Japanese-canadian ball team gets overdue respect

VA NCOU V ER • A new heritage minute is sharing the story of a pioneering baseball team in British Columbia and the shameful government policy that tore them apart.

Composed of Japanese Canadian players, the Vancouver Asahi initially struggled against their larger Caucasian competitors and were even booed by baseball fans, said Grace Eiko Thomson, who has spent many years telling the team’s story through a variety of projects.

The Asahi adopted a new playing style in the early 1920s, focusing on strategies such as bunting and base stealing, and soon surged to success, winning various championships across Pacific Northwest.

Eiko Thomson was a child when the team was rising to prominence and she remembers going to the field with her father to watch them practice. It was an era when Japanese-canadians faced harsh discrimination in their communities but baseball gave the Asahi a unique opportunity, she said.

Shortly after the Asahi played their last game of the the year in 1941, the players were forcefully scattered across the country. In total, the federal government sent 22,000 people of Japanese descent to internment camps for the duration of the Second World War.

A heritage minute released by Historica Canada on Wednesday depicts both the success of the Asahi and the stark, difficult life of the camps. A young Japanese man is seen being disre- spected on a city street and sliding on the baseball field to cheers from a raucous crowd. He’s seen in a crowded bunk house in B.C.’S unforgiving wilderness and pitching to a small boy in an overgrown field.

“Baseball helped get us through the internment,” Kaye Kaminishi, the sole surviving member of the original Asahi, says in a voice-over.

The video ends with a shot of the 97-year-old former third baseman sitting on a bench, dressed in the team’s old uniform, bats at his side.