Japanese American descendants bring baseball back to Manzanar incarceration camp

When baseball returned to Manzanar last year after more than eight decades, descendants of incarcerated Japanese Americans took the field on the same desert ground where their families once played during World War II.

This year’s public doubleheader at California’s Manzanar National Historic Site will expand that experience to a wider audience. The event, organized by performance artist Dan Kwong and the Manzanar Baseball Project, features players in 1940s-style uniforms on a field rebuilt through two years of community labor and archival research.

The restoration began in 2023, when volunteers, historians and National Park Service staff collaborated to reconstruct the camp’s main baseball diamond. Guided by photographs taken by Ansel Adams and Toyo Miyatake, the team recreated original elements including wooden bleachers, fencing and a 22-foot announcer’s booth. The first games held before an invitation-only crowd in October last year featured Kwong’s Li’l Tokio Giants and the Lodi JACL Templars. Both teams included descendants of Japanese Americans who once played at Manzanar and other wartime incarceration sites across the West.

This year’s doubleheader, originally scheduled for Saturday, has been postponed because of the federal government shutdown that closed access to the Manzanar site. Organizers plan to reschedule the event once the National Park Service reopens, allowing visitors to witness the first public games played there since the 1940s.

For Kwong, whose mother, Momo Nagano, played catcher on a women’s team while imprisoned at Manzanar, the project represents a return of community life to a place once defined by loss: “In this place of sadness, injustice, and pain, we will do something joyous, righteous and healing. We will play baseball.”