Kaye Kaminishi, a former player with the Vancouver Asahi baseball team, sits in front one of the displays at the Levelling the Playing Field: Legacy of Vancouver's Asahi Baseball Team exhibit at the National Nikkei Museum and Heritage Centre in Burnaby, B.C., in October, 2005.Jeff Vinnick/The Globe and Mail
Kaye Kaminishi was a skinny high-school student when he earned a coveted spot on the Asahi baseball team.
A utility player who spent more time on the bench than in the field, he found satisfaction in wearing the uniform of a team that was the pride of Vancouver’s Japanese Canadian community.
The players, as well as their fans, families and neighbours, were forcibly removed from the city before the start of the 1942 season after Canada declared war on Japan following the sneak attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.
The Asahi were disbanded and never played together again.
Mr. Kaminishi, who has died at 102, was the team’s last surviving player.
After the war, the dispersed players, some of whom had been forced from British Columbia, never to return, rebuilt their lives, often including the playing and coaching of baseball along with regular employment. A reunion in Toronto in 1972 brought them together for the first time in three decades.
The Asahi have since been rediscovered by sports fans, while the club’s deep ties to a community uprooted during war led to a reassessment of the team’s legacy.
The roster of survivors thinned over the years, eventually leaving only Mr. Kaminishi to testify about the team’s history.
Five years ago, he was featured in a Heritage Minute for which he also served as narrator. “We were born in Canada,” Mr. Kaminishi said in voiceover. “We spoke English.” The image changes from a baseball diamond to a man in civilian clothes being rudely bumped by a passerby. “On the streets, we weren’t welcome, but on the field we were the Asahi, Vancouver’s champions.”
Two months later, Canada Post unveiled a commemorative postage stamp, which included a teenaged Mr. Kaminishi in a team photograph.
Mr. Kaminishi’s birthday earlier this year was proclaimed Vancouver Asahi Day in his honour by the city’s mayor.
“He was lovely. Quiet. Soft-spoken. Unassuming,” said Lorene Oikawa, whose grandfather pitched for the Asahi a generation before Mr. Kaminishi made the team. “He was one of those people who you feel will go on forever.”
A 2019 Canada Post stamp featuring The Vancouver Asahi baseball team. The stamp displays 11 Asahi players from the 1940 team, including Mr. Kaminishi, who appears in the back row, second from left.Supplied
Just two weeks before his death, Mr. Kaminishi attended a banquet for Ms. Oikawa and others on a bus tour of the British Columbia ghost towns and internment camps into which Japanese Canadians had been forced.
A slight figure even in his playing days, when he weighed just 120 pounds (54 kilograms), Mr. Kaminishi personified the baseball skills for which the Asahi were renowned. He was a speedy baserunner with larceny in his heart, stealing bases whenever possible. An infielder who most often patrolled third base, Mr. Kaminishi was a slick fielder, who took to heart the instruction about fielding a batted ball he learned from his manager, Roy (The Dancing Shortstop) Yamamura: “If you can’t stop by glove, stop by chest.”
In an age of common racial discrimination, the Asahi found on the baseball diamond a level field on which to compete against white teams in the city’s amateur and semi-professional industrial leagues.
The Asahi style of baseball, dubbed “small ball” or “brain ball,” relied on facility with bunting and running to score runs, as most of the players were physically smaller than their opponents. In time, they also won over rival audiences, becoming the most popular team in the city.
Koichi Kaminishi was born in Vancouver on Jan. 11, 1922. He was the result of a Jazz Age romance between his mother, Kayano Takehara, and Kannosuke Kaminishi, a married businessman who owned the Royston Lumber Company on Vancouver Island, among other properties.
The boy was sent to Japan to be raised by an aunt in Hiroshima, where he received a Japanese education and learned the fundamentals of baseball. After his father’s sudden death from a heart attack in 1933, his mother brought him home to Vancouver. Koichi was placed with younger children at Strathcona Elementary for his lack of English, a humiliating circumstance that spurred his desire to learn the language. A teacher at the school who did not want to call him by his proper name dubbed him Kaye. A bright, eager student, he quickly advanced to join his age group.
