Fairly by coincidence, the forty fourth working of the Japan Cup (G1) set for Nov. 24 comes up just some days after this reporter ventured into the Large Metropolis for a tour of the Japanese American Nationwide Museum, situated on the nook of First Avenue and Alameda, arduous by downtown Los Angeles. I attempted to not conflate the occasions with undue significance, however failed. There clearly was one thing within the air.
This 12 months’s renewal of the two,400-meter (about 1 1/2-mile) Japan Cup at huge Tokyo Racecourse provides the primary time in a very long time a rooting curiosity for United States followers. Not that there’s a North American horse within the area—that has not occurred for the reason that grade 1 winner Up With the Birds flew the Canadian flag there in 2014—however high contenders Auguste Rodin and Goliath brim with résumés that hyperlink them to those shores.
Coolmore’s Auguste Rodin is a son of 2006 Japan Cup winner Deep Influence, who in flip was a son of Sunday Silence, the U.S. Horse of the 12 months in 1989, whose mixture of Kentucky and California DNA revolutionized Japan’s bloodstock universe. Auguste Rodin additionally had the nice style to win North America’s richest grass race by capturing the 2023 Breeders’ Cup Turf (G1T) at Santa Anita Park below a rail-skimming Ryan Moore journey.
Goliath is a 4-year-old German gelding who dismantled a stellar area within the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes (G1) in July, a efficiency so placing that Kentucky’s John Stewart of Resolute Farm needed to have him. So he bought him, most of him anyway, and consequently, Goliath may give an American proprietor a Japan Cup victory for the primary time since 1991, when Golden Pheasant got here by for the Nationwide Hockey League’s L.A. Kings proprietor Bruce McNall and his favourite hockey participant, Wayne Gretzky.
Golden Pheasant wins the 1991 Japan Cup at Tokyo Racecourse
There isn’t a reference to the Thoroughbred racing relationship of Japan and america on the Japanese American Nationwide Museum. At the very least, not as such. Even so, the deeply entwined racing historical past of the 2 nations presents a narrative of ebb and circulate going again greater than half a century to the early Nineteen Seventies, when an rising Japanese racing economic system started reaching into American bloodstock for invigoration.
California was a selected goal. Shigeo Yoshida purchased champion mare Typecast for a then-record $725,000 out of the Westerly Farm dispersal and took her house to breed a Japanese champion. His cousin, Zenya Yoshida, turned a significant participant in U.S. racing with such stakes winners as Izanami, Miss Tokyo, and Ski Goggle, skilled by California-based Tommy Doyle, in addition to partial possession of Wajima, champion 3-year-old colt of 1975, and in 1991 the total buy and importation of Sunday Silence.
Horses with U.S. connections gained the primary two runnings of the Japan Cup in 1981 and 1982, then one other in 1988 earlier than Golden Pheasant. Since then, American stables can declare solely a handful of placings, whereas hometown Japanese runners have come to dominate even their European rivals.
Flash ahead to current years, when the welcome mat has been rolled out for Japanese runners competing in U.S. occasions. Their presence has given home racing worldwide cachet, and so they have responded with two Breeders’ Cup victories and a close to miss within the Kentucky Derby (G1). At Del Mar earlier this month, Japanese horses completed second and third within the Breeders’ Cup Turf (G1T) to repeat winner Insurgent’s Romance .
As I wandered by the exhibition halls of the Japanese American Nationwide Museum, I couldn’t assist however marvel on the arc of historical past that introduced waves of immigrants from Japan to America, first as laborers, then settlers, then enterprise house owners and civic leaders with multigenerational roots in a rustic that betrayed them so comprehensively through the racial panic following the assault on Pearl Harbor by Japanese imperial forces Dec. 7, 1941.
On the time, there have been greater than 100,000 folks of Japanese delivery or People of Japanese descent residing on the West Coast. On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Govt Order 9066 authorizing the evacuation and internment of 110,000 Japanese People, two-thirds of them residents by delivery.
