Minneapolis Park History

Today’s story is not about a Minneapolis park, but grew out of research into a basketball league run by the Minneapolis Park Board. Park league basketball, football and baseball games were for many years among the city’s leading sporting events.

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How a basketball team of Japanese Americans was assembled at Fort Snelling in the 1940s is a story of war, injustice, and patriotism. Why they were so good is beyond explanation.

Months before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military knew conflict with Japan was possible and recognized that the U.S. would need people who could read and speak Japanese as an integral component of military intelligence. Where could the U.S. military find Japanese speakers? There were about 110,000 people of Japanese descent living along the west coast of the United States. So, in November 1941 the U.S. Army began to set up a Japanese language school at the Presidio in San Francisco. Barely a month later Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. and Japan were at war.

The plan to develop a corps of Japanese speakers and readers appeared prescient, but what followed made the job of military intelligence much harder. People of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were imprisoned. All of them. American citizens included. They were sent to ten hastily concocted prison camps that were deplorable in every respect — from concept to administration to location to construction. That meant of course that the hope to run a language school for Japanese American students in San Francisco was no longer possible. They had been scrubbed from the landscape.

The Army searched for another site for its language school. What it found was an abandoned Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps camp near Savage, Minnesota, a half-hour drive southwest of Minneapolis, and a governor, Harold Stassen, who was not afraid to have Americans of Japanese ancestry living and learning among his constituents. Minnesota did not have a history, as some western states did, of prejudice against Japanese. In fact, few Japanese had settled in Minnesota; the 1940 Census counted only 51 people of Japanese descent in the entire state.          

Of course, that didn’t exempt those few from mistreatment in December 1941. Ed Yamazaki, who ran Ed’s Café on West Broadway in Minneapolis and lived in the leafy Linden Hills neighborhood was visited by police and agents of the Treasury department at work the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They shut down his restaurant. He was allowed to open his restaurant again three days later, but his bank accounts were frozen and he was allowed to withdraw only $200 a month for living expenses. The same conditions were reported to have been imposed on a gift shop owner in St. Paul. These were apparently the only two businesses owned by persons of Japanese ancestry in the Twin Cities.

Perhaps someone feared that if they had spare cash laying around they’d send it to the Emperor. Yamazaki had lived in Minneapolis since 1914. His son had been a record-setting intermediate speed skater at Powderhorn Lake in Minneapolis before the war and was a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant at the time of Pearl Harbor. You couldn’t be more Minnesota than that. “We are sorry to see the war come,” Yamazaki said, “But what can we do? My family and I have no ties in Japan.”[1]

The Army’s task of developing Japanese language capabilities proved harder than initially imagined because the assumption that young men of Japanese ancestry would be able to speak their ancestral language was false. The Army was shocked to discover that only about 3% of the 3,000 Japanese-Americans already in the Army could speak their parents’ or grandparents’ language even a little bit. Despite that drawback, the Army still focused on the Japanese American community for students for the Japanese language program. Fortunately for the Army, although they and their families had been imprisoned because they were suspected, without evidence, of being potentially sympathetic to the enemy, many Japanese American men were American citizens and could be drafted into military service. Also fortunately for the Army, although their rights as American citizens had been suspended, thousands more Japanese Americans enlisted to fight for those rights for others.

The Military Intelligence Service Language School at Camp Savage opened in May 1942 but outgrew the outdated camp. In August 1944 the entire language school, about 1800 students at the time, was moved to Fort Snelling, a fort established in 1820 on a bluff at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers just south of Minneapolis. In all, 6,000 Japanese Americans went through the language school. (More than 30,000 Japanese-Americans served in the U.S. military during the war, including a division that fought with great distinction and suffered staggering casualties in Europe.)

The U.S. Army provided what recreational opportunities it could for the soldiers learning or perfecting Japanese language skills at the Fort, even though the demanding language courses of six to nine months duration left little time for recreation. Several sports were encouraged, basketball among them.

