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Ed Peters

Sumo, judo, kendo, aikido, kyudo – all of these and more tug on the heartstrings of Japanese sports fans. But nothing galvanises the nation quite so much as yakyu, better known as the all-American game of baseball.
Japanese toddlers start playing as soon as they can pick up a bat. The annual summer high school championship, featuring teams from all 47 prefectures, is broadcast live on national television.
A dozen teams – reluctantly spending extended time on the bench now due to the worldwide coronavirus crisis – make up the two professional leagues.
There’s intense competition among employees to join one of the industrial sides, and a few players – such as starting pitcher Masahiro “Ma-kun” Tanaka, who is on a seven-year, US$155 million contract with the New York Yankees – have made the lucrative jump across the pond to compete in the United States.
Thousands of Japanese followers pour into stadiums for each and every game to voice their support in a fashion that gives full amplitude to the term “fanatical fan”.

Japanese baseball had an unlikely genesis. A century and a half ago, American civil war veteran Horace Wilson was packing his bags on the family farm in Gorham, in the US state of Maine, before taking up a post teaching English at Kaisei Gakko, which later became Tokyo Imperial University.
One of several thousand experts who were shipped in at the time to help modernise a feudal Japan, his contribution would prove to be one of the most influential.
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Wilson had learned to play baseball during the war, and after installing himself in Tokyo in 1871, decided his students needed a bit of pepping up. Having improvised a bat and a ball, he led the youngsters out of the classroom at recess and took them through the basics of the game – and the rest is history.
“Students at that time tended to stay in the classroom, studying and debating. They didn’t play any sport, so they were weak and unhealthy,” says baseball historian Kazuo Sayama, who has written and broadcast extensively about his beloved sport.
“Professor Wilson told his students that if they wanted to lead Japan in the future they had to be strong – they had to study of course, but they had to be fit and healthy too. Baseball was his way of getting his students to go outside and exercise.”

“From the very start, his students loved baseball,” Sayama continued. “Quite simply, they were fascinated. Baseball was the first team sport in Japan. Before then, Japanese had practised martial arts, but that was more about the individual.
“Now it’s spoken of as the second national game, after sumo. That’s how crazy people are about it all over the country.”
Wilson gave baseball a toehold in Japan, but it got a huge boost when a local side beat a foreign team in Yokohama in 1896, the cue for newspaper pundits to expend gallons of ink hailing the winners as national heroes.
Some years later, Japanese diplomat Tsuneo Matsudaira described the mood at the time: “After the victory, the game spread like a fire in a dry field. In summer, and for some months afterwards, even children in primary schools in the countryside far away from Tokyo were to be seen playing with bats and balls.”

Baseball fever even infected one of the leading poets of the late 19th century, Masaoka Shiki, and his celebratory haiku is quoted to this day: “Spring breeze/ this grassy field makes me/ want to play catch.”
In subsequent years, everyone from scholars to casual observers has pondered what it is about baseball that appeals so strongly to the Japanese psyche, and just how it has grown so robustly over the past 150 years, surviving two world wars in the process.
Ironically, it was as a result of the American military occupation that baseball enjoyed a surge of popularity in the post-atomic age.
Most of all, we were struck by the great respect and reverence that the Japanese have for the sport. I’ll never forget that
Scott Balcomb, Horace Wilson’s great-great nephew
In 1949, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Douglas MacArthur – in a quest to boost morale and build bridges between conquerors and the vanquished who were suffering grievously from housing and food shortages – summoned Lefty O’Doul and his San Francisco Seals to play in Japan.
O’Doul was already well known to Japanese fans, as he had been instrumental in setting up both the country’s professional league and legendary batsman Babe Ruth’s promotional trip back in 1934.

From start to finish, the Seals’ 10-game tour was a spectacular success, drawing half a million spectators, including 14,000 war orphans, to a game against a US military all-star side. O’Doul received the personal thanks of Emperor Hirohito, and, together with Wilson, is one of the handful of Americans commemorated in Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame.
Yet the sport’s allure goes beyond mere celebrity. It’s undeniable that certain key characteristics of the game chime with the Japanese work ethic. Baseball places great importance on teamwork, perseverance and discipline, all qualities the Japanese value highly. Loyalty is held in similarly high regard, and players tend to stick with one team for the whole of their careers.
Finally – and the theory is tinged with romanticism – there’s also a subliminal appeal in the duel between pitcher and batter, which evokes comparison with battling samurai warriors of old.

The most idiosyncratic characteristic of Japanese baseball games are the oendan, which literally means “cheering squad” and in reality is a battalion of devotees, garbed in team colours and united in their determination to roar at the top of their voices.
Taiko drums, horns and megaphones add to the cacophony, and pom-pom girls – a notion imported from the US – spice things up a bit. The chants are synchronised, likewise the clapping and cheering. And jeers and catcalling at the opposing team are so rare as to be remarkable.
“The real action in a Japanese baseball game takes place in the stands, where the fans are as boisterous, passionate and welcoming as anyone you’d meet in the States,” notes author Pico Iyer, in his far-reaching, deceptively titled bestseller A Beginner’s Guide to Japan.
“Old ladies will share their trays of fried octopus, young guys dressed from head to toe as tigers will wrap you in a bear hug.”

Few foreigners who’ve witnessed oendan in action have failed to be moved by the spectacle, and it proved to be nigh overwhelming for one visiting party of Americans, who happened to be Wilson’s descendants.
“We live on the farm in Maine where Horace – my wife’s great-great uncle – was born and grew up,” says Scott Balcomb, a mathematics lecturer at Maine’s Bates College.
“We knew something of what Horace had done in Japan, but were very surprised to hear that Kazuo Sayama was researching his life. Then in 2000 a representative of the Japanese Baseball Federation, a couple of journalists and an interpreter turned up on the farm on a sort of pilgrimage to pay tribute to his birthplace.”
The visitors then delivered their bombshell: would the family visit Japan the following year to honour the legacy of Wilson?

Nearly 20 years later, the trip – which coincided with all the high jinks and pageantry of Japan’s summer high school championship – remains sharply etched in the family’s collective memory.
Balcomb’s 13-year-old daughter, Theo, was invited to retrieve the first ball of the game, which had been ceremonially parachuted from a helicopter, and they were royally treated wherever they went.

“When the teams came marching into the stadium it was like something out of the Olympics,” Balcomb says.
“The good manners of the fans, the importance of an ‘origin story’ to the Japanese baseball community, and the reverence the high school players had for the tournament – scooping up a handful of dirt from the baseline to take home with them – all seemed very different from what you might experience at a baseball game in America.
“Most of all, we were struck by the great respect and reverence that the Japanese have for the sport. I’ll never forget that.”


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Baseball was introduced to Japan by an American civil war veteran in 1871 and became the country’s first team sport
One theory behind its popularity is the appeal in the duel between pitcher and batter, which evokes comparison with battling samurai warriors of old



Introduced to Japan in 1871, baseball became the country’s first team sport and is now spoken of as the second national game, after sumo. But why do the Japanese love it so much?
