Baseball in Japanese American Internment Camps

     "Shi's family was evacuated to Manzanar on April 25, 1942.  Earlier that month, Amy and her family had been sent to an assembly center at the Santa Anita racetrack.  Built to confine the Japanese until permanent camps were constructed, the assembly centers were created in just twenty-eight days.  Fashioned from fairgrounds, racetracks, and other open areas, they were enclosed by barbed wire and guarded by armed sentries in towers.  In April and May 110,723 Japanese were escorted into the assembly centers, while another 6,393 were sent straight to permanent relocation camps."  (Stanley, 1994, p. 37-38)

     "With 18,000 men, women, and children, Santa Anita was the largest assembly center.  The horses had been removed only four days before the Japanese started to arrive.  Families were housed in horse stalls heavy with manure dust.  'Fortunately for us,' Amy recalled, 'we didn't live in a stall.  By the time we got there they were all taken.'"  (Stanley, 1994, p. 38)

     Once at permanent relocation camps, guards thoroughly searched all items.  They seized anything they considered dangerous:  kitchen knives, knitting needles, even hot plates for warming babies' milk.  After the residents had their baggage and clothes searched they could move into the barrack they were assigned.  Dust was so thick the room had to be swept before they even wanted to unpack the few items brought with them.  Each resident was issued a cot, an army blanket, and a sack to be filled with straw for mattresses.  The buildings had been quickly constructed of raw lumber.  As the boards dried, large cracks appeared in the walls and floors.  Lids from tin cans were collected to nail over knotholes in the floor and walls to keep out the winds and dust.  Dust was a constant problem.  It covered everything.  Frequently residents would wake to find their faces a ghostly white from the dust that covered them.  Women tried wearing scarves to keep it out of their hair, but it did not work well.  Within a few weeks mushrooms were growing through the floor.  (Stanley, 1994, p.40)

     Depending on the size of their families, some internees had to share their open barrack with strangers.  They only had sheets to hang up as partitions to separate them from their roommates.  "For these unfortunate people, this was very embarrassing and degrading."  (Stanley, 1994, p.43)  The barracks did not have any furnishings.  Residents had to build their own table and chairs, many times from scraps.  Barrack apartments did have a coal burning stove located in the center of the room.  (Stanley, 1994, p.43)

     Hundreds of people living in a block shared bathroom facilities.  Toilet bowls were arranged in pairs, back to back, down the center of the room with no partitions.  As one resident said, "You could hold hands sitting on the pot."  "There was no privacy at all.  Everyone could see you and you lost your identity as a person because you couldn't even do this alone."  (Stanley, 1994, p.44-45)  Residents also had to use laundry facilities shared by everyone.  Mess halls were another area that families had to share with other internees.  Residents found themselves waiting in long slow moving lines for hours at times.  It seemed as if they had to stand in line for everything.  Many times the lines were in direct sunlight and temperatures soared over a hundred degrees.  Often older ladies passed out from the heat.  (Stanley, 1994, p.45)

     No family received more than $7.50 per month as an allowance.  The men took jobs so they would be able to purchase clothes and other items not provided by the War Relocation Authority.  (Stanley, 1994, p. 46)  Women stayed in the barracks to baby-sit.  Some Nisei chose not to work because the pay for a forty-hour-a-week job was so low:  $8 a month for unskilled labor, $12 for skilled labor, and $16 for professionals such as doctors and dentists.  (Stanley, 1994, p. 48)

     Life inside of the fence stripped Japanese Americans of their possessions, their dignity, and life as they knew it.  Living conditions were miserable.  The Issei and the Nisei found themselves without anything to look forward to.