Japanese Internment Camps

Craig Nakamura is Joey’s best friend; he is the Green Hornet to Joey’s Shadow, but due to anti-Japanese sentiment, Craig and his family leave Brooklyn in 1942.  Shortly after arriving in California, the Nakamura family is interred in Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp.  Craig finds some solace when he makes one of the camps’ baseball teams, the San Pedro Gophers.

In the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific Coast.  This was justified as protection again domestic espionage and sabotage, though there was no proof of these accusations.  These people lost their homes,  properties and belongings, except for what they could carry with them.

Like Craig, many of those interred in these camps found some comfort in baseball.  Baseball was one of the few things of their old life that they were able to hold on to in the camps.  In Manzanar, the baseball diamond was one of the first things to be constructed, even before the school was built.

Take a look at the PBS site, Children of the Camps, for a detailed history of the lives of the children in the Japanese internment camps.

Click here to listen to Public Radio International’s Baseball Behind Barbed Wire to learn more about the importance of baseball to those in the internment camps.

The National Park Service has a virtual museum exhibit of the Manzanar National Historic Site.