 This is looking to the east and I'm your host Steve Zircher. Thank you very much for tuning in or viewing this. I want to welcome you to a very special show today. I have with me actually a repeat customer of mine, Jim Allen. I think this is the second or third show that he has contributed his wisdom about the sport of baseball in Japan. So this week's addition of the show, we're going to actually take a look at the history of Japanese baseball, how it came into the country from the US and how it's evolved to become quite a different experience than what us Americans are used to observing in the United States. So it kind of reminds me of the quote by Winston Churchill. We have two countries separated by a similar language. Here we have two countries separated by a similar sport. So Jim wrote an article a few weeks ago about the history of baseball and it caught my eye. So that's why I invited him to participate with us today. So Jim, thank you so much for waking up early here in Japan and going through the high points of the article that you wrote about the history of Japan, which is 150 years old. That shocked me too when I saw the title. I didn't realize that baseball had been in Japan that long. So let's go ahead and start. I'm sorry, Jim, but let's go ahead and start with a little bit about you. How did you become a preeminent sports journal, especially focusing on baseball? Although I know you do other sports as well. How did you come to Japan and how did you grow to love the sport of baseball in Japan? A great question. I came basically because I needed a job getting out of university and I studied Japanese history and Japanese language in university. And so teaching English in Japan was sort of an easy entry. So I did that for 11, 13 years. And then in the process of that, I missed my baseball back home. I was a pretty fanatical San Francisco Giants fan. Me too. Yeah. And when I came, it was a pre-internet. Well, it wasn't pre-internet, but it was pre-worldwide web. And to get the Japanese the scores of the Giants games, I needed to, I was living in a kind of a remote location where we didn't get the late papers. So to get the West Coast scores, I had to buy Japanese sports papers. And so I started, when I opened them, of course, I got my line scores, you know, see how the Giants did, but what I also got were these huge box scores of Japanese professional baseball games and high school games even for the national tournament. And I was just enthralled by all the information and data and coverage that six to 10 baseball games a day could get in a national paper. It was just amazing. So I started watching. So you saw how popular baseball was in Japan? Oh, sure. I started watching the games and I didn't understand the commentary that well, but seeing the information and it just led me to so many questions. Why did they do it like this? Why don't they do it like that? I mean, you know, the drill when you come to a new country, you're forced to question what's normal in your country. You know, why do we do it like that? And why do they do it like that? Well, that's why do they do it like that has been essentially my obsession for the last 37 years. Oh, okay. Great. So this show timing is actually interesting because yesterday was the final match of the high school baseball championship in Japan. It's called Koshien because the location of where the tournament is played. The stadium is called Koshien. And this particular sporting event is incredibly popular. So there isn't an equivalent in the United States to high school. I follow college baseball a little bit. There's a college world series, but that doesn't even come close to the attention that's paid to baseball at the high school level in championship. My entire family who follows it every day. Otherwise, my wife is not really interested in sports, but when it comes to high school baseball championships, she knows about the team. She knows about the players who are going to the pros and so forth. So good timing. Yeah, it was, I had to think that one of the semifinals, excuse me, one of the quarter finals was probably the biggest game of the pro baseball seasons of the Japan baseball season this year when this relatively unknown high school beat one of the Japan powerhouses. And in my office, so many TVs are tuned to the tournament and we have a well inside our building so you can hear voices from other floors and you could hear it echoing people's response to that victory. It was quite impressive. Yeah, so let's start with how this happened. How did baseball become so popular that the high school championship tournament every summer is the most popular sporting event in the country? Yeah, that's a great question too because you wouldn't think it. But baseball came to Japan essentially because when the Meiji restoration came and the old feudal government was kicked out, Japan was in a real bind and was surrounded by hostile foreign powers and had to knew the leaders, the new leaders knew they had to modernize very quickly. So they started importing, sending a few people abroad, and that's kind of an accident in some ways. But some of those people who were sort of like kicked out of the country, you know, like go earn a living came back and one of them became kind of the father of Japanese baseball because he picked it up in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia became a fan of the Philadelphia athletics. And he started Japan's first baseball club when he came back as a railroad engineer. And also the foreign teachers came flooding into Japan from mostly Germany and England and the United States. And the Americans taught baseball. And they taught lots of sports, but baseball kind of caught on. And