Ann Burroughs says Manzanar’s lessons have never been more urgent
Hundreds of spectators gathered in Lone Pine, California, in the eastern Sierra mountains on October 17, 2026, for a double-header on Manzanar’s restored dirt field. Players from California’s Japanese American baseball league wore 1940s-era uniforms, gloves and catcher’s helmets, while spectators used Japanese-style paper parasols against the high desert sun. The games marked the public culmination of Dan Kwong’s effort to rebuild the field where his mother and aunt had been confined.
Park rules and political caution shaped the games
In the October 17 games, players smashed balls into the sagebrush beyond the outfield and struggled all day with the unusual way the ball bounced and skittered across the grassless field. Kwong took the field first for the Li’l Tokio Giants, his team for the past 54 years, and then for an all-star team representing Southern California against a team from Northern California. The crowd cheered his every appearance.
The announcer declared: “No 12 on the field, but No 1 in our hearts.” Kwong played tight first base, brought in a run with a single and later came around to score.
The National Park Service imposed a flurry of restrictions. Kwong had to arrange off-site parking and a shuttle bus for spectators, and he was told after the announcer’s booth was already half-built that it did not meet government building safety standards. At the games, the announcers sat at a simple table beneath an awning, read a lengthy legal disclaimer and warned players they would have to pause every time a car crossed the field, which happened every few minutes.
The Guardian reported that the outspoken politics of the event also appeared to cause official nervousness. It said the National Park Service had faced political pressure under the Trump administration, which made sweeping cuts that reduced the agency’s workforce by 25%. The site superintendent, Jeremy Scheier, was not present during the speeches, and Kwong said he had been told to be careful about what he said as a volunteer at a government site.
A 2024 soft opening was followed by further restoration work
Restoring the field initially appeared impractical. The ground was neglected and overgrown, the work promised to be expensive and time-consuming, and the National Park Service, which maintains Manzanar as a historical monument, had reservations about allowing an outsider to oversee the site and bring in large crowds once the work was done. Kwong raised money and persuaded park rangers to support the project. For the three years preceding the October 2026 report, he made the 225-mile (360km) drive from Los Angeles as often as possible, sometimes with volunteers and sometimes alone, to clear foliage and tumbleweeds, smooth the rough terrain, excavate outfield posts and erect a fence, bleachers and an announcer’s booth.
Kwong first staged a game at Manzanar in 2024, but the public was not allowed in and he called it a “soft opening.” A photograph by Brian van der Brug of the Los Angeles Times shows Dan Kwong on the pitcher’s mound at Manzanar, restored to its wartime configuration, on October 26, 2024, in Lone Pine. A separate photograph from that day shows TK Ohyama of the Li’l Tokio Giants delivering the first pitch at Manzanar in 80 years. Another shows Kwong, the Li’l Tokio Giants first baseman, fielding a pickoff throw as Logan Morita of the Lodi JACL Templars dives back safely during the game. A further photograph shows Kwong watching a foul ball at Manzanar on the same date.
In 2025, a federal government shutdown scuppered plans for a larger event. In spring 2026, a powerful windstorm knocked down the fence and forced Kwong to build a new, stronger replacement.
Kwong’s family and contemporary politics shaped the project
Kwong, a 71-year-old Los Angeles performance artist for whom baseball was a passion, first conceived the project as an exercise in living history, an eye-catching way to convey the trauma of 120,000 men, women and children who were locked up in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He knew that the wartime internees had played the game not only as a distraction from their predicament but as a quiet expression of their loyalty to the United States, and he wanted to stage an event that would cast the game as an act of resistance and teach new generations about the damage governments do when they strip a whole segment of the population of their constitutional rights.
His connection to Manzanar was both familial and personal. Kwong was born 10 years after the war and developed his own baseball obsession through his father, who came to the United States from China. He also grew up with a mother who had been incarcerated at the camp and told him stories about Manzanar, including her experience making camouflage netting for the war effort. That experience inspired her later career as a tapestry artist. In homage to her, Kwong set up a do-it-yourself camouflage-netting project behind the bleachers of the restored baseball field.
The context changed after the second Trump administration brought detention camps and mass arrests, The Guardian reported, making the treatment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s relevant in ways Kwong found both shocking and impossible to ignore. For Kwong, the project was no longer only a way to teach history. “It’s not a cautionary tale any more,” he said. “Now it’s a call to arms.”
