Yakima Valley Libraries appreciates the value of stories, as stories remember, preserve, educate, imagine, and inspire; at their best, they foster and elevate community. Archive Librarians, Carlos Pelley and Matt Kendall, steward a treasure-trove of Yakima’s diverse history in the Northwest Reading Room – the Library’s Special Collections and Archives Services. In monthly blog posts, Carlos and Matt will highlight impressive stories found within the content-rich resources of the NWRR.
Told as a cultural touchstone to describe unique experience of the Japanese-American population that lived in the Yakima Valley before World War II, this is the story of the Wapato Nippons Baseball Club –
On July 20th, 1935, the Wapato Nippons Baseball Club faced off against Moxee for a third and final game to decide the champion for the Mount Adams League that season. The game was a tense one that saw Harry Honda execute a squeeze play to score two runs in the top of the 10th inning that would hold up as the winning runs in a 5-3 game. The Wapato Nippons, an all Japanese-American team, had won their second consecutive Mount Adams League Championship.
The United States saw a significant increase in Japanese immigrants towards the turn of the century. As the 19th-century came to a close, Japan had swiftly abandoned a feudal society for a modern, industrialized one. It was a drastic change that improved the nation on a whole but had harsh consequences for farmers and craftsmen. Fixed taxation and severe deflationary economic policies put many of these farmers and craftsmen into debt, and they could not compete with industrialized forces that flooded the marketplace with cheaper and more plentiful products.
So, the sons of Japanese farmers and craftsmen were sent abroad to make money in foreign lands to send home to cover the debts of their struggling family members. Some worked on sugar plantations in Hawaii. Some become miners or railroad workers in Idaho and Colorado. Others became farmers in California and Washington.
The Japanese-American farmers of the Yakima Valley were largely prevented from owning land due to state and federal laws that restricted land ownership by people of Asian descent, but many were able to skirt around these laws by farming leased land from the Yakima reservation.
The Japanese-American population faced the dilemma of wanting to fit in with American society – with intent to prove they were truly American – and to also retain and honor their heritage and ethnic identities. Baseball was a popular outlet to meet these conflicting needs, as baseball was an American pastime that allowed the Japanese-Americans to utilize Japanese characters or their Japanese names (such as the Yamatos, the Fujis, and the Nippons) on their uniforms.
There was little practice time for these amateur teams, but the Japanese-Americans of the Yakima Valley had enormous chemistry and cohesion; for not only did they bond playing baseball every Sunday, they also worked daily together on the farms.
Every week of July 4th, a tournament was held in Seattle among all the Japanese-American teams in the Pacific Northwest. The Wapato Nippons were the most feared team because of their level of camaraderie. They won the tournament in 1933.
In 1937, the Nippons’ beloved Japanese-born manager Frank Fukuda moved on, and the Nippons faded as a power-house. When Fukuda passed away in 1941, Japanese-American baseball players from all over the Pacific Northwest came to the Yakima Valley to play a memorial game against the Wapato Nippons’ old timers for the final game in the team’s history. Several months later, the Japanese-Americans of the area were ordered to report to Heart Mountain where they would be interned for the duration of the Second World War. According to a 1976 report of the Yakima Valley Asian American Task Force, of the 1,200 Japanese-Americans of the Yakima Valley that were taken away to Heart Mountain, only about one-third of them returned
-Written by Matt Kendall, Yakima Valley Libraries’ Archive Librarian
This content was curated for a presentation titled “Yakima’s Diverse History” at Yakima Valley College on March 1, 2023 by Matt Kendall and Carlos Pelley. The presentation was the product of a partnership between Yakima Valley College’s Raymond Hall Librarians and the staff of the Yakima Valley Library’s Northwest Reading Room. The previous year, Yakima Valley College Reference librarian, Samuel Faulk, and Yakima Valley College Director of library media services, Leslie Potter-Henderson, visited the library to see the new reading room and to discuss future programming partnership opportunities. Among the ideas discussed included the need to develop adult educational programming for the Yakima community. Those ideas coalesced into presentations that featured the histories of underrepresented groups in Yakima’s history. Stay tuned for more live presentations in the future; and we look forward to sharing such stories with you here on this online platform.