The Fort basketball players were good, so they entered a Fort “all-star” team in the top recreational basketball league run by the Minneapolis Park Board in January 1945. The highly competitive Park National league had for years featured the best basketball in the city, before the arrival of professional basketball and the Minneapolis Lakers. And even though the talent level had dropped during the war due to so many young men in military service, many excellent players still filled the rosters of the eight-team league. Especially big men. Players over 6’6” and those with bad knees, eyes or ears, even asthma, (maybe bone spurs) were exempted from service.

Many armed forces teams featured superb players during the war years and the Fort Snelling team was no exception. Still with a roster of men most of whom were well under six-feet tall — various newspaper articles calculated their average height at 5’6” —  the success of the Fort Snelling team must have surprised local players and observers. All but two players on the team were of Japanese ancestry.

The leading scorer was Wataru Misaka. In a day when college basketball stars shined less brightly than today, Wat Misaka was a superstar. He would become even better known within a couple years. Misaka had starred for the University of Utah team that won the NCAA championship in March 1944 at Madison Square Garden and then defeated the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) champion, St. John’s University, on its home court in a playoff game to raise money for the Red Cross. Misaka and teammates won the hearts of New York City’s hard-core basketball fans in the process.

The day Misaka returned to Utah from New York to a hero’s welcome he also received his draft notice. Misaka had grown up in Ogden, Utah and like many other Japanese Americans in Utah, both in and out of internment camps, he ended up at the Fort Snelling language school. He was not the only player on that team with hoops cred.

Masaru Nishibayashi had played at Los Angeles Community College before he was imprisoned with his family at Denson, Arkansas. He was released from the camp to attend the University of Cincinnati where he played basketball for the Bearcats before entering the Army.[2] At 6’2” he was the tallest man on the team. He was also one of two players who played portions of the 1944-45 and 1945-46 seasons with the Fort Snelling team, because his language training was interrupted by attendance at Officer Candidate School in Georgia. He was one of the few Japanese Americans offered the chance to become an officer.

Another former college player on the 1945 team was John Oshida. He followed a most unusual path to Fort Snelling. He grew up in Berkeley, California where he was a star athlete. He was a freshman at the University of California when the war and imprisonment of Japanese Americans began, but he had a unique family connection.

When the Army began to put together a Japanese language program in San Francisco, one of the first hires as an instructor was a young man who had been born in the U.S. and graduated from Berkeley High School, but had returned to Japan for his college education at Meiji University in Tokyo. He, therefore, not only spoke and read Japanese as a native, but he was familiar with Japanese military terms and usage because, as all Japanese college students, he had been required to attend military training. He had worked most recently in the Japan pavilion at the Golden Gate International Exhibition. His name was Akira Oshida. He was John’s older brother.

When the MIS language school was established in Minnesota, Akira Oshida moved east to teach there and was able to get his brother out of the prison camp at Topaz, Utah and brought him to Minneapolis where he enrolled at Augsburg College in January 1944. John immediately joined the college basketball team, along with another Japanese American, Joe Seto, and became a starter for the Auggies.[3] Despite his unimposing wiry frame and wire-rimmed glasses, he had an immediate impact on Augsburg’s performance and created quite a stir in the state. A newspaper repeated a rumor, not true, that he had been a freshman basketball star at USC before the war. In the spring of 1944, he played doubles in tennis and shortstop and pitcher for the Auggies baseball team. He had pitched previously for the Post Office team at the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California in the summer of 1942. Tanforan was a horse racetrack near San Francisco where Japanese Americans lived in former horse stalls for several months until they were shipped to other prisons. Most were transferred to the bleak high-desert prison at Topaz, Utah.[4]

