Baseball was a Japanese national pastime long before WWII. American sailors played the game in Yokohama in the 1870s and 80s, albeit exclusively for their own participation. Japanese were forbidden from the Yokohama Athletic Club’s field. However, American educators like F. W. Strange, had different ideas. They proselytized and published handbooks, and baseball slowly started to catch on with Japanese youth. The Meiji government had imported over three thousand teachers and technocrats to build westernized institutions. As it turned out, one of these was baseball. In 1872, Horace E. Wilson introduced the game to his students the the new Tokyo Imperial University. By 1876, they were playing exhibition games against foreigners from Yokohama.

With the rise of nationalism in the 1890s, physical education and sports in general took off in Japan, and baseball was swept along in that tide. The sport benefitted from an aura of modernity and westernness, as well as a team structure that reenforced emerging collectivist ideals. Proponents of the game drew parallels to the newly codified and mythologized ideals of “Bushido” and compared batters to swordsmen. Sports like American football, association football, and rugby football were violent and disorganized. Baseball required patience and concentration. The relationship between the pitcher and batter was akin to a duel between master swordsmen. Of course, the analogies were to largely invented traditions, but that had little bearing on their efficacy. Baseball’s rise to prominence in Japanese culture was downright meteoric, and by 1891, Japanese teams were challenging the Yokohama Athletic Club to games. The club’s repeated refusal only fueled the patriotic fervor of the young Japanese batsmen. Eventually, in 1896, an American teacher, W. B. Mason, negotiated a match between the club and the Toky high school he taught at. The Japanese players were not well received, and the pregame crowd ridiculed them. The ridicule subsided when they thrashed the Americans 29-4. The students were national heroes, and baseball became a growing source of national pride in Japan. The Athletic Club found some ringers on US Navy ships and demanded a rematch, which they lost 32-9. Crowds lined the streets to welcome and congratulate the students.

In 1909, the sporting goods importer Mizuna started manufacturing baseballs, and in 1922, American barnstorming team, The Herb hunter All-Stars, toured Japan. By 1934 some of the best Major League players, including Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx and Lou Gehrig, were playing exhibition ball for Hunter in Japan. One fo the more colorful figures on the 1934 tour was the great Princeton catcher Mo Berg. A hero in the American Jewish community, Berg had a law degree from Columbia, and was known as cerebral player and person, who spoke several languages. By 1934, his best days were well behind him, but he was invited in the tour and gladly accepted. He brought along a movie camera, and secretly filmed Tokyo harbor infrastructure from the roof of a hospital, later providing this to the US government. This presaged later intelligence work he did for the Office of Strategic Services during WWII. Berg was not the only player with a camera. Jimmie Foxx also filmed the tour, and amazingly, some of his footage survives.

The 1934 tour was an overwhelming success, and cemented professional baseball as Japan’s premier sport. Unlike the early encounters between Japanese and American players, these tours were congenial and fostered a fraternal spirit, improving relations, or at least the popular perceptions in each country. However, The inherent conflict between the two countries’ interests and foreign policies soon negated that effect.

Sources:

Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan, DONALD RODEN, The American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Jun., 1980), pp. 511-534

For Love of the Game: Baseball in Early U.S.-Japanese Encounters and the Rise of a Transnational Sporting Fraternity, SAYURI GUTHRIE-SHIMIZU, Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5 (November 2004), pp. 637-662

The Transnational Pastime: Baseball and American Perceptions of Japan in the 1930s, JOHN GRIPENTROG, Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No. 2 (APRIL 2010), pp. 247-273

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, Nicholas Dawidof, Pantheon Books, 1994