An Open Letter to America From Seattle

Dear Friends:

If you are wondering about us and the sale of the Mariners, we are wondering about you and the Japanese.

Seattle and the Pacific Northwest is not a country separate from the rest of America, but there are some things about this region that make us different. One of them is the way we think about the Pacific Ocean and the people on its other shores.

Maybe one way of explaining that is to tell you about a man named Frank Fukuda.

Fukuda is not famous or even particularly well-remembered here, but he represents something. He was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture on Japan’s main island of Honshu and found a way to immigrate to America. When he came, he brought his love of baseball to the Pacific Northwest.

Fukuda became a school principal, but he was renowned as a baseball coach. A photo from the 1930s shows him with the Wapato, Wash., Nippon Juniors, a high school team that played in the farmlands of eastern Washington.

The Nippon Juniors were American farm boys whose parents came from Japan. Aside from speaking Japanese at home, they were the same as sons of Polish immigrants in Detroit, Irish immigrants in Chicago or Italians in San Francisco. They loved baseball.

For Japanese-Americans of the 1920s and 1930s in the Pacific Northwest, baseball was their passion and often the social center of family life--an era of summer baseball and families rooting for their hometown boys. They spoke Japanese, but each year more and more spoke English. Fukuda, who directed a language school, helped them with that as well. He died in 1941, just before the world could break his heart.

Asia is not an exotic, foreign place to people in Seattle. Many of our ancestors came from there. Tokyo is just the next stop west. Japanese business has not displaced jobs here the way it has in other parts of the United States. Like many Western states, our industry has been in our natural resources and, lately, the high end of the technology scale.

Almost a quarter of everything produced in this state goes overseas. About one job out of five in Washington state is related to international trade. For the products and services we send abroad, the Japanese are our best customers.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have differences with Japan. Fishing rights is one example. But we are Pacific Americans untethered to the Atlantic cities. In ways that we don’t even think about, we are at the end of the westward migration and the beginning of America’s movement East.

For all of those reasons, the Mariners belong in Seattle and so does major-league baseball. This large neck of the woods cannot be without professional baseball. The fact that a Japanese family wants to invest in the Mariners does not strike us as strange at all, but as part of the hazy, emerging picture of the century ahead.

Baseball is not the way to resist change. Baseball with Latinos, Africans, Japanese or Siberians is still baseball. When Frank Fukuda coached the Nippon Juniors to their team trophy, no one said the game did not belong to them.

A few years after they posed for snapshots on a dusty field in eastern Washington, most of the players were in internment camps. Some were in the U.S. Army. When war broke out, Fukuda’s own son was studying in Japan. He was drafted into the Japanese army and was killed.

In the internment camps, Japanese-Americans still played baseball and beat their guards at the game. It’s all one history to us. The complicated, emotional history of Americans and Japanese spreading toward each other across the Pacific is also part of the history of baseball.

We understand that and we wish you did, too.