Sidebar: Ideals Never Lost

The Totalizer was a mimeographed newspaper produced at Tanforan Assembly Center by internees, many of them American citizens, who were held without rights or redress until they were shipped to one of ten prison camps. The editorial in the July 4, 1942 issue of the Totalizer contained these words: “The ideals which germinated in the birth of this nation as a free people are as valid today as they ever were. They still form the one bastion of man’s hope for a better world, unburdened of the weight of fascist tyranny. If we allow the apparent anomaly of our particular circumstances to tarnish our faith in the tenets of the democratic creed, we are divorcing ourselves from the current of humanity’s highest aspirations. In our observance of July Fourth, then, let us not speculate idly and fruitlessly on the special constraints and hardships—and, in many cases, the seeming injustices—which the fortunes of the present war have laid on us. Rather, let us turn our thoughts to the future, both of this country and of our place in it. It is our task to grow to a fuller faith in what democracy can and will mean to all men. To stop growing in this faith would be to abandon our most cogent claim to the right of sharing in the final fruits of a truly emancipated world.”

The sports columnist for the Augsburg College Echo, also a member of the basketball team, wrote, “Augsburg College as a whole, and specifically the basketball team, ran into some good luck this semester when Joe Seto and Johnny Oshida, two Japanese Americans from the West Coast, enrolled in Auggie Tech…Both of these likable fellas have proved their worth on the Augsburg basketball team.”

The Echo profiled Seto and Oshida as the first Nisei students to attend Augsburg. The profile noted that Oshida had a brother at Camp Savage as well as a sister in Hopkins. The writer encouraged students to talk with Oshida, “If you readers have any other questions about him, or his experience in the relocation camps, just ask him. He’s very willing to supply the answers.”[5]

Joe Seto became the sports columnist in the Echo the next school year and was also named honorable mention on the all-conference basketball team that year.

Another excellent player on the 1945 Fort Snelling team was John Okamoto. He was from the Seattle area where he was reported to have been an all-city high school basketball player at Broadway High School and was rumored, falsely, to have played for the University of California before the war. Okamoto, like Nishibayashi, played for the Fort Snelling team for two years because his post-language-school assignment was to the Fort Snelling HQ.

Only two of the 1945 Fort Snelling All Stars were not of Japanese ancestry. John Leddy was an especially valuable addition because he was six feet tall, providing a bit of height that the team lacked outside of Nishibayashi. Like Wat Misaka, he had the rare distinction of having played on an NCAA championship team, the 1942 Stanford team. While at Stanford he enrolled in an intensive Japanese language course and after joining the Army he was sent to an Army Japanese language program for officers at the University of Michigan for the 1943-44 academic year. Like many other military personnel enrolled in military courses at universities, he was eligible immediately to play basketball for Michigan. He earned honorable mention All-Big Ten that winter, along with teammates Elroy Hirsch, better known as future football Hall of Fame halfback “Crazylegs Hirsch” and Dave Strack who would later coach  the great Michigan basketball teams of the 1960s.[6]

The other Caucasian contributor to the Fort Snelling team was Merle Gulick. Gulick had enrolled at DePaul to play basketball, where he would have been a teammate of George Mikan if he hadn’t been drafted into the Army. Gulick was from a famous family of missionaries to Japan and he had been born there and grew up speaking Japanese. He probably had a closer connection to Japan than most of his Nisei teammates. His great uncle was also the famous promoter of physical education in New York City, Luther Gulick. His father was the head of the new Japanese section of the OSS, wartime forerunner of the CIA, and after the war taught Japanese at the University of Chicago. While Leddy was often one of the top three scorers for the 1945 Fort Snelling team, along with Misaka and Oshida, Gulick was a less important contributor on the score board.

Little was known about Wat Misaka and his Fort Snelling team when it entered the top basketball league run by the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners in January 1945, least of all that they were studying Japanese in a secret military intelligence program. The purpose of their study — the entire Fort Snelling program — was not revealed until after Japan’s surrender and the war was over. The U.S. Army didn’t want Japan’s leaders to know that its written and spoken communications were being intercepted and understood. (Many American military communications in the Pacific truly were indecipherable as they were conducted by the famous Navajo code talkers.)

