In 1943, the issue of race was played out on many fields, but in the Amazon Prime Video series, “A League of their Own,” the issue is both women and baseball and an African American woman fighting the race lines of baseball. But that isn’t the whole story of baseball, even in the 1940s Midwest USA. While struggling to show the diversity within the American landscape, this series fails to look at diversity and racism beyond the women’s league; it fails to look at the color lines drawn on a federal level that had restricted immigration for decades and an Executive order that changed the lives of thousands of people.
The American Midwest
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) was founded by Philip K. Wrigley and played from 1943 to 1954. The games were located in the American Midwest and the league consisted of 10 teams.
If marriage had been a barometer for race relations, not all of the Midwest states were equal. The Midwest states weren’t differed in their laws against the mixing of races and that some of these states also focused on Asians (and Filipinos). Laws against the marriage between Blacks and white people had been repealed in Ohio (1887), Michigan (1883), Illinois (1874), Iowa (1851) and Kansas (1859). Midwestern states of Wisconsin and Minnesota never enacted them.
North Dakota repealed laws against marriage to Blacks in 1955. Indiana didn’t not allow marriage between Blacks and Whites until 1965. Missouri would hold out until 1969 and Nebraska until 1963 (both targeting Blacks and Asians). South Dakota had laws against the marriage of Blacks, Asians and Filipinos to White people until 1957. Remember that in the 1940s, the Philippines was officially a US territory and as such Filipinos were almost US citizens. They were non-citizen U.S. nationals until July 4, 1946.
East Asians did find their way to the Midwest. Missouri did have a Chinatown in St. Louis from 1869 (also called Hop Alley) and that was demolished in order to make way for Busch Memorial Stadium in 1966. There was a Chinatown in Omaha (Nebraska) and by 1885, there was a movement to run the Chinese out of Omaha because of their “opium joints.” The Great Depression was blamed for the demise of the city’s Chinatown in a 1961 article according to a North Omaha History website as opposed to racism and the effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Deadwood, South Dakota did have a Chinatown. According to the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, Calamity Jane “one lived in a shack in Chinatown” and because the Dakota Territory “placed no restrictions on foreign ownership of property, the Chinese owned most of the houses and stores in Chinatown.”
The Historic Significance of 1943
By 1943, the year that the TV series begins, the US had entered World War II. The US had been reluctant to enter the war that began in 1939 in Europe (Japan had invaded China in 1937.), but with the bombing of Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941), the US declared War on Japan and subsequently, on 11 December 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the US.
By 1943, Japanese Americans from Hawaii and the West Coast had been sent to transfer or relocation camps, a forced migration that began on 19 February 1942, but the Japanese American communities were already in disarray. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI had “arrested over 1,200 Japanese immigrant (Issei) men: businessmen, Buddhist priests, Japanese language teachers, and other community leaders.” Eventually, Densho reports, 5,500 first-generation Japanese Americans (men born in Japan, but unable to naturalize as US citizens due to the laws against East Asians) were picked up and classified as “potential threats to national security.”
The Death of a Baseball League and its Rebirth
The West Coast had been the home of baseball leagues based on ethnicity, including a Japanese American baseball league that was reborn in the concentration camps. The first Japanese immigrant baseball team was formed in Hawaii in 1899. The first mainland team formed in 1903 in San Francisco (the Fuji club).
By the 1920s, the Northern California Japanese Baseball League formed semi-pro teams. Japanese American women’s teams also formed. Nikkei League and Negro League teams made multiple tours of Japan in the 1920s. In 1927, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play an exhibition game in Fresno with Nisei (second-generation Japanese) all-stars. In 1932, Kenso Nushida becomes the first Japanese American to play pro baseball in the US. According to the NiseiBaseball.com website, by 1935, four Tokyo Giants players were offered contracts to play in the US, but “only Hawaii-born Jimmy Horio is eligible to accept an offer” due to restriction of the Immigration Act of 1924. (The first Asian American to play in Major League Baseball was San Pedro-born Bobby Balcena (Filipino) who had been in the minor leagues until 1956 when he played two games for the Cincinnati Redlegs. )
More importantly, in relation to this TV series “A League of Their Own,” Japanese Americans did end up in Chicago as a direct result of World War II. Yosh Kawano (1921-2018) and his younger brother Nobe (1923-2018) were in Los Angeles when the war broke out. In the mid-1930s, Yosh had been hired as a batboy to the White Sox who were doing their spring training in Pasadena, California. But in 1942, they ended up at the Poston War Relocation Center on the Colorado River Indian Reservation near Yuma, Arizona. Yosh wrote a letter to White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes and it was Dykes who helped Yoshi get a job as a clubhouse assistant in 1943. Yosh stayed on past the war. In all, he served under 37 managers and 12 general managers before retiring in 2008. Nobe also was involved in baseball, eventually ending up with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1959 where he was the clubhouse manager when he retired in 1991.
