Discover Nikkei spoke with Amy “Emiko” Hever, Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Trust, about her roots, cross-cultural upbringing, and work in philanthropy and professional sports. From her family’s early ties to New York’s Japanese community and experiences during World War II to her own years growing up in New Jersey and Tokyo, Hever reflects on how migration and transnational ties have shaped her perspective.
In this conversation, she traces the common threads of a career spanning the nonprofit and sports sectors, leading to her current role with the Major League Baseball Players Trust, where she helps advance player-driven causes and community initiatives across borders. Through these experiences, Hever offers insight into identity, belonging, and the evolving presence of Japanese and Japanese American players in the game today. She reflects on her efforts to help players use their platforms to give back, and on how stories of connection and community continue to resonate both on and off the field.
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Matthew Sueda (MS): Please tell me a little bit about yourself.
Amy “Emiko” Hever (AH): My roots to Japan trace back to my mother’s side, where her father (my grandfather) was born in Japan in the Nagano region, and her mother (my grandmother) was born in NY to a Japanese father (my great-grandfather) and Irish American mother (my great-grandmother). I guess that makes me between a Sansei and a Yonsei, if you will. My mother’s hapa and her mother (my grandmother) was also hapa. My grandfather was a Japanese national from Nagano. My family’s story is an East Coast story—both my grandfather and great-grandfather had settled in the New York area, so there is a somewhat unique perspective there.
MS: Do you know why they moved to New York by any chance?
AH: I unfortunately do not have a lot of clarity on my grandmother’s side. We believe her father was from the Yokohama area, but we really don’t know what the truth is because any records on him and his family were destroyed in the Great Yokohama fire. We know he came to the United States through Washington, but why New York? Was it something that was premeditated? Even that I don’t really know because they just didn’t talk about it. He wound up serving for a family called the Kips in New York, where he was the cook. And that’s where he ended up meeting my great-grandmother, who served as the governess of the Kips family.
Now, on my grandfather’s side, New York was premeditated. He worked for a silk company called Hara and Company out of Nagano Prefecture. He came to the United States before World War II, certainly intentionally so, to help expand the business in the United States. He wound up meeting my grandmother, and to some extent the rest was history. But he actually was in an arranged marriage, so it was kind of a big family deal when he met my grandmother and decided that he was going to marry an American, albeit a Japanese American, but an American.
MS: Is this family history something that you talked a lot about within your family growing up, or is it something you learned more about as an adult?
AH: Not as much as I would have hoped, unfortunately. My grandfather kept meticulous records by way of diaries. Unfortunately, they were lost. And even if they were recovered, I’m not so sure that someone would be able to transcribe them from the script that he wrote. There isn’t a lot of history, but our family, including my family in Japan, stayed very, very close.
My mom was the oldest. She just passed recently. She was born December 16, 1941, literally right after Pearl Harbor. She was born and raised in the Bronx during a very, very challenging time. Mom could remember standing in lines at the tail end of the Depression, waiting for food and rations. They grew up quite poor. There’s a history, a story to that, too.
Really the reason why I think not much was shared or said was because of the times and to not be associated as a Japanese. It was to try and be identified as an American, and certainly that came along with some other expectations as well. My mother never learned Japanese until much later on as an adult.
When the war began, Hara and Company recalled my grandfather to Japan. As we understand it, he was recalled with the expectation that he would serve in the imperial army, which he didn’t do.
He had said—this part we do know—that if he had returned to Japan with my grandmother and my mom, he didn’t think they’d make it. He didn’t think they would survive. Why that comment was made, I don’t know. He made the choice and decision to stay in the United States, and as a result everything was taken from him—his job, as well as his assets. The bank account was drained to zero, and they had to basically subsist on my grandmother’s salary. My grandmother worked a number of years as the secretary to the President at Fordham University in New York.
I also recall stories that my grandparents worked through either the American Red Cross or an international Red Cross to send care packages to Japan, because my grandfather’s family was struggling, as were most. They sent food packages, things that would just help them get through really the roughest parts of the war. We also know that the Japanese American Catholics who were based in New York provided a great deal of support to my family as well.
My grandfather converted to Catholicism in order to marry my grandmother. My grandmother, being hapa, was half Irish, half Japanese, raised Catholic. Back in that time, even though he converted, they couldn’t get married inside the church. They had to get married on the steps. It was an interesting memory that I have. I do know that the Catholic church, to include the Japanese American Catholics who were in the NY area, provided a lot of social support to our family.
