A Pioneer for Japanese American Basketball

By Elise Takahama

If there was a last shot, a game-winning buzzer beater on the line, Tetsu Tanimoto would be the one to take it. 

This is how Kay Oda, and many other Nikkei basketball players in 1960s Southern California, remember Tanimoto’s skills on the court. 

“He was the most dominant player at the time in Southern California Nisei basketball,” said Oda, one of Tanimoto’s former teammates. “He’s the only one — to my knowledge — who could dunk the ball (in the Japanese American basketball community). It was unheard of in the early to mid-60s.”

Tanimoto earned his reputation after he joined the Lords, one of the best teams at the time in the Nisei Athletic Union (NAU), a Japanese American basketball league that grew in popularity after World War II, Oda said. It was glorious for a time, Tanimoto said recently, but the path there was marked with challenges: family turmoil, financial burdens and post-war anti-Japanese racism.

Tanimoto was born in Los Angeles in 1941, just as the United States was being pulled into World War II. His family lived in Boyle Heights at the time, and his father worked as a part-owner of a produce market.

Then came Executive Order 9066. The order, signed on Feb. 19, 1942, directed all Japanese people living on the West Coast to relocate to incarceration camps to protect “against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material.”

Within days, Tanimoto and his family — his parents, older sister and older brother — were forced to leave their home and sent to the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia. There, they slept in horse stalls until the U.S. government sent them to a military-run camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Ultimately, they would lose their home and their father, his business. Tanimoto’s younger brother would be born in camp in 1943. 

“It was a bitter moment for my father,” Tanimoto said, adding that while he doesn’t remember much about the camps, he knows military officials “tried to normalize things by having activities.”  His father became the manager of both the camp’s baseball team and the block they lived on, Block 22, said Tanimoto. 

After the war ended and Tanimoto and his family were allowed to return home, his parents never talked about their experiences at Heart Mountain — though he said the pain stayed with them for years afterward.

He remembers one day in particular when he was in junior high school and asked a teacher about Japanese American incarceration camps. 

“She said that it never happened,” he said. “It wasn’t in the history books.”

When Tanimoto went home that day, he told his dad about the conversation.

“My dad was angry,” Tanimoto said. “Visibly, emotionally angry. … He had kept it in for so long. Many (Japanese Americans) at that time said, ‘OK, you put your head down, go to work, get an education and forget about it.’ That’s the way Japanese people were at the time.”

After returning from camp, Tanimoto said his family of six couldn’t afford much. The U.S. government allowed them to stay in naval camps in Long Beach, but things weren’t much better there, Tanimoto said. 

“People in the Navy hated the Japanese because of what they did to a lot of people,” he said, adding that he and his siblings would often get into fights there. “We were not looked at with admiration.”

In 1948, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, within a mile of downtown. It wasn’t huge, but Tanimoto said he was grateful for a home they could all live in together. 

Meanwhile, his father continued working multiple jobs to support Tanimoto and his siblings. In 1958, Tanimoto enrolled at the University of Redlands, though he dropped out early to work after his father became seriously ill.

“I dropped out of school immediately and got a job with the civil service department of LA,” he said. “There was no other choice.”

He and his older brother quickly got jobs with the engineering survey team. 

“I was devastated when I had to quit Redlands,” he said. “I loved Redlands. I was getting letters and phone calls telling me to come back.”

Shortly after, however, Tanimoto was invited to join the Nisei Trading Lords, an all-star team in a Japanese American basketball league that was just starting to flourish. 

“(NAU founders) knew that the Japanese community was sports-minded and wanted to play basketball, but they’d go to the gyms and no one would let them play,” he said. 

Aki Komai, organizer of the Nisei Athletic Union, approached Richard “Duke” Llewellyn, then director of LA City Parks & Recreation, who was unaware that gyms were discriminating against Japanese Americans. “Duke went down to the gyms and insisted they allow Japanese Americans to play, and then informed the gyms that he himself would serve as referee for JA games,” Tanimoto said. It was a turning point for the league.

“Llewellyn saw the value of opening up space for Japanese Americans to play sports and continued his relationship with NAU until the 1960s as a game official,” according to a blog dedicated to Nikkei basketball. “Today, thanks in great part to Llewellyn’s foresight, the Japanese American basketball leagues’ players number in the tens of thousands.”

Basketball started gaining popularity in the Japanese American community in the 1920s, according to Nichi Bei. The teams were mostly organized by religious organizations and JA social clubs, but the Japanese Amateur Athletic Union in Northern and Southern California started forming formal leagues in 1933. The leagues did well at first but were put to an abrupt end during the war. 

Many tried to keep the basketball leagues active in the camps as a “distraction,” Tanimoto said. After the war, with anti-Japanese sentiment as strong as ever, it became difficult to restart leagues and find playing time in gyms. 

“We were just kids without a place to go,” Tanimoto said. “It took a guy like Duke to open it up … I just think that’s the way he was. He wanted everyone to be treated fairly. There was a lot of bad sentiment at the time, but he just decided it wasn’t right that we weren’t allowed to play basketball.”

Tanimoto eventually graduated from Cal State Los Angeles in 1965 with a degree in management science, eventually pursuing a master’s degree in economics and business. While attending CSULA, Tanimoto played on the 1963-64 Varsity basketball team that was coached by the legendary Bill Sharman. Sharman was both a Hall of Fame player with the Boston Celtics and coach and general manager with the Los Angeles Lakers.

After graduating and trying out a few different jobs, Tanimoto landed at the investment management company, Merrill Lynch. He worked there for more than 30 years before happily retiring. 

One of Tanimoto’s fondest memories was meeting Coach John Wooden at a luncheon at the San Kwo Low restaurant in Little Tokyo in 1962. Tanimoto was celebrating the California State title with his NAU team, the Lords. He eventually went on to become one of the original members of the John R. Wooden Award planning committee, which was established in 1975, and he has continued to serve on this committee for the past 46 years. 

When Tanimoto started coaching his godson’s Sabers basketball team from the East San Gabriel Valley Japanese Community Center, he reached out to Coach Wooden for advice. Coach Wooden spoke with him for hours, guiding him on how to effectively coach his Sabers boys. Coach Wooden continued to have an active interest in Tanimoto’s teams and the Japanese American leagues. In 2000, Coach Wooden served as one of the key speakers at the opening of the Japanese American National Museum’s “More than a Game” exhibit and gave the introduction to the JANM film “Crossover” that highlighted the history and influence of basketball in the Japanese American community. 

In the end, all three of Tanimoto’s children and each of his seven grandchildren have followed in his footsteps by playing basketball at different levels ranging from youth to collegiate. In addition, many of Tanimoto’s Sabers team players ended up coaching their own youth teams, emulating Coach Wooden’s style and philosophy.

Tanimoto’s main priority now is to spend time with his family — loved ones he might not have if he hadn’t dropped out of Redlands as a young man, he said. 

“Sometimes there are awful changes you don’t expect, ones you worry about, thinking they are going to affect you for the rest of your life,” he said. “But sometimes those changes can end up taking you somewhere really good.”

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