In an Internment Camp, All They Had Was Baseball. They’re Back to Play. In an Internment Camp, All They Had Was Baseball. They’re Back to Play.
The New York Times
As Shohei Ohtani played in the World Series, Japanese American ballplayers returned to Manzanar for the first baseball games in the internment camp since World War II.
First, the tumbleweeds were cleared. Then, an archaeological dig found the posts for the backstop and the bases. Finally, old black-and-white photographs unearthed in an archive in Los Angeles were examined to make sure everything was reconstructed exactly as it had been.
All that was left was to play baseball.
For nearly two decades, Dan Kwong had the dream of restoring the baseball field at Manzanar, the sprawling camp in the Mojave Desert where thousands of Japanese and Americans with Japanese ancestry were incarcerated during World War II, among them Mr. Kwong’s mother. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, baseball was a source of connection between Japan and the United States.
As many as 120,000 American citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned during the war in 10 camps across the American West. When they were forced from their homes on the West Coast, they brought baseball with them.
“To come to these camps, to be in Manzanar, where you have lost everything, the one thing they could hold on to — the one thing they could keep — was the game of baseball,” Mr. Kwong, a performance artist in Los Angeles, said.
He continued: “And then on a deeper, symbolic level, it was an expression of Americanness. It was like, this is our game, this is our culture, we are a part of this, and we are going to do it even here.”
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.