Les derniers des Asahis

Les derniers des Asahis is a Canadian baseball-themed novel written by Alain M. Bergeron and published in French in 2024.

The novel follows central character Bobby Hiroshi Shuuto who joins the Vancouver Asahi, the prestigious and highly successful baseball team made up of members of the Japanese-Canadian community around Vancouver, BC, in the spring of 1941. Shuuto, whose idol is Bob Feller, is still a teenager, living on the family farm in nearby Maple Ridge, BC, but makes the team thanks to his outstanding right arm and a trick pitch he has developed, the "Shuuto ball", a type of screwball that leaves hitters baffled, as they have never seen anything like it. Bobby is the youngest player on the team, made largely of grown men who work various day jobs. They play their home games at Powell Park, a makeshift ballpark in the heart of Vancouver's "Little Tokyo" neighborhood, in front of large crowds including members of the Japanese-Canadian community but also regular baseball fans who have come to appreciate the Asahis' excellent play and love of the game. Their opponents are other local teams, but they also win their sixth straight title as the best Japanese team in the Pacific Northwest , defeating a similar team from Seattle, WA. The Asahis are an immense source of pride for their community.

Shuuto's season with the Asahis is marked by success on the field (although they fail to win the city championship) but also manifestations of racism, both overt and institutional - for example, even though all members of the team were born in Canada, none of them has the right to vote, as this would not be extended to persons of Asian descent in Canada until 1948. Shuuto proves to be quite popular and has a particular knack for connecting with the team's young fans, who idolize the Asahis, soon having his own coterie of dedicated fans. He is good enough that he and a teammate pique the interest of legendary scout Joe Cambria, who intends to recommend the pair to the Washington Senators as the season is winding down and Bobby starts attending college at the University of British Columbia. By then, Canada is already at war with Japan, and the mistreatment of Canadian POWs in Hong Kong has increased the level of hostility towards Japanese Canadians, but their world really collapses after the attack on Pearl Harbor that December.

The Canadian Government's reaction to Pearl Harbor is borderline hysterical, like it was the case in the U.S., as the Japanese community is seen as some sort of dangerous fifth column that is plotting to attack the country from the inside. Japanese institutions are shut down, children can no longer attend schools, community members are subject to a strict curfew, and things only get worse from there. Bobby's father is forced to abandon his farm to do road-building work in the Rocky Mountains, and soon the entire family is uprooted, first sent in a notorious detention facility at Hastings Park, the site of the province of British Columbia's annual agricultural exhibition in Vancouver where they are held in demeaning conditions. They are then encouraged to either go work on sugar beet farms in Alberta, or be deported to the province's interior, to shoddily-built resettlement camps. Bobby ends up first in Lillooet with his mother and younger sister; their father is eventually able to join them, but in the meantime all of their belongings back in Maple Ridge have been seized and forcibly sold for pennies on the dollar. The displaced manage to organize life around the new settlement, including organizing a baseball team which helps to break down barriers with surrounding villages, who also like baseball. Bobby is at the center of these efforts. The family is then displaced again, this time to New Denver, BC, when Bobby's younger sister catches tuberculosis and has to go to the only treatment center open to Japanese Canadians (New Denver is the largest of the various displacement camps set up around the province). Bobby is able to continue playing ball, as other former Asahis are also around, but by 1943 the government's policy is that the Japanese-Canadians either have to move east of the Rockies, or be deported back to Japan. The community is thus scattered to the four winds.

Bobby eventually finds his way to Montréal, QC, where he obtains employment and is eventually able to resume his university studies (he becomes a physical education teacher, never having lost his ability to connect with kids) in a city where everyone thinks he is Chinese, since they have hardly ever seen any Japanese and no one has an inkling about what Japanese-Canadians have gone through. He is able to bring his mother and sister to live with him (his father has passed away in the meantime, destroyed physically and mentally by all the hardship he had to endure) and builds a new life, still playing baseball in local amateur leagues and coaching kids. As he grows older, some persons start to revive the memory of the Asahis, including Pat Adachi, who was one of his admirers as a young Asahi fan, clipping every article she could find about the team, taking her own pictures and collecting players' autographs. She organizes team get-togethers starting in the 1960s. He manages to re-connect with some of his former teammates - a few of them had made it Montreal, like him - and lives long enough to see Pat publish a book about the team, the Canadian Government issue a formal apology for its mistreatment of the community in 1988, the team being admitted to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and be recognized by a postage stamp. However, the Little Tokyo neighborhood, whose businesses were shuttered in 1941, never recovered and has become an unrecognizable slum; he and his sister are able to visit the old family farm, fifty years after being forcibly removed, however. When he passes away at 98, he and his former teammate, third baseman Kaye Kaminishi are the last two remaining members of the Asahis - the Last of the Asahis of the title - but while what could have been can never be recovered, they have at least reconquered their dignity.

While the character of Bobby Shuuto and his immediate family are fictional, everyone else in the book is real. Kaminishi did in fact live to be over 100, and Pat Adachi did indeed write the history of the team based in large part on the materials she collected as a young girl. When the family is interned in the interior of B.C., they run into other youngsters like the future scientific journalist David Suzuki, the novelist Joy Ogawa and the architect Raymond Morikawa, all of whom would outlive their traumatic childhood experience to become leading members of Canadian society. The research that the author undertook for the book was exhaustive and it provides a thorough and realistic picture of what Japanese Canadians had to endure.

Bergeron was a highly successful author of books for children and young adults when he began working on what was his first adult novel (although it can be read by young adults as well). He explains in an afterword that, even though he was a baseball fan, he had never heard about the team or the story of Japanese Canadians (those of a generation slightly older than him would probably have been more aware, as the events leading to the 1988 apology received extensive media coverage); his curiosity was triggered by the 2019 Canada Post stamps, which led him into a rabbit hole of investigating who were these players and what happened to them. The result was this outstanding book which is begging for both an English and a Japanese translation.

Further Reading

• Alain M. Bergeron: Les derniers des Asahis, Éditions Druide, Montréal, QC, 2024. ISBN ISBN 978-2-89711-707-8