Yet Yosh Kawano wasn’t the only Japanese American to leave internment for Chicago. According to WBEZ91.5Chicago in the article “What Happened to Chicago’s Japanese Neighborhood?” (Lake View), keeping all those people interned was expensive and the war effort resulted in a deficit of workers. The War Relocation Authority decided to “redistribute Japanese Americans across the country.”
The Japanese Americans who wanted to participate in this program were given a “clearance interview” which included questions like:
- “Will you assist in the general resettlement program by staying away from large groups of Japanese?”
- “Will you avoid the use of the Japanese language except when necessary?”
- “Will you try to develop such American habits which will cause you to be accepted readily into American social groups?”
According to WBEZ, there were only 400 people of Japanese descent living in Chicago in 1942. In 1944, “a wave of around 20,000” Japanese Americans arrived in Chicago, taking work in the garment, book binding and candy making industries.
Of course, Japanese Americans were not the only East Asians in Chicago. Chicago already had a Chinatown, first begun in the late 19th century and then moving to its current location in 1912. Unlike Chicago’s Japantown, Chinatown remains.
Chicago comes up in the TV series “A League of Their Own” from the first episode. In Season 1, Episode 1 (“Batter Up”), Chicago is the site for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League tryouts. In Season 1, Episode 2 (“Find the Gap”), the Peaches meet their coach, former Chicago Cubs pitcher Casey “Dove” Porter.
The series focuses on the formation of the Rockford Peaches, a real professional baseball team based in Rockford, Illinois, a city two hours or about 90 miles away from Chicago. Rockford is currently 52% White (not Hispanic or Latino), 21% Black/African American, 18% Latino/Hispanic and 3.6% Asian. While in 1829 the Illinois law stated “No person of color, negro or mulatto shall marry any white person,” that law was repealed in 1874.
What bothers me about this version of “A League of Their Own,” is that while great pains are taken to include an African American baseball thread, there isn’t an effort to show how the Japanese American leagues were affected by the war even though there was an influx of Japanese Americans to Chicago at about the same time. It’s not as if the Japanese American and Negro leagues were unaware of each other. Negro and the Japanese American baseball leagues had both toured Japan and they also played each other. According to a blog entry “The Other ‘Colored’ Leagues: Japanese American Baseball,” by Bill Staples Jr., Kenichi Zenimura’s teams faced Negro League teams 11 times and won eight.
The character of Max, an African American woman, is based on three women who did play in the Negro League: Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson, and Connie Morgan. Yet there were also Japanese American women who played baseball. According to DiscoverNikkei.org:
Alice Hinaga and Asaye Sakamoto played in the famed Women’s Night Ball Association of San Jose. In 1938, 15-year-old Kazui “Babe” Oshiki toured Japan with the Max Factor all-girls softball team. One night in 1943, Oshiki was drafted to play with an all-male team at Soldier’s Field in Los Angeles. A crucial hit earned her the nickname “Babe.”
Chicago was also home to another league: The National Girls Baseball League (NGBL) which was active beginning in 1944 and closed down in 1954. This league had different rules and was closer to softball (fast pitch softball) according to the article, “No Crying Here: An Introduction into Professional Girls Baseball.” Why the NGBL is important to the story of diversity is that the league integrated players, including African American Betty Chapman, Chinese American Gwen Wong and Japanese American Nancy Ito.
Moreover, Chicago was the last city of residence of the Los Angeles-born Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino (1916-2006), more popularly known as Tokyo Rose. US President Gerald Ford granted a full and unconditional pardon to D’Aquino in 1977. Yet this further illustrates how important Chicago is to the story of Asian Americans in the US, particularly during the time period of World War II.
As I mentioned above, Rockford, the home of the Rockford Peaches, is only an hour and a half away from Chicago by car, and Rockford currently has the Anderson Japanese Gardens, founded in 1978 by John R. Anderson and Hiroshima-born landscape architect Hoichi Kurisu. There were Japanese in the Chicago area and there’s a Japanese influence in Rockford now.
Both the Japanese American and Negro leagues did a lot to spread the joy of baseball to Japan. Until recently, Japan that had a women’s baseball league. In softball, the Japanese women were the Olympic champions in 2008 and 2020, both times beating the United States. The Japanese women came in third (behind Australia) in 2004 when the US won. The Japanese lost to the US in 2000 to finish second. In 1996, the Japanese placed fourth behind runner up China and Australia when the US won the gold.
If Japan and Japanese Americans had been included in the story line of “A League of Their Own,” the TV series would have better reflected race relations in the US as intertwined with baseball and even the future of baseball internationally. The Midwest and Chicago are part of the Japanese American relocation story particularly during a time of high anti-Asian sentiment and during this current era of high anti-Asian sentiment, it would seem important to include Asian Americans in this story about the all American pastime.
“A League of Their Own” premiered 8 episodes on 12 August 2022. In March 2023, the series was renewed for a four-episode second and final season. The second season premiere has not yet been announced.
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