school diploma, and by time he turned up in Fresno in 1920, baseball’s place in his heart eclipsed all other loves.
He formed a team in his newfound town, and built a field for them to play on. Though its players were not welcome on mainstream fields, the Fresno Athletic Club was one of scores of all-Japanese teams up and down the West Coast, from the Vancouver Asahi to the Tijuana Nippon.
These were the golden years for Kenichi Zenimura. He organized goodwill trips to and from Japan and his Fresno Athletics were the team to beat. They played Negro league squads and any willing white team, and in 1922, they won the Japanese-American championship.
Zenimura couldn’t rely on size or power to win games, so he became a master strategist instead. If the opposing team spoke English, he’d call plays in Japanese. If they had him on strength, he would get them on speed. He played small ball against bigger teams, and he did it with remarkable success.
He even got to play against Babe Ruth himself.
It was a 1927 barnstorming tour, and Zenimura and a few of his teammates had been invited to play in an exhibition game — the Bustin’ Babes against the Larrupin’ Lous.
Zenimura played for Lou Gehrig’s team and, the way he told it, he was taking his usual big lead off first base when Ruth called for the pitcher to pick him off. He beat the throw, and Ruth got mad, calling for the ball again. But Zenimura avoided the tag, and he did it in the most audacious way: He slid right through the Great Bambino’s legs.
“If you do that to me again,” Ruth told the man who came up to his shoulders, “I’ll pick you up and use you as a bat, you runt.”
Now, here Zenimura was at 42 years old, and the barrack walls were closing in.
He sat on his cot while his sons, Kenso and Kenshi, were out making friends at teenage bonfires, the guards and barbed wire almost invisible to their young eyes. The desert lapped at his thin front door, an unending outfield of crumbling soil.
Then an idea came that would change his misfortune, an idea so clear that it breached his despair. He would build a diamond in the middle of the desert. He would scratch it out with his own two hands. He would form a league and that league would play. He’d done it before. He could do it again.
It was 10 p.m. and a group of teenage boys crept out of their barracks under a pale desert moon. They stole through the streets hugging shadow and shade, their white T-shirts removed and stuffed into jeans pockets to blend brown torsos with black night.
It was a mile-long walk to the hospital construction site, where idle piles of pristine lumber lay behind guarded lines. They called themselves the Night Raiders, and their orders were clear: Liberate the wood in a late-night heist and use it to build a baseball field.
Once they arrived at the site, Tets Furukawa could make out the glow of a lit cigarette dangling from the lips of a graveyard shift guard. The guy was Japanese — that much was clear — but they couldn’t be sure if he was friend or foe.
The Night Raiders crept forward, prepared to make a daring move. But the crimson nub of the guard’s cigarette vanished as he pointedly turned in the other direction. And while the boys stood rooted in disbelief, he took a deep, contemplative drag on his smoke and stared out over the desert plain.
The boys claimed their moment, careful to keep their movements casual. They loaded their arms with 2-by-4s and receded back into the night.
The next morning, Kenichi Zenimura rose early, ate a quick breakfast with the mess hall crew and headed into the desert to begin his day’s work. He would dig up the planks of stolen wood that teenage hands had buried in shallow graves, gather his sons to help with the work and continue building his field of dreams.
He’d selected a site on the southeast side of camp, not far from his corner barrack. He’d had to cut a hole in the barbed wire fence to get there, but no one seemed to notice or care. The Army guards in their 20-foot towers had left Gila after just six months of monitoring 13,000 people with nowhere to go, and security was loosening day by day.
The first task had been clearing the tangled sagebrush from the lot, and Zenimura and his sons hacked at the shrub’s stubborn taproot with picks and shovels for hours a day.
They’d burned the brush in heaping piles of silver-green, but the now-barren field presented a new set of problems. It was deceptively uneven, and deeply pocked with gopher holes that could turn an ankle, or worse, change a play. It was riddled with rocks of every size, and clearing the field would be an enormous undertaking.
But Zenimura was not deterred. His enterprise had caught the attention of several other internees, who were drawn each day to the edge of camp. Before long, some 100 people had offered to help.
If camp authorities had a notion of what he was up to, it wasn’t clear to the volunteers who showed up each day to carve the field from the desert scrub.
A young man named James Tomooka, who was tasked with chauffeuring the administrators around camp, had access to a car that could flatten the field. The all-internee fire department hosed the gophers out of their holes, and volunteers screened rocks through homemade sifting pans like nuggets of gold.