Manzanar’s history and wartime baseball
The Manzanar Baseball Project website describes Manzanar as the first of 10 camps established to house the Japanese American population of the western United States and calls that system the largest mass incarceration in U.S. history. Before the government requisitioned the site and erected barracks-like structures, the land had supported thriving farmland filled with apple and pear trees. The site turned arid after Los Angeles bought vast tracts of farmland across the Owens Valley and drained the water to spur its own development in the early years of the 20th century.
By the time the government requisitioned the site and erected barracks-like structures to house arriving families, the area was best known as a filming location for B-movie westerns and the occasional blockbuster, including Gunga Din. The film’s producers built a vast military encampment in the shadow of Mount Whitney three years before the internment, a few miles south of Manzanar.
Baseball and softball were major parts of Japanese American life in California and continued inside the camps. A photograph taken on February 10, 1943, shows sixth-grade boys playing softball at recess at the Manzanar relocation center, and a 1943 photograph by Ansel Adams captures a baseball game at Manzanar. Some teams survived intact and continued playing one another as they had before the war, while others sprang up fresh with names like the ManzaKnights and, among the women’s teams, the Dusty Chicks. The leagues became so strong that the authorities allowed teams to travel from camp to camp to play each other. As one Manzanar prisoner, Takeo Suo, put it: “Putting on a baseball uniform was like wearing the American flag.”
Speeches and a re-enactment linked the camp to the present
Between the two games, Kwong spoke about the racial animus of the 1940s and its modern-day revival. He connected Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement with what he called the “premise of domination and supremacy” that had made different groups of immigrants and citizens of color vulnerable to scapegoating and criminalization in the past. He described the field as a version of national history made physical.
“It is a version of America frozen in time within Manzanar’s fences and here on its baseball field,” he said. “When we run its dusty base paths and sit in its sunbaked bleachers, for a few hours the past is unfrozen. And in that thaw, we may face the contradictions embedded in America’s legacy: our welcoming arms and our bigoted rejections, our highest aspirations and our lowest debasements, our cruelty and our kindness, our generosity and our greed.”
Ann Burroughs, chief executive of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, made a similar appeal to those gathered. “We gather at a time when the lessons of Manzanar have never been more urgent,” she said. “The racism, xenophobia and cruelty that made what happened here possible are once again unfolding before our eyes. So many of the laws that were used to discriminate against your families and people of color over hundreds of years of history in this country are now being used again.”
As the ceremonial portion of the day reached its climax, actors dressed in 1940s clothing walked onto the field carrying suitcases. A photograph by Andrew Gumbel showed the re-enactment of a family arriving at Manzanar, with Miyamoto singing and players for the Southern California all-star team, on October 17, 2026. The scene represented the arrival of hundreds of families, most from Los Angeles, in the spring of 1942. Nobuko Miyamoto, a Japanese American singer with a lifelong commitment to civil rights, sang of the prisoners’ despair at being behind bars when they had done nothing wrong. Spectators sobbed when she sang, “When will it ever stop?” Many of those spectators had grown up with stories about the camp from their parents and grandparents.
At least five men in their 90s or older had previously been imprisoned at Manzanar. Masayoshi Morioka first arrived there at age 9, while his grandson Mason played for Southern California in the all-star game. Morioka recalled his grandson announcing, “Gramps, I’m going to Manzanar.” He asked, “Whatever for?” When Mason said the visit was for a game, his grandfather vowed: “I have to go, for the last time in my lifetime.”
Volunteers and outside partners sustained the project
Throughout his project, Kwong counted on many others: volunteers and teammates; a Hollywood prop shop that provided the vintage equipment; a seamstress from Connecticut who specializes in vintage sportswear; a veteran of the farm-workers’ movement and the 1960s student protests at Berkeley who donated the labor and material to finish the fence; and several professional baseball teams that made financial contributions.
The effort remained largely a one-man operation. In the days before the games, Kwong’s rooms at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, where he was an artist-in-residence, were filled with Manzanar-themed baseball hats, vintage uniforms and paperwork concerning insurance, security and legal waivers. One night, he remained awake until 2 a.m. steaming creases from the team jerseys. “It’s been pretty hectic and I’m a little run down,” he said four days before the event. “And now I’m supposed to play baseball? I’m so not ready.”
Obon folk dancing closed the Manzanar games
As the day ended, Kwong moved between the live stream, elderly guests, water supplies and a closing session of obon folk dancing. He declined to discuss how he felt but alluded to the “indestructible nature of the human spirit” that the Manzanar experience inspired in its prisoners. “They created beautiful gardens, exquisite art and music,” he said, “and, oh yeah, they played some hellified good baseball … We still do.”