A teacher scored an $8 cardigan at a thrift store. It led his students to a piece of Japanese Canadian history

When Mike Wood bought a cardigan for $8 at a thrift store in his hometown of Prince George, B.C., he knew nothing about the item’s history. 

Neither did the elementary school teacher expect it to pique so much curiosity in his fifth- and sixth-grade students after he hung the cardigan in his classroom, eventually leading to a school project on the early history of Japanese Canadians.

Wood’s students at Bert Edwards Science and Technology School in North Kamloops discovered that the sweater’s logo belongs to a Japanese Canadian baseball team, the North Kamloops Mohawks, established in the 1950s. 

Wood says he’s proud of his students’ investigation, where they also discovered that most of the team’s members were sent to internment camps during the Second World War.

“Our new B.C. curriculum is like … letting the kids guide where the learning goes,” he said. “This was just a perfect example of the kids guiding what happens.”

He says his students were figuring out whether the Mohawks were a hockey or football team when they found an article online that revealed the team’s origins. 

An integral part of Kamloops

According to author George Uyeda, former president of the Kamloops Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre and brother-in-law of Mohawks player Gord Miyahara, a group of young men in their 20s formed the Kamloops Nisei Athletic Club (KNAC) in 1952 as a way to show that Japanese Canadians were an integral part of Kamloops. The word “nisei” means second-generation Japanese Canadians.

“After the war, we had quite a problem of racism [against] Japanese,” Uyeda, 78, told CBC News.

“[The team] tried to instill [in people’s minds] that they were good sportsmen and they did very well for the Kamloops community.”

KNAC, which later changed its name to the North Kamloops Mohawks, won two consecutive B.C. League Championships and two B.C. Interior Baseball League tournaments before disbanding in 1957 due to the lack of Japanese players.

The team was inducted to the Kamloops Sports Hall of Fame in April 2013 for the pride they brought to the Japanese Canadian community and the city.

Teacher Mike Wood and his students at Bert Edwards Science and Technology School spoke to the CBC’s Doug Herbert about how a sweater bought from a thrift store had inspired a semester-long research project on the North Kamloops Mohawks baseball team.

‘Lessons on sportsmanship, perseverance, racism’

Wood says the students invited Uyeda to school for an interview, where he showed them a brown-and-white leather jacket donning the KNAC and Mohawks logos.

Uyeda also encouraged the students to visit the Kamloops Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre to learn more about the history of internment camps, and get help looking up old newspaper clippings about the team from the Kamloops Museum and Archives.

“There’s nothing more real than actually being an investigative journalist and finding this information out on their own,” Wood said of the students.

With information and photos from the archives and families of the team’s members, the students crafted baseball cards featuring all 23 players and wrote an essay on the team’s history.

“This story can teach us lessons on sportsmanship, perseverance, racism, and to not judge a book by its cover,” they wrote.

Uyeda says he’s glad to share an important part of Japanese Canadian history with the students.

“Hopefully the students will learn from the past and what happened to the Japanese community at the time during the war.”

The project received a lot of positive feedback from the principal and fellow teachers, says Wood, adding he is considering donating the cardigan, along with his students’ essay, to the Kamloops Sports Hall of Fame.