He lived with his mother at the Dunlevy Rooms, occupying several rooms on the second floor of a 60-unit building, home to loggers and labourers. The three-storey brick building was kitty-corner from home plate at the Powell Street Grounds, the modest home park of the Asahi. Even when he was supposed to be doing homework or household chores, Kaye made sure to sit by a window so he could watch the action across the street.
At 17, the King Edward High student was promoted to the Asahi roster after playing for the team’s many feeder clubs. He was so excited before his first game that he was unable to sleep. He did not wear pyjamas that night, instead going to bed in the team’s white uniform with the word Asahi splashed in red felt across the chest in Coca-Cola script.
He liked to tell a story about one of his first hits. He lashed the ball deep into the left field corner. As he raced around first base, he was certain he had hit a triple. Instead, he stumbled in comical fashion and barely made it safely to second base.
After seeing spot duty over two seasons, he accompanied his mother to Japan in the summer of 1941. They returned home on the last ship to leave Japan for Canada before the outbreak of war.
Under the War Measures Act, the federal government declared 22,000 people of Japanese ancestry to be “enemy aliens,” though three in four were Canadian citizens. Automobiles, trucks and fishing boats were seized; radios and cameras were surrendered.
Mr. Kaminishi avoided reporting to authorities for two months, managing in that time to sell the family’s rooming house business, while securing storage for some possessions. The vehicles and machinery of the family’s lumber business were taken by authorities. While he was interned, the Custodian of Enemy Property informed Mr. Kaminishi the Royston Lumber business had been sold for $202,000. (The family estimated it was worth $376,000 in liquid assets in 1940, while also holding expansive timber rights for 10 years.) In the end, Mr. Kaminishi only got $14,200 of the proceeds.
“They sold it for nothing,” he lamented afterwards.
Mr. Kaminishi and his mother were assigned cabin No. 59 of a settlement of 62 tarpaper shacks in East Lillooet, B.C. The uninsulated buildings were freezing in winter and sweltering in summer. Over time, the internees managed to pump water into the settlement from the nearby Fraser River, grew tomatoes and traded with members of the St’at’imc Nation for salmon smuggled into the camp. For recreation, a softball diamond was built. Mr. Kaminishi eventually convinced the RCMP officers who guarded the camp to allow exhibition games against a team in nearby Lillooet. The players were the first internees allowed across what is now known as the Old Bridge.
Not until 1949, four years after the war’s end, were restrictions removed on those who had been uprooted, dispossessed and exiled.
Mr. Kaminishi found work packing fruits and vegetables and later got a job as a clerk in a liquor store. After marrying, he operated motels in Hope and Kamloops.
The Asahi gained belated recognition earlier this century as a symbol of Japanese Canadian resilience, as well as for their pioneering efforts in seeking equality in the face of hostile and racist opposition.
Asahi players were featured in the National Film Board documentary, Sleeping Tigers, released in 2003, the same year in which the team was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame at St. Marys, Ont. They were enshrined in the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in Vancouver two years later.
In 2008, the federal government unveiled a plaque at the site of the Asahi home grounds, now known as Oppenheimer Park, extolling the team for creating “a legacy of inspiration for future generations.”
The burden of representing the team often fell in recent years on Mr. Kaminishi, who granted numerous interviews during which he extolled teammates while insisting his own achievements were modest.
Mr. Kaminishi died in Kamloops on Sept. 28. He leaves his daughter, Joyce Shimokura, and son, Ed Kaminishi. He was predeceased by Florence Naoko (née Kobayashi), his wife of 66 years, who died in 2017, at the age of 92.
Among the possessions Mr. Kaminishi saved were his beloved baseball uniform and purple team sweater. He later donated the items to the Nikkei National Museum in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. It is one of only two Asahi uniforms known to have survived.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.