Although professional football has not always been a sport associated with athletes with a WWII incarceration story to tell, it took a player with a Super Bowl victory and 11 years in the NFL to generate increased national attention on the unjust wartime mass detention of Japanese Americans. Former New Orleans Saints linebacker Scott Fujita—the adopted son of a Japanese American father—became an unlikely spokesperson when he narrated the NFL Emmy-nominated documentary, 9066: Fear, Football, and the Theft of Freedom. In his role as narrator, he also became the emissary for the scrappy but proud camp football team, the Heart Mountain Eagles.
The popular sport of football provides a curious window into what happened when Japanese Americans were stripped of their freedom. Baseball has typically been celebrated as America’s favorite pastime, but it’s been said that football exceeds its national popularity by nearly 2 to 1. There are few Asian football players who can take the spotlight away from Japanese baseball luminaries like Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, but Fujita stands apart as a unique athlete who has excelled in this dominant American sport.
Perhaps the dearth of Japanese NFL players comes down to one thing: size. Just as there are no 7-foot Japanese American NBA basketball players, there are even fewer football players big enough to take on tough assignments like tackling a 250-pound running back.
At 6’ 5” and 250 pounds, Fujita was built for the sport he loved as a young boy. Adopted at a young age by former Gila River camp incarceree Rodney Fujita and wife Helen, he recognized he was also an odd choice for the face of Japanese Americans as people repeatedly questioned his fair skin and “funny” name. He knew he was unique, particularly as he aged, and as he aptly put it, he “grew and grew, and grew and grew and grew.”
As Fujita says, “I don’t have a drop of Japanese blood running through my body but being the big white guy who played football with the Japanese last name, people would ask about that. If nothing else, I think I just saw myself as sort of a conduit to this story and to help be a part of a bigger conversation.”
But before he could completely take on the role of conduit, he needed his father’s permission. As the son of the educator and football coach born at Gila River and growing up in Oxnard, California, Fujita knew his father as someone who shared certain characteristics of other Nisei men, “He’s from a pretty silent generation, right? He didn't share a whole lot and was not overly communicative with how he felt about things.” As his father’s son, he realized, “I was worried that this was something that might open old wounds.”
However, after giving his father a copy of Bradford Pearson’s book, The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in WWII America, the younger Fujita received his father’s enthusiastic support. Rodney Fujita, whose incarcerated family includes an aunt who is still alive, was initially hesitant because his parents rarely spoke about it and he knew there was “a lot of pain and suffering.”
However, through the process of learning more about camp, both father and son became increasingly proud of their heritage as they became more aware of the sacrifices made by people like Rodney’s father Nagao, who enlisted in the celebrated 442nd Regimental Combat Team while his wife Lillie and their family were still imprisoned at Gila River. Ironically, the couple had gotten married prior to being sent to camp just so they could stay together but ended up continents apart when his grandfather accepted the call to serve.
Filming the documentary also gave the Fujitas the opportunity to travel to the site of the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming to see firsthand what their ancestors endured. On a blistery cold and windy day, they stood overlooking the huge plain and distinctive mountain to experience how grueling it was for their forefathers forced to leave their California homes to live in this place of freezing desolation.
Even though Heart Mountain could be bitterly oppressive, a resilient football team rose from the dust and dirt. Consisting of a band of relatively small young men who averaged 125 pounds each, the Heart Mountain Eagles ended up playing against the best high school teams in Wyoming’s surrounding areas of Worland and Lovell—and won. Their winning record was only broken by a single touchdown in the final game of their second and last season.
According to author Pearson, despite this crushing loss it was a moment when the Eagles proved to everybody in the state of Wyoming that they were a “real football team.”
Fortunately, several of the people who were there when the Eagles played, including former player George Iseri, are still alive to talk about it and are featured in the film. Although most of them were young at the time, men like Bacon Sakatani, Mike Hatchimonji and Hal Keimi recount all the familiar things many might have heard about camp life: the crowded conditions, the lack of privacy, and the long train ride to get there.
For many who’ve never heard these stories, there’s nothing better than hearing it from people, now in their 90s, who were there.
For Fujita, meeting and talking to these survivors meant even more to him on a personal level. As someone who sometimes feels like he is an interloper among Japanese Americans, he expresses his pride at being part of the community that bore these men. As he puts it, “It allowed me to connect in an even deeper way to the story and those who had actually lived it.”
Being a spokesperson also comes with the recognition that there are those who still don’t know much, if anything, about what happened more than 80 years ago. He recounts the story of a young teammate who, not realizing Fujita was Japanese, blurted out a denigrating remark about Japanese Americans being wartime enemies who deserved what they got. In an angry but teachable moment, the player with the funny last name was happy he could share the story of what happened to his family and “turn a light on for people who otherwise may have never heard about it.”
“I'm grateful for the power of story and the opportunity I’ve been given to tell the story,” Fujita exudes. “We’re in a period of time now where words like diversity and inclusion are under assault. I think regardless of one's politics, we all see the value in telling unique and diverse stories.” He is particularly grateful to the NFL for helping expose this story because “the ripple effect of these things can echo into eternity unless we choose to do something different about it.”
© 2025 Sharon Yamato
