The Tatsuo Nakase Japanese American Internment and Baseball Archive
ca. 1935-2006. Item #4791
Tatsuo Nakase was a regular Japanese American citizen with a love for baseball and his family who, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans, was subjected to forced relocation and incarceration in a concentration camp by the American government during World War II. Spanning from the 1930s to 2006, the archive contains primary source materials on Nakase’s internment, the successful efforts in subsequent decades to receive reparations and redress, and ephemera and photos from Nakase’s personal life upon returning home. The relationships he made in the camp permeate throughout the archive, including correspondence and photos of people Nakase was incarcerated with.
Letters and pamphlets declaring to Japanese Americans their forced relocation and internment are shocking in their matter-of-fact tone, while photos of Nakase’s internment baseball team are striking in how they contextualize baseball—commonly indexed as an all-American pastime and cultural cornerstone—with something as “un-American” as concentration camps. Housed in one bankers’ box, one museum box, and one poster sleeve.
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