Jan. 3, “Route 51” Honors Howard Kenso Zenimura

Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Route 51” rebroadcasts Glen Moberg’s 2016 interview with two survivors of America’s World War Two Japanese incarceration camps, in honor of survivor and Japanese American baseball star Howard Kenso Zenimura, who passed away December 13, 2018.

Host Glen Moberg interviewed Zenimura and Tets Furukawa, who as boys were interred at the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, and Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Director of the Nisei Baseball Research Project. After the Pearl Harbor bombing, more than 120,000 Japanese American citizens, including Zenimura and Furukawa, were rounded up and placed in the internment camps for perceived national security reasons. The show will also feature Colin Hanson, the Edgar Elementary School teacher whose “A Walk in Their Shoes” school history program brought the survivors to central Wisconsin, and will discuss how the great American past-time of baseball provided a relief and focus to the lives of those who were interred. Furukawa and Zenimura’s stories are featured in the books “A Diamond in the Desert” and “Barbed Wire Baseball.”

Video of Japanese internment processing.