The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball Wally Yonamine

In 1947 Wally Yonamine began his trailblazing professional sports career, fi rst with football, and later—and most notably—with baseball. Two years earlier, World War II had ended, but the confl ict was still fresh in our nation’s consciousness. When the war began, Americans of Japanese ancestry weren’t permitted to serve in our nation’s armed forces. We were classifi ed as 4-c, “enemy aliens,” and 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and placed in internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gun guard towers that were located in desolate parts of the country. It was within these camps that Japanese Americans played baseball. The American pastime was...