All Americans
Bradford Pearson tackles the injustice of Japanese American incarceration though the exploits of a WWII camp football team
Author Bradford Pearson’s “The Eagles of Heart Mountain” is a most unusual World War II story.
It recounts how 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans were incarcerated by the U. S. government, but also focuses on how a group of teenagers trapped in one of these camps turned themselves into a football team for the ages. They did this while trying to complete high school, studying civics while being unjustly imprisoned by their own government. ( Note: While “internment” has long been used to describe the forcible detainment of Japanese Americans, recent scholarship has pushed for the more accurate term “incarceration” used here.)
While the detainment camp was in Wyoming, much of the book is set in Los Angeles, which was the center of Japanese life in America before the war. Many prisoners were originally detained at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia before being shipped out; many returned to Los Angeles upon release as well, despite having been treated so poorly by California’s residents and its government.
Pearson spoke by phone about the people who drove his story and why it still matters. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q
What drew you to this story?
A
In 2013, I was on a press trip to Yellowstone for a magazine and we went to the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, and I was kind of embarrassed by how little I knew about Japanese American incarceration. While I was there, I saw one sentence on a display about the camp’s high school football team and that
in any of the other incarceration camps.
There are a lot of great books about Japanese American incarceration, but there aren’t as many, outside of memoirs, that tell the story through the characters. I felt this was an opportunity to tell the story through the eyes of these normal American teenagers in L. A. or San Francisco or Seattle we can all relate to.
stuck with me. Every couple of months that sentence would pop into my head and I’d think, “I should really look into that and see if there’s any therethere in terms of a story.”
I started reading the incarceration camp’s weekly newspaper, The Sentinel, and realized there was a story to tell about the football team. The story about Japanese American incarceration had been told and the story of the camp had been told, but I’d
Q never read a story about this incredible How did you find your two team that had no peers main characters, Babe Nomura
and George Yoshinaga?
AQ
After the war, why did so many of the families go back to Los Angeles, where they’d been treated so badly?
Heart Mountain had
11,000 people and the newspaper was well- staffed, including
A the sports section. I Well, a lot did go to Denver, kept a big spreadsheet to see Chicago and other cities, who was in the stories the but Los Angeles was the most and it was immediately city they knew. They said, obvious that Babe Nomura was “This is our home. Let’s go the best player on the team back and try re- creating what and that George Yoshinaga was we had.” Many who lost their a good player but also an important farms ended up in landscaping, part of it — you then which was then dominated start seeing his byline in the for years in the area by Japanese sports section. Americans.