Zenimura dug out the dugouts and marked the baselines with flour. He planted a row of fast-growing castor beans to mark the edge of the outfield, and watered them with a hose diverted from the laundry room. The hard-won lumber would form the backstop frame and the arc of bleachers that could seat four deep.
His next task was forming a league, and 32 teams signed up to play. Most were reincarnations of hometown squads, though many were born of more recent alliances. New neighbors formed teams from their cluster of barracks, as did those with the same camp occupation.
Zenimura Field opened on March 7, 1943, when mimeographed posters announced the event in both tidy Japanese and bold-faced English. The first event was a doubleheader between the Parlier Cards and the Guadalupe Young Men’s Buddhist Association; the Kingsburg Vikings and the Zenimura Jr. All-Stars. The director of the camp threw out the first pitch.
Two years after that warm spring opener, another landmark game was about to begin. A yellow school bus bearing the members of the Tucson High School Badgers pulled off Highway 10 onto the dirt road that led to the Gila River Relocation Center.
The bus rattled by the guard tower that had long since been torn down. It passed the acres of farmland the internees had tamed, the camp dairy, the churches, the barbershop and store. And it passed in the shadow of the camp’s only knoll, where residents had built a white monument to the sons they’d sent overseas to fight for the country that had put them all here.
The bus shuddered to a stop alongside the field, and the players got out to stretch their legs. The two teams eyed each other as they started warming up, and without a word, they began to play.
Kenso Zenimura crouched low over second base, ready for whatever might happen next. The Tucson Badgers had opened the game with a well-placed single, and the runner on first would be coming his way.
The coach’s son was a wiry boy, a natural at every sport he tried. He had a habit of furrowing his brow, which made him look serious even when smiling, and he wore his hair in a fashionable ducktail that a baseball cap could never contain.
His Fresno Athletic Club jersey was bright in the sun, its red, uppercase lettering a testament to its spirit. This was the uniform of his father’s team, the one he’d been wearing when Kenso was born. Kenichi Zenimura had been away on a tour of Japan at the time, spreading the gospel of baseball while his family grew. It was the uniform Kenso and his younger brother, Kenshi, wore while shagging balls for their father’s team, and the one they put on for games of their own.
Through both predilection or inheritance, or perhaps a bit of both, the arc of a baseball was the arc of Kenso’s life.
There was a certain pressure that came with being a Zenimura, and Kenso worked hard to live up to the name. He wasn’t technically the chonan, or first-born son, since grandparents in Japan were raising his older brother. But the high expectations of a culture that valued birth order nonetheless fell to him, and his teammates said he seemed older, wiser and somehow more put together than the other boys his age.
Kenichi Zenimura held his sons to high standards — especially when it came to baseball. Do something halfway and he’d dress you down in front of everyone. Don’t show respect and you’d regret it, quick. His father called it “boneheaded baseball,” and Kenso made sure not to play it.
He furrowed his brow as the next play began.
The batter hit a ground ball to the infield, and Kenso’s teammate scooped it up. He threw it to Kenso in what should have been an easy out, but the runner kept coming after the ball arrived.
The two boys collided right over the base, and when the confusion cleared, the worst was confirmed: Kenso Zenimura was clutching his ankle.
He tried to walk it off, but the sprain was too severe. It was the second play of the second inning, and the Eagles’ team captain was out of the game.
Kenso’s father remained in the dugout, his mind clearly on the substitution rather than his son. As the team helped Kenso hobble off the field, another player came running in. Ralph Osada was the youngest boy on the team, and Zenimura had subbed him in at shortstop. But there was already a boy in that position, and suddenly, the whole field was shifting. The shortstop went to third, the third baseman went to first, the first baseman went to center and the center fielder went to second. When the exchange was over, only four players stood in their original positions.
Kenso eased himself into the dugout as the next play began. He probably should have found some ice, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Shikata ga nai, he tried to convince himself. It can’t be helped. He wondered if his father thought he should have gotten out of the way, and vowed to never get hit like that again.
But there was a nagging feeling he couldn’t shake, something about how deliberately the runner had slid. Had he done it on purpose? Was he after a Jap? Kenso couldn’t be sure, but his gut was uneasy.
The rest of the inning did not go well. The Tucson team scored two easy runs and the rattled Eagles weren’t able to answer. Kenso watched the rest of the game from the dugout, wondering if he was a casualty of a proxy war.
Right about the middle of the second inning, Lowell Bailey had a revelation: The other team was speaking English.
