Fragile Arrogance: Baseball, Japan, and America

John Ostermiller
APS 600: Research Methods
November 14th, 2015
 Introduction

Baseball first came to Japan in the late 1800s during the Meiji Restoration, when

Westerners (sailors, merchants, etc) played the game for recreation and as an expression of their

own manliness at a time when sports were an integral part of this self-image1. Unlike the

American game, the Japanese interpretation ran deep with martial virtues as it developed into a

high school centered sport2. In the early 20th century, Americans began asserting baseball was

Americas Pastime and through this nationalization it grew to become an integral part of

Americana. 3 But in Japan, baseball experienced a different trajectory: one dominated by the

Japanese governments need to modernize or be colonized. Through this domestication4,

baseball became a source of informal education - one that valorized the traits needed for

Japanese society to function. In order to attain modernity, Japanese elites borrowed heavily

from those they felt were models of those traits. This included Bismarcks Germany, where Meiji

officials drew on ideas of a national essence to cultivate a unified identity for the people of

Japan.5 Despite this documented history, the Popular American conception of Baseball lingers on

as a product of that aforementioned Americana. Indeed, baseball has been used as metaphor for

the threat Japan periodically poses to the West, in particular during the Post-War years. As a

result, I have constructed this paper to achieve four specific points: (1) examine the

socio-historical context of Baseball in Japan, (2) apply that knowledge to deconstruct popular

American images of Japanese baseball in the 1970s to 1990s, (3) reinterpret those observations

1
Roden, Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan, 511
2
Ibid. 519, 520
3
Ibid. 517
4
Gratitude is given to Dr. John Nelson of USF, who suggested domestication over the term assimilation, as the
latter has a confrontational quality to it. Dr. Nelson made it clear this was not his idea, but he could not identify the
original source for the use of the phrase. See Notes 16 and 21 for further discussion.
5
Murphy, Japan and the Shackles of the Past, 74
1
from an academic perspective, and (4) comment on the debate between academic and enthusiast

scholars.