Wat Kept Playing

Discussion questions: 

• Can a person be American and Japanese…or Mexican, or French, or Vietnamese, etc?

• How was basketball important to Wat? Do you think his life would have been different without access to basketball?

• How do you think people felt seeing a Japanese American player on the basketball court?

• How do you think people in Japanese American communities felt about people being imprisoned for their identities? How do you think people outside of those communities felt about it?

• Are you surprised to learn that people, many of whom were American citizens, were imprisoned within the U.S., not for breaking a law but for just being themselves?

• Wat felt most like himself on the basketball court. Do you have an activity that you do that makes you feel like yourself or the most alive? 

Vocabulary:

• Heritage: n. A person's heritage is their racial, religious or cultural identity that has come to them through their family.

• Community: n. A particular community is a group of people who are similar in some way

• Racism: n. The belief that people of some races are inferior to others, and the behaviour which is the result of this belief. Racism also refers to the aspects of a society which prevent people of some racial groups from having the same privileges and opportunities as people from other races.

• Hecklers: n. A person who annoys or harasses (a speaker) by interrupting with questions or taunts

• Tenacious: adj. If you are tenacious, you are very determined and do not give up easily.

• Civilian: n. In a military situation, a civilian is anyone who is not a member of the armed forces.

Video Content:

• This short documentary (08:32) from PBS Utah follows a high-schooler who works on a history project about Wat. It’s a good mix of history and basketball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm1axZ74rZ0

• There are many videos to be found online about the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Here is one that is short (03:39) and from the Smithsonian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcLXdGJFRkY

Activities: 

• For younger students, the coloring page on the publisher’s website is a nice option. 

• For all ages, have students imagine what they may have said had they been in the crowd when Wat and his team played. What could they have shouted as encouragement to Wat and others? This exercise could be drawn on paper, or possibly acted out. If appropriate for the group, students could reflect on what it means to act as a bystander versus an upstander. 

  • Sesame Street did a video (02:10) with our country’s first National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman about how to be an upstander: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzpnitSjZA4 

• For all ages, students could reflect on what activities they turn to in hard times. Students could share their reflections aloud, or they could write them down and see each other’s answers in a Post-it gallery.

• For older students, this page of primary sources from the Library of Congress concerning the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII is informative: https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/japanese-american-internment/

Companion Books