"Barbed Wire Baseball: How One Man Brought Hope to the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII" paperback copy, written by Marissa Moss with illustrations by Yuko Shimizu.
Barbed Wire Baseball is a picture book about a true story set in a Japanese American internment camp in World War II. As a young boy, Kenichi Zenimura (Zeni) wanted to be a baseball player, even though everyone told him he was too small. He grew up to become a successful athlete, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Zeni and his family were sent to one of several internment camps established in the U.S. for people of Japanese ancestry. Zeni brought the game of baseball to the camp, along with a sense of hope, and became known as the “Father of Japanese American Baseball.”