The One Story I Absolutely Had to Write

My grandparents kept quiet about the ordeal Japanese-American families like ours faced during WWII. When I heard about one small joyful chapter in this sad saga, I had to learn everything about it.

Photo courtesy of Kerry Yo Nakagawa and Bill Staples Jr./Nisei Baseball Research Project | Edited by Brendan Spiegel

I knew I had to tell the story of “The Greatest Game Ever Played Behind Barbed Wire” from the moment I heard about it. Kerry Yo Nakagawa, director of the Nisei Baseball Research Project, told me about the game when I was a young reporter in Sacramento. It seemed to lace together threads of my own history that had been trailing me for years, like the time I learned — on a museum wall, of all places — that a great-uncle I’d never known was one of the first Japanese-American baseball players at the University of Washington, my own alma mater.

Then there was the fact that my own family was incarcerated during World War II. My grandfather was imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho before being released on work duty. My grandmother was held at the Tule Lake camp in California. I know almost nothing of their experience during one of the most deplorable periods…