No one cared that 13-year-old Adam Orozco couldn't dribble or shoot. Weighing 200 pounds and standing 6 feet tall, this kid had Shaq potential.
So for the next six Saturdays, Adam eagerly practiced with the Montebello Jets Corsairs youth team, making fast friends with his diminutive teammates and learning some much-needed basketball fundamentals along the way.
Then he was kicked off the team by the Community Youth Council, the 55-year-old group that runs the league. The reason? Adam is not of Japanese heritage.
The Community Youth Council is one of a dozen Japanese American basketball associations, with a total of more than 10,000 players, in Los Angeles and Orange counties. In an effort to preserve Japanese American culture, the leagues employ a variety of race-based rules that limit each team's number of non-Japanese American players.
Southern California's Japanese American communities have been quietly debating the wisdom of those rules for years. That debate reflects a wider ambivalence about how Japanese Americans, Los Angeles' most assimilated minority group, should sustain their cultural identity.
Behind the question of quotas and hoops are deeper concerns: Should Japanese Americans emulate the self-sufficiency and cohesiveness of past Japanese American communities? Should they shed their ethnic identity for a broader, "Asian American" identity? Or should they--could they--simply emphasize the latter half of their Japanese American identity?
These are the kinds of questions all American immigrant groups have faced at one time or another. Earlier this century, Jews were the most rapidly assimilating population and Jewish women were the most likely to marry outside of their ethnic group. Jewish Community Centers, which sponsor sports and cultural activities, were established in response, and still thrive in cities around the nation.
Like many Jews who participate in Jewish Community Center sports programs, some Japanese Americans view the leagues as athletic organizations and nothing more. Others say Japanese American basketball is a reservoir of culture and should be protected--a stance that has allowed suburban Japanese American children to meet each other and grow in self esteem, but also caused some hard feelings both inside and outside the leagues.
