Tokyo connection keeps memories of the Vancouver Asahi baseball team alive

Yobun Shima was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan, and lived in Tokyo for most of his life, working for a shipping company until he retired a decade ago.

That’s when he started tracing his family’s footsteps from when his grandfather moved from Japan to Vancouver in 1907. A few years later, his grandfather’s family, including a son named Shoichi, joined him. In 1914, Shima’s father, Fred, was born in Vancouver.

Shima discovered his Uncle Shoichi was one of the earliest members of the legendary Vancouver Asahi baseball team that played from 1914 to 1941. This was the start of his instrumental work piecing together little, fragile parts of B.C. history. He would go on to be part of tracking down some 30 other families whose connection to the Asahi would have otherwise been lost.

In 2005, when the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame inducted the Asahi team, it named 75 former players as medallists for their contributions as athletes. It was also a poignant nod to the times in which the Vancouver Asahi played.

Despite being born in Canada or being naturalized citizens, Japanese-Canadians weren’t able to vote or hold certain jobs. In 1938, when the Asahi won three regional championships, the community rejoiced. On the field, the Asahi broke down social barriers, connecting with Anglo-Canadian spectators who were entertained by their signature style of play: more speed and defence, rather than girth and heavy hitting. 

Growing up in Kyoto, Shima never knew his uncle played for the Asahi. The family “eventually returned to Japan step by step by the end of the 1930s.”

After Shoichi died, the family found in his old files a 1916 Asahi team photo with him in it. That got tucked away until a cousin visited Vancouver about 10 years ago and “happened to find an English book entitled, ‘Asahi: A Legend in Baseball,’ written by Pat Adachi.” It was a “big surprise” to the family to see Shoichi in the first Asahi team photo ever taken in 1914.

Meanwhile, in Vancouver, the Hall of Fame had some success awarding its medals to the 75 former Asahi players it named in 2005, but things then stalled. There were still 25 unclaimed medals, including the one belonging to Shima’s uncle. That list would languish for another decade.

It was no wonder. By the time the Hall of Fame list of medallists was drawn up in 2005, it had been almost 65 years since the Vancouver Asahi was forever disbanded after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In a shameful period of Canadian history, Japanese-Canadians were interned and not allowed to return to the West Coast until five years after the war ended. Some were forced to move eastward across Canada while others did what was called “voluntary deportation,” heading to an impoverished, postwar Japan where they struggled.

“To be honest, after a while, nobody had been looking for,” the remaining players on the list, said Vancouver lawyer Emiko Ando. “I felt strongly. Let’s try to find these people.”

Ando got connected to Shima when, as a parent, she became involved in a new Vancouver-based Asahi baseball club started in 2014 to give young players a stronger connection to the their Japanese-Canadian heritage.

Around the same time, there was the release in Japan of The Vancouver Asahi, a film that reconstructed evocative scenes of old Vancouver in a studio in Japan. Its tale of Japanese emigrants in prewar Canada resonated with families of Asahi players in Japan, said Shima.

In November 2014, 100 years after his uncle first played for the Asahi, Shima made it to Vancouver to collect a medal from the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame on his behalf.

Returning to Japan, he then feverishly began to look for families of other former players who hadn’t yet claimed their rightful medals. 

On a tip that one former player on the list, Motoji Kodama, ended up working in Japan for brewing company Suntory Holdings Ltd., Shima approached the company, only to be rebuffed. So he found someone who used to work there who finally led him to a woman who was the daughter of Kodama’s cousin. In early April this year, the Hall of Fame sent a medal to Kodama’s family in Kyoto.

Shima also tracked down Ken Noda, who hailed from “Wakayama Prefecture,” by connecting with a contact in Toronto who heads an association there of Japanese-Canadians with ties to this region. They found Noda’s half-sisters and his medal was awarded to them in mid-April.

“He’s become the driving force, based in Japan. He’s our Japanese division for the search for these players,” said Jason Beck, curator of the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame. “We have a much fuller picture of who was on these teams.”

The list of unclaimed medals is now down to just seven names.

Not only were 20 medals on the list crossed off, but another 10 previously unlisted players were found through the combined efforts of Shima, Ando, the Hall of Fame and others like Grace Eiko Thomson, a Japanese-Canadian elder who was interned and sees the Asahi story as a way of talking to young people about her generation’s history.

These other players had not previously been identified in team rosters or newspaper photos. Sometimes even when names were recorded, they were misspelled.

Ando said one player, Tom (Sutejiro) Yoshioka, for example, originally appeared on the Hall of Fame list as Yosh Oka because old newspaper photo captions had incorrectly spelled his name. It was Shima’s careful eye and a gut feeling that, perhaps, the long-lost Yosh Oka was Tom Yoshioka.

In August 2015, Tom’s son, Frank travelled from Kelowna to receive his father’s medal at a Vancouver Canadians game.

jlee-young@postmedia.com

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