it was just a confluence of so many things going on. The governments need to to create compulsory education. There had been none. So okay, creating compulsory education and convincing the leaders of the of the education movement to include sports, which had been an alien concept in Japan. That also amazed me that was in your article that there wasn't really organized sports in the country natively. I mean, we think of sumo and martial arts has been deeply rooted in Japanese history, but there were no team sports like volleyball or or basketball or anything like that. Now it was sumo and sumo was was a thing. And of course, there was a kendo and although judo judo was developed at the same time as baseball was introduced. And for many of the same reasons to train the kids. So the teachers taught them baseball and it kind of it's slowly built. But what really happened was this guy Hiroshi Hirooka here, Hirooka who came back from the states and created the first baseball team. He was a he was from an influential family and all his family kind of wanted him to go away. He was a black sheep. He came back and his family had connections. And at that time Japan Japan was embracing everything modern, everything western. People were wearing top hats and silk coats. And you know, if you had money and people copied that and baseball was one of the things they copied. They're teaching it in the schools and everybody had to play baseball. Wow. Okay. So when one of Japan's elite high schools, there was there was essentially at the beginning just a just a handful of them around the country had the best. We're talking about the early 1900s perhaps. We're talking about the early 1890s. Oh, okay. Wow. Okay. Still in the 1800s. Okay. So baseball was introduced, was first taught in Japan as as early as 1872. And that's why this year is the 150th anniversary. It might have been it might have been taught earlier by a missionary's son, but that's not quite there. There's still some question about that. So anyway, we fast forward 24 years and there's this high school team in Tokyo, and they defeat everybody in Tokyo. And so they're sort of the Japan powerhouse, these 10 or 11 school boys. And but baseball really the heart of baseball in Japan at that time was Yokohama, where American expatriates and a few Brits and US Navy sailors from the Japan from the US Asian squadron would play. And they were the they were the the heart of baseball. And so the kids said, we're going to play these these foreigners in Yokohama. And Yokohama was like a foreign country too, because the treaties that Japan had signed with America and foreign countries that allowed foreigners in Japan to be treated to not be responsible to Japanese law for any laws they broke. They were immune. So it took a long time because the Americans said, no, we're not going to. The Japanese are too small. They're too weak. They're Japanese men are too effeminate, you know, they take up the flower arranging and calligraphy and things like that. So it took a long time. But when they got a game, the kids just beat the living daylights out of them. Wow, they've been practicing and practicing and practicing. I mean, not not not every day practicing, which was kind of a surprise to me because I grew up reading Robert Whiting stuff and we're good friends. But it was it was it was extensive practice when they had the time. They couldn't practice all the time because I was talking to a professor of sports history, and he said, well, they had exams. So before exams, nobody practiced. But it was rigorous. And they they just shocked. Well, I don't think the people in Yokohama, they took it badly. But what happened was it became a wave in Japan. It became these kids, these schoolboys became national heroes in 1896. They beat the foreigner. They beat the foreigners. I think the storyline. Yeah, I think the final the final record of the series was six wins and one loss. They lost because they lost one game two to one because of two sailors. I want to say from the one of the the American cruisers anchored in Yokohama, they had two former pro baseball players. Okay. Couple ringers. Yeah, exactly. So so baseball became this really big thing. And it just and as the schools, the compulsory education exploded across Japan. One of the things that they needed to do was they had to make the entrance requirements at the school much more difficult. And there as a result of that, they stopped getting the best the best astute athlete. And the school fell on hard time. The baseball team fell on hard time. And people were looking at the people in the school were looking around for scapegoats. And people are the same all over the world, I suppose. And and they started reflecting on this glorious past, you know, we have to recapture this past glories of Japanese baseball from five years before when we were really good. And the way they did that eventually, another conflict of a lot of things was the the rise of college baseball and the the popularity and Japan's growing economy pumped all this money into this amateur sport. And college player players were getting paid to to attend events. If there was a tournament with college and high school players where there was a star player, the star player would get money under the table to make sure he was there at the event. There was all kinds of things going on and it was considered the sport was getting kind of a bad reputation players were sort of seeing themselves sort of like American college, you know, big 10 college football players, right? You know, bigger than the law in state, you know, comes to mind a lot of, you know, Texas schools come to mind. Sure. And it was it was a it was so popular that there became