BASEBALL SAVED INTERNMENT CAMP DETAINEES

A family tree is a unique way of looking at your family's history. It allows you to visualize your family's past.

When Ken Mochizuki looked at his family tree, he saw a tragic event that few young people knew about. After looking over family photo albums and magazine articles that had been given to him, he felt the need to tell the nation how his family and other Japanese-American families were forced into internment camps during World War II.

As an author, the best way he could do that was to write a book. Baseball Saved Us, illustrated by Dom Lee, is a picture book that tells the story of a child who is moved, with his family, to a such a camp during World War II.

The book is part fact, part fiction. It is set in the 1940s when Japanese-Americans were taken from their homes in Washington, Oregon and California because the U.S. government feared they would help Japan invade the West Coast of this country.

Mochizuki has spent most of his life in Seattle. He attended the University of Washington and received a bachelor of arts degree in communications. Before turning author, Mochizuki was a reporter and an actor.

Dealing with prejudice

One of the issues the book deals with is prejudice. In a telephone interview with Children's Express, Mochizuki explained how Japanese-Americans have had to deal with prejudice before and after World War II.

"Asians have been here in America in large numbers all the way back to the 1850s," he explained. "There's even new evidence we've been here as long ago as the 1500s. . . .

"Even today, I'm asked (if) I speak English or where am I from. A lot of Americans still judge people on just what they look like. So, with me, they assume a lot of different things without even knowing anything about me."

In the first few pages of the book, the narrator - a boy about 12 years old - and his family also are faced with prejudice. In the days before the family is forced to go to an internment camp, the narrator is ridiculed for his small size and ethnic heritage:

The kids started to call me names and nobody talked to me, even though I didn't do anything bad. At the same time the radio kept talking about some place far away called Pearl Harbor.

One day Mom and Dad came to get me out of school. Mom cried a lot because we had to move out of our house real fast, throwing away a lot of our stuff. A bus took us to a place where we had to live in horse stalls. We stayed there for a while until we came here.

Mochizuki's parents experienced firsthand the internment camps. They were sent to the Minidoka camp in Idaho.

His research for the book included touring the northern California camp called Tule Lake Relocation Center. He described to CE what he saw:

"What (I) saw was that it was in the middle of nowhere. And then, even without a fence around the camp, you could just look around for miles, as far as you could see. It's nothing but flat desert," he said.

"(The camps) all were pretty much in the desert where it'd be scorchingly hot in the summertime during the day and below freezing and so cold at night. Duststorms (happened) quite often, and where (the detainees) lived, dust would come right through the walls."

In the book, the narrator describes these hardships, but another one really bugs him - the lack of privacy:

We had to use the bathroom with everyone else, instead of one at a time like at home. We had to eat with everybody else, too, but my big brother Teddy ate with his own friends.

We lived with a lot of people in what were called barracks. The place was small and had no walls. Babies cried at night and kept us up.

The title for the book is based on the one event the entire camp could look forward to - baseball. The game brought people together and also prevented boredom.

Mochizuki explained that family life began to deteriorate in the camps because there weren't many rules or things to do. Once the kids got to the camp they turned into rebels and ignored their parents.

This was the case with the narrator's brother:

Once Dad asked Teddy to get him a cup of water.

"Get it yourself!" Teddy said.

"What did you say?" Dad snapped back.

The older men stood up and pointed at Teddy. "How dare you talk to your father like that!" one of them shouted.

Teddy got up, kicked the crate he was sitting on, and walked away. I had never heard Teddy talk to Dad that way before.

That's when Dad decided we needed baseball.

"These people discovered (when) they played baseball, that (it) gave them something to do in the camps, and it became a real big thing in the camps," Mochizuki explained. "They had camp leagues and everything."

The book also tells how baseball brought everyone together:

We got shovels and started digging up the sagebrush in a big empty space near our barracks. The man in the tower watched us the whole time. Pretty soon, other grown-ups and their kids started to help. . . .

Soon there were baseball games all the time. Grown-ups played and us kids did, too.

Every book has critics, but according to Mochizuki, "Reaction has been mostly favorable." The book is in its fourth printing and has sold 14,000 copies nationwide. It was also the 1993 Parents' Choice Award winner.

Mochizuki said the book has two messages. "One of them is that this is what happens when you just assume things about people rather than knowing things about them."

The other message is about thinking positively, he said. At the end of the book, the narrator is playing baseball back in his hometown. As he stands at bat, some people in the audience call him racist names. At first he is nervous, but then he says, "I blocked out the noise around me and got set."

"I think that's one of the key lines of the book," Mochizuki pointed out. "Listen to yourself and know what you can do rather than listening to people who tell you what you can't do."

EDITED BY: Gary Templeton, 18