Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms by Anita Heiss

heard of baseball, but I don’t know the rules.’
    â€˜It’s an American game, with a bat and a ball, and men run around a diamond.’ He draws a diamond in the air with his finger.
    Mary sees a connection and is excited. ‘We have a game here called rounders, it sounds a little like your baseball. You hit the ball with a wooden bat, sometimes we use a cricket bat that my dad made out of wood, but some of the boys will just use a broom handle if they have to. You have to hit the balland then run from base to base and get there before the ball is thrown there. Is that the same as baseball?’
    â€˜Yes, that sounds a lot like baseball. It’s called rounders?’
    â€˜Yes.’ Mary doesn’t understand how or why the Japanese are playing American baseball. ‘How do you know this American game, though, and aren’t you at war with the Americans?’
    â€˜We played baseball when I was at university. We have been playing baseball in Japan for many, many years. It is very popular. We had a baseball team in the 1880s but the year I was born, in 1919 is when Japan first got two professional teams. It’s strange now; Japan and America are at war. We hate each other. I don’t know if we will have baseball again when I go home.’
    Mary is taken aback by the comment. Hiroshi talking about going home upsets her; she doesn’t want him to leave. But Hiroshi hasn’t seen the change in her expression and keeps talking.
    â€˜Back home I followed the Yomiuri Giants. We called them the Tokyo Giants.’ Hiroshi laughs for the first time in months. He shakes his head. ‘Tokyo Giants is so American. We are so much like the country we are at war with.’
    â€˜And you played baseball in the camp?’
    â€˜Yes, we made the baseball gloves ourselves from old boots, and masks for the catcher. We would take one grille out of the Kendo masks we used in our own Japanese martial arts and we would turn it into a catcher’s mask.’ Hiroshi puts his hands up to his face.
    Mary doesn’t ask about Kendo because she is conscious of time and wants to know more about the Japanese playingAmerican baseball with other soldiers. ‘Did you play sport with the Italians?’ Mary asks, knowing that they were the first prisoners to arrive in Cowra. ‘Everyone says they are very funny.’
    â€˜No!’ Hiroshi says aggressively, a tone that Mary has not heard him use before. He sees her reaction to his voice, and repeats more softly, ‘No. I am sorry, no, we didn’t.’
    There’s silence for a few seconds and then he adds, ‘We did not mix with the Italians. We had our separate places of living.’
    â€˜Yes, but surely they would let you play baseball against each other?’
    â€˜We did nothing with them,’ Hiroshi says, conscious that Mary might judge him for hating the Italians as well as the Americans. Hiroshi hasn’t really heard Mary speaking about hating anyone. He thinks Mary is a nice girl who is too young and probably too sheltered to understand anything of life in a prisoner of war camp, regardless of how much she might like to try. ‘They are very different to us. They sing a lot and play instruments.’
    â€˜What instruments did they play, and what did they sing?’
    Hiroshi is not eager to respond, he did not and does not care for the Italians. Like most of the Japanese soldiers, he feels an unspoken level of contempt for them, perhaps because they were allowed out into the community while the Japanese weren’t. Or perhaps it is because they were happy to wait the war out in Australia and didn’t wear the pressure of shame for being a prisoner of war. He is sure the Italians don’t have an Emperor or a centuries-old philosophy of dying withhonour. He has read that the Italians had signed an armistice with the Allies, which makes him hate them more. In Hiroshi’s eyes they have no shame,