He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but when he heard his Tucson Badgers would be playing a team of Japanese kids, he assumed that they’d be much more … foreign.
But these guys were from Fresno, Stockton and Los Angeles. They didn’t have accents, and looked nothing like the slant-eyed, bucktoothed enemies on the propaganda posters he’d seen so many of over the years.
Lowell hadn’t even known the Gila River internment camp existed until this game was on the Badgers’ schedule, hadn’t understood that American citizens were living as prisoners in their own country just 100 miles from his cozy home.
In those days, Tucson was a town of 35,000 where neighbors always knew each other’s names and no one bothered to lock the door. Lowell spent his days riding his bike down country lanes and firing fastballs off the mock pitcher’s mound his father had built in their rural backyard. Both he and his sister were champion athletes.
He’d been at a family picnic when he heard about the Pearl Harbor bombing. And though the World War I veterans there had grown grave at the news, Lowell hadn’t really understood.
And now here he was, playing baseball against the so-called enemy.
He began to realize how little he knew the moment the team bus turned off the familiar stretch of Highway 10 and headed west into the desert. The rows of white barracks looked primitive to Lowell’s 17-year-old eyes, and though their inhabitants had clearly tried to improve them by planting gardens around them, no domestication could shield the shabby reality.
It was far more surreal than the away games the Badgers had been playing lately, and their season had already been far from conventional.
World War II had been raging for nearly four years, and baseball teams stocked with a full roster of young men had grown increasingly scarce. The Tucson Badgers had been playing far-flung high school squads and adult military teams to fill the schedule, and they were doing it with their usual success.
With three state championship titles and Lowell’s own perfect pitching record, the Badgers were feeling a little bit smug. So when their coach, Hanley Slagle, told them they were going to play a team of Japanese kids at an internment camp, nobody expected much of a challenge.
Slagle was known as a gentleman’s coach, the kind who expected your socks to be straight, your pants to be clean and your bearing and manner to befit the team.
Lowell wasn’t sure how this game had been arranged, but he knew it had taken a bit of doing. “These boys can play,” Slagle had told his team, “so get your cleats on and go to work.”
But a couple of the boys heard something different. They recognized an opportunity, and not the one their coach intended. They felt that this might be a chance, in their own small way, to avenge Pearl Harbor, where their own U.S.S. Arizona had been shelled into the sea.
Lowell wasn’t sure about all that talk — he just wanted to play some ball.
The Badgers were up 4-0 at the top of the second, but the champion team had begun to unravel. They committed an unprecedented four errors in the space of an inning, and the Eagles were able to tie the game.
Lowell’s team certainly hadn’t been going easy on the Eagles, but they might have played with a bit more grit. Right about the time that he realized everyone was speaking the same language, he also realized they were playing the same game. So, as the two teams moved into a tied third inning, he straightened his shoulders and started playing for keeps.
The thing about Zenimura Field was that its namesake wasn’t kidding when he said he’d build a bona fide diamond, and certain traditions were not overlooked.
They didn’t have peanuts, they didn’t have Cracker Jacks, but they had a seventh-inning stretch, and it included the same rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” as every baseball stadium in the United States.
Most members of the crowd didn’t know the words, the song being an odd tradition to issei fans, but their sons and daughters sang along with the gusto of the American-born.
Kameo Furukawa stood with the rest of the crowd, as he had every time his son Tets had played here in the past three and a half years. Since he’d been freed from FBI custody, he hadn’t missed a single game.
Issei men in particular were crazy for baseball, dropping their studied reserve at the grandstand gates in favor of a frenzied fandom. Each game day, Furukawa would join the crowd heading toward the barbed wire, would pass the eccentric man who had set up a small zoo of rattlesnakes, Gila monsters and other gnarled desert beasts and would drop his quarter into the Hills Bros. coffee can that collected donations for league equipment.
Thus ushered, he would find a place in the stands that had been carefully marked into section and seat — some of which were reserved for particularly well-paying sponsors — before settling in for a happy ritual during an unhappy time.
He’d missed a lot of games while he was locked away, first in a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Los Angeles, then in a Department of Justice camp north of Bismarck, North Dakota.
In the days following Pearl Harbor, the FBI had targeted several thousand issei men as potential spies, either because they were suspected of having ties to their old country or simply because they were suspiciously successful. After the FBI had shown up at Furukawa’s door, put him in handcuffs and led him away, they had finally informed him of his offense: He was sending information to enemy submarines.
