The Province from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 59

Province Sports Friday, October 21, 1994 Today's Pages: A72 A59 I i JT jtri i -i ft i lj 85y-w iftw fe. in HM fin VL iJ lj ti ii Photo from Asahi: A Legend in Baseball Roy (the Dancing Shortstop) Yamamura (front row, third from right) was a member of the 1941 Asahi. Ball team broken up along with its community By Tom Hawthorn Sports Reporter HE OLD FOLK stopped and gaped. They stared hard at 72-year-old Kaye Kaminishi, and if they could not place his name, they certainly knew his Red felt letters in Coca-Cola script spilled across his chest. A familiar rising sun was featured on his shoulder patch.

It was the first time the jersey of the storied Asahi club had been seen at Vancouver's Op-penheimer Park since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor 53 years ago. and Powell. Chickenwire protected the spectators from foul balls. The field itself was merciless, a rock-hard pan pitted with stones. The Asahi club "Asa" for morning, "hi" for sun was formed in 1914, and sank roots deep in the community.

Children as young as nine played for the Asahi's Clovers, while the best advanced over the years to become Beavers and Athletics before being promoted to the Asahis. The players were amateurs and semi-professionals, and claimed championships in the International League (1919), the Terminal League (1926, 1930), and the Burrard League (193840). Smaller than most other local players, the Asahis played a brand of baseball everyone called "brain ball." They stole bases with abandon, placed bunts with the cunning of a pool shark. "Asahis were very proud of using the bunt," recalls Mickey Terakita, 81, of Vancouver, a pitcher in 1929 and 1930 who spent four hours practicing how to "lay one down" every Sunday. "You don't hit it, you catch it with the bat.

If you push the bat, the ball can go anywheres. But if you catch it, just like you do with a mitt, you can be sure you'll do a good job." In one memorable game in 1927, the Asahi failed to get a hit off a veteran local named Lefty Delcourt, yet won the game The Asahi, a team of Japanese Canadians, were the pride of the surrounding Little Tokyo neighborhood. But with war, the Canadian government forcibly confined citizens of Japanese ancestry, seized their property, and des- watching the exploits of Eddy Kitigawa, Ty Suga, Kaz Suga, Reggie Yasui, Herbie Tana-ka, Frank Nakamura and others. Kenji Ishii, a carpenter, was a typical fan. He would wander past the grounds, lunchpail in hand, dawdling on his way home for supper.

He always stayed until the last out. "Life was awful, it was so tough," daughter Midge Ayukawa of Victoria remembers. "But at the baseball game he was no longer a hardworking, harassed father. He was like a little boy. He didn't have much money.

He didn't drink and he never gambled. Going to see the Asahi was about his only luxury." At a time when racism was overt, when language schools were eyed suspiciously, when the community was criticized for gathering in one neighborhood, when employers used Japanese-Canadian labor to break strikes, cheering on the Asahi was about the only way to respond. Little Tokyo viewed the games as yellow Davids pitted against white Goliaths. Because their style was so exciting, the Asahi developed a following among some white fans, which infuriated one rival white manager who would scream, "But you're cheering for Japs!" With internment and the diaspora of diamond talent, the legacy of the Asahi was all but lost. Few photographs have survived.

Toronto author Pat Adachi's 1992 book Asahi: A Legend in Baseball has done much to revive interest in the club. A way of life was lost in the camps, but baseball survived. In the summer of 1942, only months after being uprooted from the Coast, four teams of Japanese-Canadian prisoners held a tournament in the Kootenays. Lemon Creek, the camp where half the Asahis had been sent, won. Jack Duggan, a Mountie posted to the area at the time, played against those Asahi-in-exile teams.

They were a first-class ball club in any man's league," he says. UiJlpPiUii troyed their community. lifTlljni J'H The Asahi never played 1 11 1 1 lAilUllH aoain. When families hur- Mtl 0 riedly packed personal belongings for internment at the PNE horse stables and future destinations Part 4 of 4 staff photo by David Clark 'Asahis were very proud of using the says Mickey Terakita, a pitcher for the Terminal League champion Asahi in 1930. unknown, baseball uniforms and gloves and cleats were left behind.

Kaminishi's uniform (No. 1 1) is one of only two to survive. As he stood in the park last summer in what had once been left field, Kaminishi remembered "a lot of good times and funny feelings. I want to let you know that Asahi teams' harmony was always 100 per cent. Everyone would go out together and we sure had a good time, all the time." Their home field was known then as the Pow 3-1 with daring baserunning and clever bunting.

With a runner on first in the third inning, Roy Yamamura scampered to second when his sacrifice bunt was thrown into right field. The next batter bunted on a squeeze play and as he was put out at first, Yamamura scooted home all the way from second base. The Asahis scored two runs on one sacrifice bunt. Yamamura's acrobatics in the field earned aged by Harry Miyasaki, the owner of a local cleaning business whom the newspapers called the Japanese John McGraw. When Yamamura eventually became manager, he would instruct his infielders: "If you can't stop by glove, stop by chest." Millers, fishermen and children from Japanese-language schools flocked to the Powell Grounds for 6 p.m.

games. Admission cost a dime, or was by donation. For 90 minutes, workaday lives were left behind in favor of him the nickname the Dancing Shortstop. He ell Street Grounds. Four modest rows of wood- en bleachers hugged the corner of Dunleavy was at the heart of brilliant Asahi teams man-.