What’s this bought to do with horse racing? Effectively, nothing, actually, until the customer pauses within the Contested Histories exhibition of the Japanese American Nationwide Museum—replete with artifacts from the 75 internment camps and detention facilities established from Washington State to Arkansas to maintain Japanese People behind barbed wire—and watches the video recollections of Jeanne Aiko Miyagishima. She was 7, residing within the Bay Space on that Sunday morning in December of 1941:
“We had the radio on, and my dad was simply so upset when he heard about Pearl Harbor,” Miyagishima says. “He had change into so Americanized, he did not even need us to go and be taught Japanese. He stated, ‘You are People. You be taught every thing in English.’
“We had been all despatched to Stockon meeting middle, which was a racetrack,” Miyagishima continues. “They whitewashed the stalls, and had some folks residing there. My sister, Gladys, stated there was a girl who’d simply had a child. They’d assigned her to a kind of locations, and you may’t clear a horse stall, make it livable. My mom requested her if she wished to commerce locations, as a result of we had a spot within the barracks. That is how a lot discretion they used once they assigned folks.”
Later, I stood within the alcove containing the Ireicho, a e book containing the names and birthdates of greater than 125,000 first- and second-generation People of Japanese descent faraway from their houses to jail camps through the conflict with Japan. I used to be there to stamp an ink dot by the names of the Hosaka household of San Diego, whose oldest daughter Ayako was my mom’s childhood good friend. As my mom instructed it, “At some point Ayako was at school, then the subsequent day she was gone.”
Arrayed on the partitions surrounding the Ireicho had been vertical planks topped by glass jars containing a wide range of soil samples. On every plank had been written the names of the locations folks had been imprisoned, amongst them Santa Anita, Stockton, and Tanforan, all lively California racetracks commandeered for wartime use. The soil was taken from every of the numerous websites.
The round-up of Japanese People is a kind of darkish spots arduous to erase, it doesn’t matter what diploma of nationwide safety was thought-about at stake. In the long run, it appeared as if the forces that promoted the draconian Immigration Act of 1924, just about eliminating authorized immigration from Japan, had found in conflict panic one other technique to train their racial animus. It was really useful by one authorities official that anybody with even one-sixteenth Japanese blood be eliminated to a camp.
Nonetheless, the mass relocation and imprisonment of Japanese People flew within the face of a raft of stories from revered officers that discovered no sound foundation for allegations of a safety threat. Amongst them was, Lt. Cmdr. Kenneth Ringle of the Workplace of Naval Intelligence, who had been finding out the attainable menace of the “Issei” inhabitants since mid-1940 and concluded:
“That, briefly, your entire ‘Japanese Drawback’ has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely due to the bodily traits of the folks; that it’s no extra severe than the issues of the German, Italian, and Communistic parts of america inhabitants, and eventually that it must be dealt with on the premise of the person, no matter citizenship, and never on a racial foundation.”
Individuals of Japanese ancestry arrive on the Santa Anita Meeting Middle in 1942
We did it anyway. The Hosaka household was taken by prepare from San Diego to Santa Anita and lived in stalls till they had been transferred first to the Poston camp on seized Native American land in Arizona, then on to the Crystal Metropolis camp in Texas. The Miyagishima household went from Stockton to the Gila River camp, additionally in Arizona, and remained there till the camps started closing in late 1944. Greater than 1,800 of the imprisoned died within the camps. There have been no documented instances of wartime espionage traced to Japanese People.
Of all the nice racing occasions this pilgrim has attended—which incorporates the Melbourne Cup (G1), the French Derby (G1), two Dubai World Cups (G1), a bunch of Kentucky Derbies (G1), and the Doncaster St. Leger (G1) with an English Triple Crown on the road—there may be nothing that compares to the pomp and ceremony of a Japan Cup.
The horses are seen reverently within the huge strolling ring by hundreds, then performed into the beginning gate by a giant brass band, whereas the official starter ascends to his place through hydraulic carry to the cheers of greater than 100,000 followers waving white cloths, chanting in delirious unison. The winner is well known by blankets, garlands and imperial recognition. The successful coach, proprietor, jockey, and groom are accorded their personal platforms, elevating them above their vanquished opponents. Then extra music.
Frank Angst, BloodHorse editorial director, is on the scene this week to supply eyewitness accounts for all issues Japan Cup and Japanese racing. Fortunate him. Nothing appears like extra enjoyable, however a day spent on the Japanese American Nationwide Museum in Los Angeles—Little Tokyo to be exact—turned out to be each bit as rewarding.