He was using his back porch light as a transmitter, they said, flashing Morse code messages toward the nearby ocean. Furukawa tried to explain that the 20-foot lamp was simply a way to light eight people’s way to the outhouse, but the FBI insisted he was lying. They knew that he was president of the Japanese Association, a cooperative of local farmers, and that was enough to send him away.
He would live as a federal prisoner for nearly six months until they allowed him to join his family at the assembly center. He was never formally accused of a crime.
The stands at Zenimura Field were filled with men like Furukawa, who had scratched a better life out of a new land only to have it stolen away along with their freedom. Life in camp took an unspeakable toll, and while their sons played baseball and tested teenage limits, their parents were navigating an uncertain world.
In the early days in camp, that meant adjusting to the terms of their new life. That first autumn, a man named Takeo Tada was badly beaten by a group of internees, who accused him of being an inu, or informer. A full-scale riot was narrowly avoided.
Midway through their internment, it meant pinning down complicated feelings about national allegiance. In 1943, federal officials circulated a mandatory loyalty questionnaire among internees. The inquiry sowed widespread fear and confusion, and the responses exposed deep rifts between parents and children, friends and neighbors.
And as the war waned and it became clear that camp life would soon end, it meant making hard decisions about what to do next. Many young men had left to join the military, while others had received permits to head east in search of work. As the camp began to empty out, many issei were weighing whether to pick up the pieces of the lives they’d lost or somehow try to start over again.
By the time the Eagles and Badgers were battling it out on Zenimura Field, the United States government was deep into plans to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 13 percent of the American public supported the total annihilation of the Japanese people. For men like Furukawa, baseball offered an opportunity to forget the wider world, and to find relief for nine sweet innings.
It was 9-9 at the bottom of the 7th, and the Eagles were matching them run for run.
Several times throughout the game, Tets Furukawa stole a glance toward the dugout where his coach, Kenichi Zenimura, was watching with his usual focus.
And several times he turned back to the batter knowing that he had at least another inning to pitch. Zenimura wasn’t going to take him out.
It was 10-10 at the top of the 10th and Tets had been in on every play. The Eagles would have another chance to take the game, but they had to hold the Badgers here.
The first batter to cross the scarred wooden slab that marked home plate was Bill Hassey, who had already hit three triples that day. Hassey leaned in and smacked it — a grounder out to Ralph Osada, who scooped it up and hurled it to first.
One out.
Up next was Lowell Bailey, who stepped up to the plate and took his stance. It was pitcher against pitcher, both leaders of their team, each practiced in the study of reading batters.
Tets let loose his fluid cast. Lowell made contact with a wooden crack, swatting the ball up, up, up and into the shortstop’s already-warm glove.
Two down.
But Tets couldn’t relax yet. They were pulling the ball on him, and hitting it toward third. That meant they had time to execute their full swing, which meant that his arm was getting tired. No surprise, really, since he’d faced 44 batters in a very long game. But the strange thing was, he didn’t feel tired. He felt like he could pitch forever.
A well-built guy named Lee Carey emerged from the visitor’s dugout. Four years later, he would sign a contract with the Cleveland Indians, but this would not be Carey’s inning. He grounded out to third, and it was three up, three down.
Tets Furukawa had done his job. The Eagles had a chance to win the game.
Sixty-six years later, an old man is sitting at his tidy kitchen table in Santa Maria, California. His wife is pouring tea and reheating meatloaf while the wan rays of a winter sun pass through windows that have been opened a month too soon.
The 83-year-old man, once a slope-shouldered youth with a slim athlete’s build, has thickened with both age and comfort. His broad, high cheekbones and fine, straight nose are recognizable from his boyhood years, but his skin is creased with the passing of time, and a pair of glasses now perch on his nose.
He is peering at a thin piece of paper that has been photocopied into near illegibility, its once-dark markings reduced to shadows and wisps on a water-stained page.
This is the score sheet that recorded every play of a baseball game he pitched in another place and another life, a game that has resurfaced nearly seven decades later.
The man who made this score sheet, who painstakingly recorded the bones and ligaments that worked together to form the game, had passed away the week before. The roster holds partial names of men whose full monikers have been lost to time, and the “where are they now” update at the end of each entry reads like a row of tombstones.
The man squints as he makes out his name. Furukawa, it says, and it’s even spelled right. He still knows how to read the scorecard — that lost art of numbers and abbreviations — and his face splits into a well-grooved grin as he remembers the way it all went down.
