I found this on Baseball Think Factory over the weekend and wanted to put it up here even thought they’ve already had a very good discussion about it. This is from the Los Angeles Japanese Daily News column written by a man named George Yoshinaga, about the hiring of Don Wakamatsu as manager of the Seattle Mariners.

The part on Wakamatsu is just a snippet of Yoshinaga’s column, which is actually quite long. I don’t normally like to do this, but I’m going to excerpt the whole portion on Wakamatsu since it’s the third item and doesn’t immediately pop up on your screen if you follow the link. Hopefully Mr. Yoshinaga can forgive me. Here’s the link to his column.

I’ll get back on track now and scrap my thoughts on my dancing skills and my “cute” and “pretty good looking dude,” matter.

I’ll start with the issue of Asian American vs. Japanese American.

I bring this up again because I was kind of disappointed when the news about Don Wakamatsu becoming the first Japanese American to gain the title of Manager of a Major League baseball team when the Seattle Mariners hired him to fill the role for the 2009 season, made the media.

The stories about Wakamatsu identi­fied him as the “first Asian American” to be named as a Big League Manager.

I wish he was identified as the “first Japanese American,” instead of “first Asian American.”

It makes me so proud that Wakamat­su was accorded the honor of heading a Big League team.

Perhaps this is because those of us who are older and lived through the crisis of World War II and were the target of racism, gain a sense of pride when a Japanese American accomplishes something that we could never imagine would happen.

When I was discussing the Waka­matsu story with one of my sons, I began to realize this because he said, “What’s the big deal what they call him, Asian American or Japanese American?”

It made me realize that one has to live through something to really un­derstand.

I’m sure that the younger generation have experienced some racism in their lives but how many can say they were tossed out of a restaurant because the owner, “didn’t serve Japs.”

Or by walking on a street and having a group of white kids yell out, “Hey, there’s some Japs. Let’s go get a few.”

Maybe they should have been ex­posed to traveling in the Southern States of the U.S. in days of yore, where there toilets marked “Whites” and “Blacks” and having to decide which ones Japa­nese Americans should use.

Heck, even in our nation’s Capitol, at the train station in Washington, D.C., there were drinking fountains marked “Whites” and “Blacks.”

So, I am proud I’m a Japanese Ameri­can, not an Asian American.

Thoughts?