by Emily Demuth Ishida for The Storied Past
Philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For most of us, knowledge of the past does not come from textbooks but from stories – stories told when a few generations gather around the dining table, stories told in movies or on the flickering TV set in the family room, stories captured in historical novels that pull us into a bygone era.
Years ago, I read Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir Farewell to Manzanar and was incredulous that discover that the United States ran concentration camps during World War II and locked up American citizens. That Japanese Americans were considered a threat to national security made no sense to my thirteen-year-old mind. My German American ancestors had suffered no such indignity.
Little did I know then that this thread of history would figure repeatedly in my life: when I married a Japanese citizen; when we stumbled upon a former internment camp while vacationing in Arizona; when our children met Daniel Tani, an astronaut and scientist, Japanese American, and Illinois resident, and saw photos of his mother in a camp; when we rejoiced when the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 offered $20,000 in restitution to those internees who were still alive.
One year our family marked February 19, the day in 1942 that President Franklin Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 9066, which sent thousands of Japanese Americans from the west coast to internment camps, by reading the book Baseball Saved Us, by Ken Mochizuki (1993).
The opening lines of this picture book by Mochizuki set the scene perfectly for my young children:
One day, my dad looked out at the endless desert and decided then and there to build a baseball field.
He said people needed something to do in Camp. We weren’t in a camp that was fun, like summer camp. Ours was in the middle of nowhere, and we were behind a barbed-wire fence. Soldiers with guns made sure we stayed there, and the man in the tower saw everything we did, no matter where we were.
The young narrator eventually plays baseball under the watchful eyes of the guard, and that memory stays with him in later life outside of the camp.
A Diamond in the Desert by Kathryn Fitzmaurice (2013) tells a fictionalized story of a baseball team at the Gila River Relocation Center (an internment camp that was located not far from Phoenix, Arizona) that plays against the Arizona State Champions.
This middle-grade novel pulls the reader into the story of loss and uncertainty as it follows a twelve-year-old boy named Tetsu, his mother, and his younger sister Kimi (his father has been sent elsewhere to be questioned), as they adapt to the challenges and difficulties of life in an internment camp.
Barbed Wire Baseball by Marissa Moss, illustrated by Yuko Shimizu (2013) recounts the actual history on which A Diamond in the Desert is based, telling about Kenichi Zenimura, the father of Japanese American baseball, who built the Gila River baseball field that became a symbol of hope for the Japanese Americans imprisoned there.
On one level, these books are sports stories, with athletes striving to do their best on the playing field no matter what else is happening in their lives. Many young readers can relate to that scenario.
But the books also keep the past alive, letting young readers know that at one time in U.S. history, immigrants from another country, many of them U.S. citizens, were ostracized and locked up merely for looking like “the enemy.”
I hope that other readers will feel the same outrage I did as a young person. May all of us strive to imagine a world in which that past is never repeated.
Emily Demuth Ishida and her sister Hilda Demuth-Lutze are co-authors of the middle-grade historical novels, Plank Road Summer and Plank Road Winter, set in southeastern Wisconsin, and Hattie’s War, a Civil War–era novel for middle-grade readers set in Milwaukee. When not writing books with her sister Hilda, Emily works as a library and computer lab assistant in a culturally diverse elementary school. Her family celebrates Japanese holiday traditions, while also commemorating difficult times in Japanese history. A member of SCBWI, Ms. Ishida lives in Elmhurst, Illiniois.
[Featured image at the head of this post is from a print by Japanese-born illustrator Yuko Shimizu from the cover of Barbed Wire Baseball.]