The clear favorite for the title of top amateur team in Minnesota in 1945 was a team sponsored by Ruff Bros., a chain of three grocery stores in Minneapolis. The captain of that team was Jerry Ruff, who had played college ball at St. John’s University in Minnesota. Led by former Gopher great, John Kundla, Ruff Bros. were undefeated in 1944 and many anticipated a similar performance in 1945 even without Kundla who had taken the coaching job at St. Thomas College in St. Paul. Ruff Bros. had won their first two games in the Park National season with ease, as had the Fort Snelling team.

When Ruff Bros. swamped the Citizens Club team 49-17 in the second week of play a Minneapolis Star sportswriter proclaimed that it “dispelled all doubt” that they were the team to beat in the city’s top league. But they would be beaten. A tight win by the soldiers over a team of Navy Flyers stationed at Wold-Chamberlain Airport set up a meeting between the two league leaders. The under-sized soldiers won easily, 46-35, snapping the “Ruffians” 26-game winning streak. Wat Misaka was the star, scoring 17 points. Throughout that season, the bigger the game, the more Misaka scored.

The Fort Snelling All Stars only lost a few games that season, one was to St. Mary’s College in Winona, which finished as runner-up in the forerunner of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC). They also lost a rematch with Ruff Bros., which left the two teams in a tie for the city championship and set up a playoff for the title. Ruff Bros. won that playoff in a very close game. A three-point half-time lead was nursed into a 42-38 win. Ruff Bros. leading scorer that game was Gordy Flick, a 6’6” former Minneapolis South High School player who had also played at Drake University and for a couple of early pro teams in Wisconsin. The Fort Snelling All Stars, talented as they were, didn’t have answers for skilled players of that altitude.

News of the success of the Fort Snelling team spread to the prison camps. Prior to an Army tournament in Omaha, Nebraska, the Minidoka Irrigator, the newspaper of the Hunt, Idaho prison camp, where 10,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned, ran a story about the team. It was written by Pvt. Peter Ohtaki, a Fort Snelling language student who had been imprisoned previously at Minidoka.

During that season a group of Fort Snelling players travelled on furlough to visit families and friends at the Topaz, Utah prison. While there they played a team of Topaz all-stars. The Fort Snelling players won, but barely, 53-49, suggesting the popularity of basketball and the high skill level in the Japanese American general population. Johnny Oshida and Kenji Hosakawa led the Fort Snelling players in scoring that game.[7]

The following winter the Fort Snelling team was much more visible in the basketball community not only in Minnesota, but Wisconsin, perhaps because the war was over and the Japanese Army had been defeated. It is unclear whether the brass at Fort Snelling or the U.S. Army encouraged greater visibility for the Fort Snelling All-Stars, or if, with the war over, there was less academic pressure on the remaining Japanese language students at the Fort. Whatever the reason, the team embarked on a much more rigorous schedule in the 1945-46 season.

The Fort Snelling Bulletin, the Fort’s weekly newspaper, noted in December 1945 that the team would play a tough schedule on the road but was also entering the city park league again just so others at the Fort would have the opportunity to see them play in town. Except for Nishibayashi, who would only play in a few games before he departed Fort Snelling, and Johnny Okamoto, who would play the complete 1946 season, the entire team was new. Gone were the former college stars, but the Fort Snelling language program still put a very good team on the floor. Okamoto took over the scoring burden from Misaka, Oshida and Leddy. He was backed up by Dan Fukushima, Joe Kadowaki, and George Mizuno among others.

Fukushima was another kid from Berkeley who had reportedly played basketball at Fullerton Junior College. Mizuno was singled out in coverage of Fort Snelling games for his speed and his diminutive stature; he was listed as 5’5.” Kadowaki was called “Big Joe’ in the Fort Snelling Bulletin and described as “hefty, but speedy,” so “big” may not have implied “tall.” Before the war, Kadowaki played for Santa Ana Junior College. Kadowaki was one of the few Fort Snelling players who had served in the famous 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, an all-Japanese American unit that had fought with distinction — and suffered one of the highest casualty rates of any American unit — in Italy and France.

