The introduction of baseball to Japan

After more than 200 years of self-imposed diplomatic seclusion, the nation of Japan opened itself up to the outside world in the mid 1850s during the Meiji Period and embarked upon a state-driven modernization program. One of the ways in which the state sought to promote modernization was to introduce advanced science and technology, institutions, and academic knowledge from the Euro-American world. To serve this overarching objective, many foreign teachers were recruited by the Japanese government. School teachers formed the largest contingent of such foreign teachers, or oyatoi, during the Meiji Period, and one of them, the American Horace Wilson, was hired into Daigaku Nanko (later to be expanded into Tokyo University) and introduced baseball to Japanese youngsters in 1872. A few years later, Kaitakushi Gakko (later to be reorganized into Hokkaido University) hired a young American teacher named Albert Bates, who not only taught the Japanese students western knowledge but also instilled in them the love of baseball. In those early years of baseball in Japan, however, the available equipment was limited and the playing field was rudimentary at best. This lack of infrastructure kept the Japanese students from forming permanent teams or playing games on a regular schedule.

Spartan as their circumstances may have been, the fact that Japan’s future elites learned this western team sport during their formative school days had enormous historical significance. For example, in the United States baseball evolved from a children’s game into a professional sport; in Japan, baseball, firmly embedded in the education system, followed a very different evolutionary trajectory. Once these American teachers went home and the students who learned baseball from them first-hand graduated, it appeared that the game had no future in this newly modernizing nation.