Shosan Shimasaki had drawn a base on balls and dashed to second on a sacrifice bunt. But the bunter in question hadn’t sacrificed at all, and Ralph Osada made it safely to first. As the Eagles’ Tets grounded out with a squib, the runners advanced to second and third.
Big hitter Tosh Nishino was intentionally walked, which loaded the bases with only one out. No one moved as George Kataoka hit a fly to left field, and then Kenshi Zenimura stepped up to the plate.
Pitch after pitch crossed over the plank, and the coach’s youngest son refused to swing. The bases were loaded with a full count. Whatever came next could decide the game.
Though the score sheet doesn’t show it, the world seemed to stop as the ball hurtled toward home, its crimson stitching turning end over end. Kenshi drew back his bat and stepped into his swing as wooden bat met leather ball.
Was it a crisp line drive or a Texas League blooper? Memory fails, but it hardly matters now.
The moment Kenshi made contact with the ball, the crowd sucked in a collective breath. Shosan Shimasaki sprinted for home while the baseball cleared the third baseman’s head.
The crowd exhaled and the earth resumed turning. The Butte High School Eagles had won the game.
Nearly seven decades later, the old man can still remember the victory roar.
After the game, the Eagles shook hands while the Badgers shook heads, slowly realizing that this game had meant more than they knew. Both teams congratulated the others’ success, and followed the game with a watermelon feast. The Eagles taught the Badgers to sumo wrestle, and the boys took turns trying to push each other out of the ring. Even the player who’d slid into Kenso joined in the merriment, and the line between friend and enemy thinned.
The coaches made plans for another game, to be held in two weeks on the Tucson field with special permission for the Eagles to leave camp. But the scheduled rematch would never take place.
“We arrived home and started hearing from some of these so-called 100 percent Americans,” Slagle wrote in a bitter letter to Zenimura. “I sincerely hope it won’t be too long till we are all thinking straight again.”
It turned out that some vocal members of the Tucson community weren’t interested in hosting a Japanese-American team, and laid the blame on security threats. It was never clear just who was in danger, but the game was canceled in light of the tension.
The Badgers would go on to another state championship, while the Eagles would remain behind barbed wire. Within a few months, the bombs would be dropped, the war would end and Tets and the Eagles would return to their communities, a welcome of cold shoulders and well-aimed rocks awaiting them. The game would recede to the backrooms of memory.
But when Kenshi Zenimura’s ball went soaring through the sky, the only thing that mattered was there on the field. The players and crowd spilled onto the diamond, laughing and shouting and wringing each other’s hands, letting loose a fierce and dormant joy. Yesterday’s woes would resume tomorrow. Today was a day they would never forget.
I’d like to dedicate this story to Tets Furukawa, who passed away in February at the age of 95. It is a rare thing for a Nisei to so openly share their incarceration experience, and Tets’s candor, bravery and optimism permeate every word. He would have been thrilled that this story survives him, and I humbly offer it in his honor.
This story would not have been possible without the grace and generosity of the following people: Kenso “Howard” Zenimura, Shosan Shimasaki, Ralph Osada, Tosh Nishino, Lowell Bailey, Lee Carey, Jerry Dodson, Arky Hirota, James “Step” Tomooka, Mas Inoshita and Sab Yamada, who shared their memories with me in interviews conducted throughout 2011. Kerry Yo Nakagawa and Bill Staples Jr., both scholars of Nisei baseball and Zenimura’s legacy, provided me with inspiration and an impressive body of research from which to draw.
Lisa Heyamoto is a journalist, educator and nonprofit leader who is committed to channeling the best of journalism’s past toward a robust, resilient future. She is the Director of Programming for Member Education at LION Publishers, where she supports local, independent news organizations as they become more sustainable. She is a fourth-generation Japanese American who lives in Portland, Ore., with her husband and two daughters.
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In July I visited for the first time the Japanese American National Museum in LA. I had heard of games being played at the internment camps, but seeing actual uniforms, equipment and photographs of camp baseball - mixed in with everything else about the camps ... I don’t have the words to describe it. It made me feel angry, humbled, proud, betrayed, and a little joyful at the same time. Well worth a visit.
a pognant tale that brought tears to my eyes at the end...
the USA has had many shameful moments in its history, beginning w/slavery & the genocide of Native Americans- and the mass internment of Japanese-Americans- most of whom were bonafide US citizens- is shameful as well...
America can never claim the complete moral high ground w/such shameful things as this...