Kaye Kaminishi is the last surviving member of the Vancouver Asahi, a Japanese Canadian baseball club. The team was disbanded 75 years ago today, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

After the attacks, the Canadian government responded by interning 21,000 Japanese Canadians. including every member of the Asahi. A Proud Benchwarmer is Kaye’s story.

A Proud Benchwarmer was produced by Sam Fenn, Gordon Katic, Alexander Kim, and Eli Yarhi for The Canadian Encyclopedia, a division of Historica Canada. Fact checking by Lawrence Pinsky. Special thanks to Jari Osborne for putting us in touch with Kaye Kaminishi.

You can read more about Kaye Kaminishi and the Vancouver Asahi on Historica’s website.

In the second half of the show, Gordon talks to Geoffrey White, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i, about the politics of memory at Pearl Harbor. His ethnography of the site tells the story of how different stories compete for space in the public remembrance of the Second World War.