Those who have not followed Higashioka’s career closely might know him best as one of the players the New York Yankees sent to San Diego for outfielder Juan Soto this winter. He is 34 years old, grew up in Southern California and is a solid defense-first catcher. Teammates will tell you he is an affable clubhouse staple, the kind of guy for whom players root — the kind of player whose homers always seem to come when they are most needed.
He is also, as it happens, the grandson of the late G. Shigeru Higashioka, a Japanese American man who fought in World War II as part of the 100th Infantry Battalion, one of more decorated units in Army history. Higashioka fought for the United States from 1943 to 1945 while the country imprisoned the rest of his family at an incarceration camp in Salinas, Calif.
G. Shigeru Higashioka was one of several thousand Nisei soldiers, children of Japanese American immigrants who desired to fight despite having to demand the right to do so because the U.S. considered them “enemy aliens,” a classification that left them barred from military service until midway through the war. Because of long-standing prejudices, their work was not well-known to those outside the Army, nor lauded in the way others were in the immediate aftermath of the war. But in 2011, the unit was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. Kyle Higashioka, who has military service on both sides of his family, was presented with a replica of that medal Monday.
“Japanese Americans at that time were not exactly in a great position,” Kyle Higashioka said Monday. “But the choice that they made to almost prove themselves to America through service in the war was pretty incredible, and I take a lot of lessons from that.”
Because of Kyle Higashioka’s connection to the military through his family and his work with the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, the MLB Players Trust helped put him in touch with the National Veterans Network. Executive Director Christine Sato-Yamazaki asked her research team to look into Higashioka’s grandfather’s service.
They found that he was a student in Tulsa in 1943 when he joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which traced a harrowing and crucial path through Italy and France. Kyle Higashioka accompanied Sato-Yamazaki for a tour of the museum Monday. Retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who previously served as secretary of veterans affairs and Army chief of staff, also joined him, explaining that Higashioka’s grandfather had been awarded a Bronze Star after leaving his cover to distract an enemy unit while a group of fellow soldiers escaped.
Shinseki also told Higashioka that his grandfather probably qualified for a Purple Heart, like nearly 4,000 other members of his decorated regiment: That unit staged a dangerous rescue of a trapped unit on the border of France and Germany in October 1944, among other maneuvers crucial to Allied success on the Western Front, a résumé that earned it reputation for making an outsize impact.
“I had one interaction when I asked [about his service] and he was not in good health anymore,” Higashioka said. “He said he was just trying to survive. But clearly, it was a little more than that.”
But his grandfather was not the only person about whom Higashioka learned as Sato-Yamazaki’s team looked into his family. It seemed his great uncles, the ones who endured the post-Pearl Harbor years in incarceration camps, passed time with something they would eventually pass down: Baseball.
Sato-Yamazaki explained that first-generation Japanese immigrants formed teams when they arrived in the United States, so the game was already a part of their new stateside lives. When they were forced into camps, Japanese Americans were housed in rows of barracks, and each barrack would form its own team.
“Perseverance was a big character quality for Japanese Americans,” Sato-Yamazaki said. “They just wanted to do the best they could under the circumstances. When they went into the camps, the Nisei formed the teams.”
Sato-Yamazaki’s team found a camp newspaper that confirmed Higashioka’s great uncles played baseball at Poston War Relocation Center. Kyle Higashioka said he always heard family stories about his other grandfather, who served for the United States in the Pacific Theater, an officer supposedly so good at baseball that the enlisted soldiers would let him play with them. But as for his Japanese American great uncles, “I had no idea,” Higashioka said.
“I guess everybody in my family was a baseball player.”