The Fort Snelling team played its best game of the year, according to the Bulletin, in the opening round of the U.S. Army 7^th Service Command annual tournament in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Fort Snelling team defeated the tournament favorite from Fort Leavenworth. Fort Snelling lost its next game, however, knocked out of the tourney by the host team from Fort Warren, which was where the Army trained its Quartermaster Corps. Fort Warren featured a 6’6” center who played before and after the war for teams in the early National Basketball League and a 6’3” forward who would become a college star in Indiana after the war. They put the Fort Snelling team at a height deficit, once again, that it couldn’t overcome.

The 1945-46 team played fifty-one games and lost only ten. It split two games with Eau Claire Teachers College and lost in overtime to St. Cloud State College. Both college teams won their respective conferences, which won them invitations to the National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball (NAIB) national tournament in Kansas City. St. Cloud was defeated in the second round by Indiana St., which wasn’t beaten until the national championship game.[8]

Those Fort Snelling losses, like most of their wins, were played on the road. On many weekends the team played four games, usually playing an afternoon and evening game on Sundays. They travelled from southern Minnesota to central Wisconsin to the Iron Range in northern Minnesota. The Fort Snelling team would take on local stars with the money raised from usually sold-out arenas going to some sponsoring charity. Receipts from Fort Snelling games went to everything from the local library fund in Cornell, Wisconsin to the American Red Cross and National Infantile Paralysis Foundation.

The team was nearly universally well-received by local crowds according to newspaper accounts. Of the dozens of articles in Minneapolis newspaper sports pages the team was never called Japanese American and was referred to even as Nisei only occasionally. The team was almost always called the “soldiers” from Fort Snelling. The same was not true for all smaller-town newspapers, which often wrote about the “Japanese American” or “Jap-American” team, although the term appears not to have been used with pejorative intent.

One of the few newspaper references to prejudicial treatment of Fort Snelling athletes came in an article from the Winona Daily News which, when reporting on a local baseball game featuring a team from Fort Snelling, noted that fans had shown “above average respect for the soldier nine. Only once did anyone remark about the nationality of the visitors and he was reported to be somewhat under the influence of liquor.”[9]

The Fort Snelling Bulletin, admittedly not an unbiased source, claimed that the Fort Snelling team was one of the “most popular” and “most respected” teams in the area. Most coverage of their games outside of Minneapolis referred to enthusiastic, over-flow crowds. Their overtime loss to St. Cloud State, for instance, was played before “a shrieking capacity crowd” which witnessed “one of the most exciting games ever played in St. Cloud” featuring the “sharpest shooting show” in years.[10]

A team of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin all-stars lost to Fort Snelling when, trailing 63-59 with 30 seconds on the clock, the soldiers stole the ball three times and John Okamoto hit three long shots, the last one at the buzzer, to win 65-63. The Chippewa Falls coach told a Bulletin reporter, “You guys are like the Globe Trotters. You can win anytime you want to and stage a close finish to give the spectators a thrill.” He said he was glad the Fort Snelling team didn’t “pour it on” because the fans like to see “a close game with the home team in the running.”

Once again, the Fort Snelling team finished second in the top Minneapolis park league behind many of the players who had played for Ruffs along with several military veterans who had been wounded and discharged from service.

The Fort Snelling All Stars finished their season in mid-April of 1946 with two two-point wins in front of overflow crowds in Buhl and Crosby-Ironton, two basketball hotbeds on Minnesota’s Iron Range. That was not the end of basketball in the lives of the Japanese language students at Fort Snelling, however.

After serving as translator with the U.S. military administration in occupied Japan, Wat Misaka returned to the University of Utah for the 1946-47 season to complete his degree and his basketball eligibility. Utah once again made it to Madison Square Garden in the post-season, this time in the prestigious National Invitational Tournament (NIT). Utah defeated Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats in a monumental upset — they were 11-point underdogs — in the championship game largely because Misaka held Kentucky’s leading scorer and All-American, Ralph Beard, to a single free throw, nearly twenty points below his average. One writer said being covered by Misaka was like “getting into a beehive.”

