An LA artist is rebuilding the baseball field of a former prison camp for Japanese Americans

For decades, the Manzanar National Historic Site has educated visitors about a painful chapter in United States history: the incarceration of thousands of Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

A new project is now putting the finishing touches on something managers hope will bring more healing: rebuilding the Manzanar ballpark.

“The baseball field was a part of the camp where people could live the lives they had before the war,” says Dan Kwong, a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist. “It was a place where they could express their American identity through this quintessentially American activity, the game of baseball.”

Kwong is the lead volunteer on the project to rebuild the field, working with the National Park Service.

Kwong’s late mother was a teenager when the government ordered her and her family to leave their South LA home and report to Manzanar.

Apple pie, baseball and incarceration

After the US declared war on Japan, people of Japanese descent were imprisoned in 26 camps, including Manzanar. Two-thirds of inmates were born and raised in the US

That process is called confinement, internment and detention. But many people think these are euphemisms.

“This place meets the dictionary definition of a concentration camp,” said Manzanar National Historic Site Park Ranger Sarah Bone.

The fabric of Japanese American neighborhoods was torn apart, and individuals and families struggled to regain their social and economic standing as they were liberated from the camps after the end of the war.

“People Dan’s age and my age, so many times we heard our parents talk about the camp, not realizing they were talking about a concentration camp… it just wasn’t discussed openly,” said Mitch Maki, president and CEO from Go For Broke, an LA-based organization that commemorates Japanese-American veterans of World War II.

Displays at Manzanar detail how President Franklin Roosevelt used the term concentration camp to describe Manzanar and the other sites.

“What we did to them was wrong,” said Chris Siddens, a retired construction worker who lives in nearby Independence.

He lends his construction knowledge and support to the project.

Efforts to rebuild the ballpark at the Manzanar Historic Site have been in the making for two decades.

Siddens has strong feelings about the injustice that the prisoners have had to endure. He’s not Japanese-American. He’s called himself a history nut since he was a teenager growing up east of San Diego in the 1970s. But after meeting Japanese-American survivors of the camps, he now believes the history he learned in high school left out a lot.

“I’m giving back to the generation that has been wronged,” Siddens said.

Fall Baseball in Manzanar

The Historic Site has attempted to balance stories of resilience within the camp with stories of the loss of constitutional rights.

“And those two things are both true, but it’s hard for the average visitor to see all of that easily,” said Bone, the park ranger.

A large garden has already been rebuilt on the site, as have parts of the orphanage that operated in the camp.

Since August, Kwong, Siddens and the historic site staff, along with several dozen others who drove to the Owens Valley, have nearly finished the ballpark where only the archaeological remains of the previous one rested.

They made sure the distance between the bases was 90 feet. They welded the backstop and built bleachers and benches of wood.

The supplies are paid for with a grant of the Fund for People in Parks.

Kwong received permission from the Park Service to host a game this fall at the rebuilt baseball field between the Japanese-American baseball team he plays for, the Lil Tokyo Giants, and a team from Lodi.

“I think of all my family members and so many other friends of mine,” Kwong said, “whose families were incarcerated here, how excited they would be to know that we are doing this really exciting, inspiring and healing work. ”

The Lil Tokyo Giants are a team in a Japanese-American baseball league. Artist Dan Kwong stands third from the right, back row.

Kwong said he wants October baseball in Manzanar, with its colorful players, gamesmanship and cheer, to become an annual tradition. He says a public opening is planned for October next year.

The field is not ready yet. This week they will begin installing home plate and the other bases and painting the baseline stripes. There are also plans to build a 20-foot announcer’s booth and scoreboard after spring of next year.

“I often imagine my late mother,” Kwong said. “How happy she would be if she knew what I did.”