Author Bradford Pearson’s “The Eagles of Heart Mountain” is a most unusual World War II story.
It recounts how 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans were incarcerated by the U.S. government, but also focuses on how a group of teenagers trapped in one of these camps turned themselves into a football team for the ages. They did this while trying to complete high school, studying civics while being unjustly imprisoned by their own government. (Note: While “internment has long been used to describe the forcible detainment of Japanese Americans, recent scholarship has pushed for the more accurate term “incarceration” used here.)
While the detainment camp was in Wyoming, much of the book is set in Los Angeles, which was the center of Japanese life in America before the war. Many prisoners were originally detained at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia before being shipped out; many returned to Los Angeles upon release as well, despite having been treated so poorly by California’s residents and its government.
Pearson spoke by phone about the people who drove his story and why it still matters today. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What drew you to this story?
A: In 2013, I was on a press trip to Yellowstone for a magazine and we went to the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, and I was kind of embarrassed by how little I knew about Japanese American incarceration. While I was there, I saw one sentence on a display about the camp’s high school football team and that stuck with me. Every couple of months that sentence would pop into my head and I’d think, “I should really look into that and see if there’s any there there in terms of a story.”
I started reading the incarceration camp’s weekly newspaper, The Sentinel, and realized there was a story to tell about the football team. The story about Japanese American incarceration had been told and the story of the camp had been told but I’d never read a story about this incredible team that had no peers in any of the other incarceration camps.
There are a lot of great books about Japanese American incarceration, but there aren’t as many, outside of memoirs, that tell the story through the characters. I felt this was an opportunity to tell the story through the eyes of these normal American teenagers in L.A. or San Francisco or Seattle we can all relate to. I could hang the history on that story of what your life could have been and what it ended up being if you were taken out of California when you were 16 and didn’t get to return till you were 20.
Q: How did you find your two main characters, Babe Nomura and George Yoshinaga?
A: Heart Mountain had 11,000 people and the newspaper was well-staffed, including the sports section. I kept a big spreadsheet to see who was in the stories the most and it was immediately obvious that Babe Nomura was the best player on the team and that George Yoshinaga was a good player but also an important part of it — you then start seeing his byline in the sports section.
Q: After the war, why did so many of the families go back to Los Angeles where they’d been treated so badly?
A: Well, a lot did go to Denver, Chicago and other cities, but Los Angeles was the city they knew. They said, “This our home. Let’s go back and try recreating what we had.” Many who lost their farms ended up in landscaping, which was then dominated for years in the area by Japanese Americans.
Q: Nomura starred in football at Los Angeles City College and then San Jose State after the war. You say he had offers to play baseball for the Boston Red Sox or football for the New York Giants. Why didn’t he go?
A: I don’t know for sure why he said no, but I think he was tired from all this turmoil and tumult for five years. He liked his life in Los Angeles. He worked for a seafood distributor and could play sports with his friends. Maybe he said, “Am I willing to be uprooted and moved around again against my will even if it’s for something I love as opposed to a racist federal policy?”
If he had been playing at Hollywood High School instead of in a concentration camp in northwest Wyoming his life would have been a lot different.
Q: Racism is obviously an intrinsic part of American history. What was different about the way Japanese Americans were treated in California?
A: Japanese Americans were just much, much better at the jobs they were coming to do in farming and agriculture in general. They were running White farmers out of the market because of how efficient they were and how they worked the soil. In Los Angeles, Japanese Americans completely took over the flower industry, broccoli, berries within a couple of decades.
Q: So, rather than learn from them, Americans at that time said let’s hound them and create laws to harm them?
A: Yes, 100%. Reading through old accounts, it was jealousy, and then it was, “How can we get them off the land and steal back this land they’ve now made farmable?” That’s what incarceration was; it was pushed on the local and federal government by the majority of White farmers to get land back or to be able to buy land for pennies on the dollar when people got sent to the camps.
Folks in the book say they were punished for the industriousness we claim to have as Americans. Look at the immigrants today and it’s the same.
Q: How much should the incarceration of 120,000 people complicate Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy?
A: I grew up in Hyde Park; I went on class trips to his home and I always was taught he was this admirable character who worked hard for the poor and led the nation during World War II. But this negative should be taught equally.
By the 1944 presidential election, whatever shred of military necessity used to justify the camps was gone but he chose to keep the camps open because he didn’t want to close them right before the election and seem like a weak leader. It was purely expediency. A month after the election he closes the camps. Extending honest and innocent people’s misery for your own political gain — that’s pretty hard to see.