Misaka was so impressive, and so admired by New York basketball fans, that in the spring of 1947 the New York Knicks selected Misaka in the first round of the pro basketball draft.[11] Later that year, Misaka became the first non-white player in league history.[12] Misaka was cut by the Knicks several games into the season and many believed he wasn’t given a fair chance partly because of his ancestry. He toured for a time playing against the Harlem Globetrotters, but turned down an offer to join the Globetrotters from owner Abe Saperstein in order to return to school and get an engineering job.

Both John Oshida and John Okamoto remained prominent in Japanese American basketball circles. In the mid-1950s when a columnist for Shin Nichibei, a Los Angeles newspaper serving the Japanese American community, selected a Nisei basketball All Time Dream Team he picked Johnny Oshida as one of his guards.[13]

Oshida’s postwar prowess was highlighted in a report of a Japanese American basketball tournament in Chicago in 1949. The Chicago team beat Berkeley for the title, but high scoring honors in the game went to a Johnny Oshida of Berkeley with 17. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that most of the players in the tournament were veterans of the war.[14]

The leader of the champions from Chicago was Oshida’s former teammate at the Fort, John Okamoto. Okamoto became a prominent player and coach in Japanese American basketball circles in Chicago. He led his Chicago team in scoring in the 1954 Nisei North American tournament won by a Toronto team.

One of the leaders of the 1946 Fort Snelling team, Dan Fukushima, became a well-known high school basketball coach in the San Francisco Bay area after the war, a leader of the California Basketball Coaches Association, and 1973 National High School Basketball Coach of the Year while coaching at James Lick High School in San Jose. He had also been chosen as teacher of the year in the San Jose school system in 1967.[15]

A team of players with Japanese ancestry never entered the annual All-Nations Basketball Tournament at Pillsbury House in Minneapolis, but the soldiers team of 1946 came close. That prestigious tournament featured teams of different national heritages and was played every year from 1929 to 1959. The Fort team planned to enter the tournament representing Japan, but a scheduling conflict with an Army tournament prevented them from competing. Despite missing that tournament, the Japanese American players from the Fort had already established their basketball bona fides on the “Pill House” floor by their success over two seasons playing in the city’s top amateur league run by the Park Board.

The 1950 census revealed that more than 1,000 Minnesotans claimed Japanese ancestry, a twenty-fold increase over 1940. Evidently, some Japanese Americans who came to Minnesota to study or teach at Fort Snelling stayed after the war.

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[1] Minneapolis Tribune, December 9 and 12, 1941.

[2] Manzanar Press, March 18, 1944. Manzanar was a prison camp in California — one of ten in the U.S. — where Japanese citizens were imprisoned from 1942-1945.

[3] Blickstad, Paul, Augsburg Echo, February 11, 1944.

[4] Tanforan Totalizer, July 4, 1942. Whoever wrote that is a better person than I.

[5] Augsburg Echo, March 24, 1944.

[6] Minneapolis Star, March 7, 1944.

[7] Minidoka Irrigator, February 17, 1945. Topaz Times, February 21 and 24, 1945.

[8] Fort Snelling Bulletin, April 12, 1946.

[9] Winona Daily Times, September 19, 1945.

[10] St. Cloud Times, January 29, 1946; Fort Snelling Bulletin, February 2, 1946.

[11] The Knicks at the time were in the Basketball Association of America (BAA), which the National Basketball Association (NBA) considers its predecessor and incorporates BAA history into its own.

[12] Transcending: The Wat Misaka Story, a documentary film by Bruce Alan Johnson and Christine Toy Johnson, 2008, ReImagined World Entertainment. The film tells the story of Misaka at the University of Utah and the New York Knicks but overlooks his time as a star for the Fort Snelling All-Stars on Minneapolis’s hardwood courts.

[13] Shin Nichibei, February 15, 1955.

[14] Chicago Daily Tribune, November 28, 1949.

[15] Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1987; Joel Franks, Crossing Sidelines, Crossing Cultures: Sport and Asian Pacific Americans,

David Carpentier Smith