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Sitting in Albany Bowl last Wednesday, watching several life-long friends enjoying their weekly bowling leagues, Nobu Asami remembered a time when bowling was one of the few recreational sports Japanese Americans were allowed to participate in after World War II. 

Asami is the co-founder of the Go-Go Japanese American bowling league that meets weekly at Albany Bowl. Bowling has long been an important part of her life. The bowling alley was the one place she and her family and friends could publicly gather and not be questioned during the war. 

Asami’s story, however, has a twist. Bowling was not only a pastime, but at one point a career.  

Back in 1942, when Asami was only 21, she and her husband were forced to flee Berkeley and move to Colorado (where they hid out with friends) when the United States government began putting Japanese and Japanese Americans in internment camps. It wasn’t until 1945 that she was able to move back to Berkeley and reunite with her family, who had been living in an internment camps in Tanforan, Cal. and Topaz, Utah, where they slept in horse stables and barracks. 

“It was miserable, I cried all the way from here to Colorado,” said Asami. In Colorado she and her husband originally stayed on a farm in Brighton and then moved to an apartment in Denver with several friends. Like most Japanese Americans, when Asami got back she had to build a new life for herself. 

Asami and her husband eventually settled in Berkeley and had children. Asami said she often found herself at home taking care of the kids while her husband was out. She needed something else to absorb her energy and get her out of the house.  

Enter bowling. Asami bowled on her own or with her kids several times a week at several of the bowling alleys around the East Bay and quickly found a job at Richmond’s Uptown Bowling. At the same time, large bowling leagues were developing in the Japanese American community here in the Bay Area. The leagues were called Nisei leagues, which means second generation, and were separate from the traditional leagues, which until 1950 were only open to whites. 

Working at Uptown, Asami developed into a talented bowler. When racial integration finally came to the leagues in the ‘50s, she was promptly recruited by women bowlers from Alameda County. Another member of the Alameda women’s league was Helen Duval, one of the most decorated woman bowlers of all time.  

Bowling alongside Duval, Asami emerged as one of the premier bowlers in the country. She and Helen began touring the United States and overseas as part of circuit of leading women bowlers. 

While her children stayed at home with her mother, Asami spent five years touring the world. In 1964, Asami and Duval enrolled in the national doubles competition in Syracuse, New York, and won. That victory was the highlight of her career. She continued to bowl competitively but eventually settled down and got a job with the University of California, where she worked for 20 years. 

Then in 1982, Asami retired from UC. Her passion for bowling had never left so with her free time she helped found a new Nisei league called the Go-Gos, which means 55 in Japanese. Because there was a tradition of bowling among the community around her age, the league quickly gained a substantial membership, peaking at 200 members. 

Over the past two decades the league has continued to thrive. Asami, now 84, is not the most senior of the Go-Gos. Several members are in their late eighties and early nineties, although the average age falls somewhere in the eighties.  

Most of the bowlers in the Go-Gos have pushed their memories of the times when they could not participate in the traditional bowling leagues into the past and say they continue to bowl both out of tradition and for the recreation. 

“Athletically, we can’t play basketball and we’re too small to play football,” quipped Wheky Sumimoto, one of the Go-Gos. 

To this day, Asami can still bowl a good game. She is full of energy and a better bowler than most bowlers who are half her age. She sits out sometimes when the Go-Gos bowl because her average is still quite a bit higher than the rest. Her best average was 195 and her best score ever was a 299, only one point away from a perfect score. 

“I told my son that if I ever bowled a 300 I’d quit bowling. I guess that’s why I never stopped bowling.”