Barracks and baseball in the Utah desert

THESE long-ago games don’t show up in baseball’s official records. They are preserved in the memories of men and women who are very old now, and in the speckled black-and-white photos that survive from that time: shots of sheepish young men showing off their batting stance or a boy caressing a favorite bat, of crowds squeezing around the crude infields for a better view of the game, of a lanky kid kicking up dust as he slides hard into home.

Americana, 1940s vintage.

But the innocence is stained by what lurks just out of the frame: Rows of barracks. Watchtowers manned by armed guards. And a fence to cage the Japanese Americans who are playing and watching these ball games in World War II internment camps.

This was baseball behind the wire, played by West Coast Japanese Americans driven from their homes and farms and businesses into what were euphemistically called “relocation camps” when the United States went to war against Japan. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans were sent into the purgatory of these hastily built prisons, whose names -- Topaz, Manzanar, Tule Lake -- make up a roll call of shame.

The makers of “American Pastime” (Warner) have set out to capture the struggle to maintain dignity amid the fear and loss that permeated those days. Directed by Desmond Nakano, whose own jazz-singing, L.A.-born father was interned at the Manzanar camp in California, the film will have a short theatrical run in Los Angeles and Tokyo before its May 22 home video release.

It also arrives conveniently amid the turmoil of another war, with America again struggling with questions of loyalty and identity.

“Reality caught up with our movie as we made it,” says producer Barry Rosenbush (“High School Musical”), who spent five years turning his original fascination with internment camp baseball into a story about a Japanese American family awaiting the day their country would recognize them as good Americans. “In the interim, our country’s xenophobia has increased. Now every Arab is a potential terrorist. Every Mexican is a potential illegal immigrant.

“We’re back to the point where we can no longer go down and say: ‘You’re a good guy and you’re a bad guy.’ It’s easier to say: ‘You’re all bad guys.’ ”

“Pastime” is a big gulp of a complicated history, told through the story of Lyle Nomura (Aaron Yoo). Lyle is a smooth sax player who’s also a pitcher with a good fastball and a restless son who has a shaky relationship with his baseball-obsessed father (Japanese singer-actor Masatoshi Nakamura). He chafes at the racism that dumped him in Topaz and cost him his college baseball scholarship. And he seeks risky consolation in the arms of Katie (Sarah Drew from “Everwood”), the daughter of camp officer Billy Burrell (Gary Cole), who is himself damaged by the combat death of his son.

“Lyle is the all-American boy,” says Rosenbush. “He plays jazz. He plays baseball. But everybody looks at his skin and sees the yellow menace.”

Lyle’s brother, Lane (Leonardo Nam), tries to assert his American credentials by enlisting to fight with the U.S. Army in Europe, just as hundreds of second-generation Japanese American internees -- including director Nakano’s father -- actually did. Swearing a loyalty oath to a country that still denied citizenship to their parents, they joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team that became renowned for its bravery and a high casualty rate. They fought across Italy and Germany and were among the first troops to liberate Nazi concentration camps around Dachau.

They were then sent back to their American internment camps when their tours ended.

They had game

HOLLYWOOD has shown only passing interest in the Japanese American wartime experience. In 1951, “Go for Broke” starring Van Johnson (and featuring Nakano’s father, Lane, in a leading role) dealt with the 442nd’s experience as the moral awakening of a white officer. Internment was the subject of Alan Parker’s 1990 “Come See the Paradise” and the backdrop to the love story in 1999’s “Snow Falling on Cedars.” But in “American Pastime” it is baseball that again has to do the heavy metaphorical lifting. The game was no mere recreational distraction in the camps. The internees established leagues that sometimes played before crowds in the thousands, and their skills were good enough to let them compete in exhibitions against white high school and semipro teams.

“The quality of their game was so good that Caucasian teams would come to the camps to play against them,” says producer Rosenbush. “The white guys may have called them ‘dirty Japs.’ But they were also looking for the best game in town.” Despite the commercial touch he demonstrated with “High School Musical,” Rosenbush found no takers in Hollywood for his desire to “tell this all-American story through the prism of internment camps.” Shut out at home, he turned to Japanese investors to raise the $4-million budget.

The filmmakers shot “Pastime” in the Utah desert, using original blueprints to build a model of the camp about 90 miles from the spot where the now-vanished Topaz camp was located. And they cast dozens of surviving internees as extras, adding an extra emotional element to the shoot.

Whether the story will resonate in Japan remains an open question. Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which did well at the Japanese box office, may have whetted an appetite for little-told stories from that war. And both Nakamura, 56, and Judy Ongg, a well-known singer who plays the mother, are longtime stars here, though their fan base is older.

Ongg and Nakamura have a moving moment in the film when she sings her anguished husband a song from home to soothe him. “That was her love scene,” Ongg says. “The mothering thing is in our DNA, and the song tranquilizes us.” The scene underscores the conflicting pulls on our sense of identity: The Japanese-born patriarch who longs to be accepted as American, a man whose son is enraptured by jazz, a most American idiom, yet who takes solace from a traditional Japanese song.

It takes baseball to provide common ground, not just for father and son but for the internees and their white overlords as well. The movie culminates in a game, as it must.

And it’s obvious, too, who wins.

The Americans.

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bruce.wallace@latimes.com