a wave kind of a backlash, but it was a popular backlash. People love baseball, but newspapers would sell anything with baseball. So there was a bunch of a lot of journalists and former players who attacked the game as unworthy of Japanese. And so with that backlash, and the increasing popularity of the sport running hand in hand, they created this high school baseball tournament. This is what we talked about at the Carava the show, the Koshien tournament. Yeah, it had already been a small tournament, but the Osaka, the newspaper was basically only big in Tokyo and Osaka, and they wanted to go nationwide. So they said, you know, if we had a nationwide baseball tournament, people would read our newspaper to read about what their kids are doing, the local heroes are doing. Yeah. At the beginning, it was in I think Toyonaka in Osaka. And it worked. It just became it it was they made it so it was like looking back on that past, you know, the past glories of the high school kids and not this dirty college game. And they wanted to make this sort of artificial history of baseball. And the funny thing is that artificial history of baseball became the absolute core of Japanese baseball. The kids, you know, and you know, now it's on national television and it's so big. It's so everybody's inculturated to follow high school baseball. And for most Japanese high school baseball is baseball. Literally, for our viewers, if you get into a taxi cab during the tournament period, you are listening to the game. Sure. Because every taxi cab driver, mostly male, 95 percent male, are listening to Koshien. It's automatic. And the regional tournament, when I was in Sapporo once, I don't know why I was in Sapporo in July or August. But the taxi driver was July and he had the one of the local Sapporo tournament was on the radio. So the school from two towns in rural Hokkaido was on the radio and the taxi driver was riveted to it. Yeah. Yeah. My son is on a high school team, as you know, Jim. And he started pitching, he was a starting pitcher for the first tournament game in Osaka. And now in Osaka, they're web broadcasting all tournament games. So no matter where you are in the prefecture, you can watch your son play in the game. So I was in Hawaii at the time, but I was able to watch the entire game. And we're really a little bit out of time, Jim. So let's move forward to the section in the article where you talk about how Japan kind of recreated or reimagined the sport to fit with the issues that you have discussed about the early history of the sport and how the government was involved as well. That also surprised me that the Japanese government took an interest in the sport and helped to create what it is actually still today. Well, the government basically said it started the first game where they sold tickets to a Japanese baseball game was because this team from Honolulu was touring Japan and they had to defray the cost so they charged admission. And the baseball touring became a it became a big money thing. University of Wisconsin, University of Washington, Stanford University, University of Chicago, and the Japanese universities were traveling across the Pacific. There was a lot of money being made and the government was saying this is kind of unseemly. So we're going to put a stop to that. American pro baseball players had been visiting Japan, but they had to play against college students. They were only college students. They had to play against amateurs. So the government said no more, no more of this. You can't play against professionals. So when the Japanese team created that was 1932, they made the laws. So in 1934, they invited Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Charlie Gehringer and number of other big MLB stars to Japan to sell tickets. They couldn't get a team because all the college. So what they did was the Yomiuri Shimbun created a team in order to sell tickets to these games. Period. End of story. But it became an idea that wait, hold on a second, we can go now on tour. So they went to America and then they came back and they said, you know, we could create a pro league. So they created a pro league. But that divide between amateurs and professionals has remained to this day. It's really it's a it's a great wall. You know, it's a it's a firewall the government built and the government got really involved and the government has always had a view of you know, I guess the point is not is not so much the government is as baseball has always been with Japanese wanted it today. You know, when Japan needed to show that it had strength, it was a modern nation in a hostile world. They had these kids from Yokohama, beating the Americans at their game. And then when Japan was conquering, conquering East Asia, colonizing East Asia, they needed to sort of rekindle that martial spirit. So let's be like that. And then when Japan was again trying to reinvent itself in the 1930s, we have to have pure baseball. And now, you know, now we find Japan reinventing itself again, or trying to reinvent itself. And that's a hard slog, because Koshien created this great movement. You know, as you said about the shaved head, you know, this is an old thing. And nobody really does that anymore. But it's it's a tradition that is still big in Koshien. Yeah, for our viewers, for these games, it's traditional for the players to shave their heads to demonstrate team spirit and a unified effort to do the very best you can on the field. And that affects all levels of the sport, even at the elementary school level. And I have pictures of my second son, when he was playing on a particularly severe elementary school team, the coach was he never said you had to do this. But of course, he was