The FBI was constantly in the picture during the war. They would interview my grandparents on the regular. We know that there was a file on my grandfather, inches thick. We tried to gain access to it, but unfortunately, the FBI already purged it by the time we made the request. My grandparents were not only being interviewed on the regular, but also having to travel to Washington to be interviewed. Then at some point during the war, my grandfather was deported.
At that time, on the East Coast, there weren’t as many Japanese as the West Coast experience. He was deported by bus, and perhaps surprisingly, in quite an unsupervised manner. The bus crashed near Chicago and he broke his leg, wound up in the hospital, and was somehow lost in the system, which is interesting because you would think certainly he would stand out, right? So my grandmother just traveled to Chicago, picked him up, brought him back to New York, and the process started all over again. In the end, he never actually wound up being deported during the wartime.
MS: Could you tell me a little bit about your upbringing?
AH: I was born in Bergen County, NJ in a suburban commuter town. I have an older sister who was born in Hawai‘i, at Tripler Army Medical Center as my dad was in the service at the time as a Navy officer. It’s obviously much more exciting to say you were born in Hawai‘i. [laughs]
This part of Bergen County was not very ethnically diverse at the time. It was interesting because from an Asian American standpoint, there was only one other Japanese American, in my town when we were little. It was a great place to grow up, and it will always be one of the places I identify as home.
For my mom, who looks completely of Asian descent, you have to remember she’s a woman from the Bronx and had everything Bronx attitude about her. We never felt as a family out of place. Believe it or not, there were actually more issues of bias much later on in my teenage years when we returned to the U.S. They were those random incidents where you hear the, “go back to where you came from” kind of comments.
When I was nine years old, we moved from New Jersey to Tokyo. My dad worked for IBM. In the early ’80s he was presented with a great opportunity to transfer to Japan, where we lived for three and a half years. I attended the International School of the Sacred Heart. It was one of the most amazing experiences in my life.
Being the minority as an American in an international setting, going to a school that really was taught by a majority of British and Australian educators among others, and going to school with students not only from countries that don’t exist in the same kind of boundaries as today, but in some cases, countries I’d never heard of before as a young 9 year old—it just changed my whole perspective of the world at a very impressionable time in my life.
That bug to travel internationally was instilled upon me very early, as well as an appreciation for cultures, and for cross-cultural understanding which influenced my studies and my career, no question. After my dad’s assignment we returned to New Jersey. We had kept our home in Bergen County, so I finished out grade school in NJ before going on to college, where I majored in history and East Asian studies.
MS: It feels like there aren’t a lot of Sansei and Yonsei today who have spent time, extended time, in Japan. So I'm curious, how do you make sense of that experience? Another way of putting that is, how does that inform the way that you understand yourself, or how do you make sense of your cultural identity?
AH: Yeah, it’s incredibly interesting. And I think that it’s evolved as well over time. Certainly, I’ve always had an appreciation for being someone who is of Japanese descent and being Asian American. In Japan, it was interesting, and also because of living in Tokyo. And even though I went to an international school and we lived in a very expat community, there wasn’t a sense that I belonged there as a Japanese. It’s hit or miss as to whether people even know that I’m Asian or not. Because essentially, I’m a third. My mom was a quarter Irish and three quarters Japanese. So my percentage is less than half.
In Japan, my school was so diverse—students from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, every part of the globe—and many of those students were hapa. Many were Japanese and something—French, British, Dutch, Chinese, American, and so on. So there was a relatability there for me. There was a different sense of fitting in, especially with those students.
I think overall, it’s fascinating. I still stay connected to those students like it was yesterday, more so than even students that I went to school with through high school or college. There’s some kind of unique bond there, a unique influence. With the international school, a lot of students were in and out. So someone might only be there for three years, maybe five years. This was one of a number of things many of us had in common and were very much unique to that experience in Japan.
Coming back to the United States, at that point I was in the latter part of middle school, and I really didn’t fit in. I struggled to come back and integrate and assimilate into the United States. It took a long time. I think part of that was certainly driven by my age. The other was that I was attending an all-girls Catholic school in Japan. Now, I was coming back to a public co-ed school. It was a cultural shock all over again. I was truly a bit lost. Even though the demographics of Northern New Jersey were changing quite significantly—there was a large influx of Korean families into the area—it took me a long time to settle back in.
© 2025 Matthew Sueda
