[Archive of Tatsuo Nakase, Documenting His Time at the Gil River Relocation Camp, His Baseball Career, and Later Aspects of His Life] by [Japanese Internment]. [Baseball]. Nakase, Tatsuo - 2016

[Various places, 2016. Very good.. Approximately 400 items, including almost 200 photographs in varying formats, seventy manuscript letters and cards, three address books, and about 100 pieces of printed material and ephemera, as well as a signed baseball. Varying light wear. The archive of Tatsuo Nakase (1916-2003) who brought his love for baseball with him to the Japanese internment camp in Arizona where he was imprisoned with his family during World War II. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which set into motion the expulsion of 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. This collection includes personal and professional photographs, ephemera, correspondence, an autographed baseball, and more material from the 1930s to 2016. Most notably, the archive documents Nakase's baseball experiences, both inside and outside the prison camp. While baseball is traditionally viewed as an American pastime, it has been equally important in Japan since it was introduced in the 1870s by an American school teacher.

Nakase was born in Guadalupe, a racially segregated community adjacent to Santa Maria along California's Central Coast that was among the largest Japanese American farming communities on the West Coast before World War II. At the time of his imprisonment at the Gila River Relocation Center in May 1942, Nakase and his father were the owner/operators of a general store. The prison camp they were sent to was located within the Gila River Indian Reservation, near the town of Sacaton, about 30 miles southeast of Phoenix. With a peak population of 13,348, it became the fourth-largest city in the state, operating from May 1942 to November 16, 1945.

"For Nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans living in the U.S., the 1920s and 1930s are considered the ‘Golden Era' of Nisei baseball, when leagues thrived in Japanese-American communities along the Pacific Coast and Western mainland," according to Charlie Vascellaro, who frequently appears as a speaker on the academic baseball conference circuit. During this period, Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans struggled to be fully accepted into American society. In 1922, the Supreme Court declared Asian immigrants ineligible to become naturalized U.S. citizens on the basis of race. In 1924, the Immigration Act (also known as the Quota Act) was signed into law, effectively ending Japanese immigration into the United States.

This collection includes a 30" x 6" black-and-white panoramic team photo taken in Santa Monica on September 3, 1933, of the Championship Game for Southern California. At age 13, Nakase played for the Guadalupe Reserves against the L.A. Oliver Juniors. This image is juxtaposed with a snapshot in the collection of his baseball team a decade later at Gila River, the Guadalupe Y.M.B.A. (Young Men's Buddhist Association), who were the Butte Major League champions in 1943. The photograph is accompanied by an autographed team baseball signed by him and other members in blue and black ink, with a larger inscription in black that reads: "Y.M.B.A. Championship Team, Butte Major League, 1943." A small spiral-bound booklet in the collection from 2004 recalls the team's reunion. Inside the internment camps, baseball fields were developed by the Japanese prisoners and a 32-team league of intercamp competition was created that allowed uniformed players to travel from state-to-state at a time when Japanese American citizens were not allowed to do the same.