saying you had to do this, right? Indirectly in Japanese, it's so easy to not say what you really want to say, but everyone understands what you are saying. One of the wonderful things about the Japanese language. So 100% kids that my son didn't want to do it, but he really had no choice. So that's that's an example of what Jim was talking about in terms of this. Samorification, if that's such a word or this kind of indoctrination of foreign sport to adhere to Japanese national ideal. Sure, that's that was so much a part of 19th century Japan was taking what what's showing what we can do with overseas technology, you know, when we get a chance. So that that was a big thing. And then when the war came, I was talking to professor told me that all the professors, all the school teachers in Japan had to go to college. And until the Pacific War turned into World War Two, until the war in China became a war with the United States, none of the college students were being drafted. So eventually what happened was they then got a military education. And when they came back after the war, baseball changed. It went from being this kind of imaginary samurai tradition. And there was sort of, there was some like physical abuse was not really a thing. But after the war, it became corporal punishment and beatings by seniors became pretty standard because that was the education, the college, you know, the teachers learned in the military. This is part of discipline. And so that became a thing. But now that's kind of going out of the way parents aren't really keen about having their kids get beat up. Yeah. And I have to tell you though, Jim, I saw that once myself at the elementary school level, and the parents were there. So that was a shock for me to watch. But I think it's rare. I only saw it once in how many years have my kids been in baseball, 10 years now? Yeah, now people can be sued and arrested for that. So that's going out of the way. And things like, I guess the final thing was, you know, how can we, this question now of falling birth rates and not having enough kids to play baseball is like, well, how can we deal with this? Well, we have to get the parents to okay and let their kids play this sport. So we have to make it more accessible. We have to make it more humanistic. And we're just seeing those inroads. And I think Roki Sasaki is the 20 year old pitcher for the Chiba Lote Marines. And he threw a perfect game in April. And the next game, he threw eight perfect innings and he was pulled out of the game. But he's sort of the face of this new baseball, because when he was in high school, his coach took extra care of his arm and all his classmates arms. And he sat him out from the regional final. And it caused quite a disturbance in the force. Yeah, I think historically, he would have been forced to or would have been required to pitch in every single game, even if they were back to back to back. Sure. And it was the coach lost his job eventually. Oh, because of this issue, Jim? Yeah, two years later, he was asked to step down. He's actually he was sort of shoved aside. He's now the assistant of the director of the Baseball Department at the Ofinata High School in Iwate Prefecture. But the whole thing, I guess the lesson from this is that was 2019. And 2022, when Sasaki is a pro, they pulled him out of a is potentially second straight perfect game in the ninth inning. And people went, okay, we get it. And I think 10 years ago, Japanese pro baseball couldn't do that. Right. And people would not have understood if they had. And now they do it and people understand. And to me, that was a huge thing. You know, they're still shaving their heads. But the game is changing. And yeah, at the at the high school level, and also at the club level of junior high, starting this year for my my younger son, tournament games, they announced the number of pitches inning by inning. And then sometimes the coaches are they're not aware of this rule. There was one game that I was watching where the opposing pitcher through the limit. I don't know what the limit was, maybe like 90 pitches. And I think it's like 500. I think it's like 500. Is it what level? This is per game. They had per game limits. Okay, so he's it's a junior high level. Okay, yes, yes. And the announcer just said, the pitcher needs to be removed. The manager had not been warming up anybody. So I think he was surprised that these pitch counts are actually being enforced. Yeah, he couldn't keep his number one pitcher in for the duration of the game past the pitch count. So you're right. There are signs that it's changing. And I totally agree with you to Jim that the burden on the kids also the burden on the parents to prepare the kids for practice four times a week. And you're kind of obligated to go to games. Again, you're not told you have to go but you're obligated to go. And it's a tremendous pressure on the families and many parents who have come to look at the teams that my sons have been involved in decide not to participate because it's just too much of a burden. And all of these demands that are placed on the players and on the parents is too much in today's modern world. Yeah, particularly on the on the mothers. You know, show up at Pratt not only make the make the lunches but serve tea after practice to the coaches. Yeah. Yeah, this is my son's junior high team. The coaches eat first, then the fathers eat, and then the mothers eat. I couldn't believe it. The mothers have to wait until the fathers have finished eating. This is, I don't know where what tradition that is bound to but it still exists today at the club school level, at least for my son's team. Wow. Jim, we've run out of time as I knew we would on this very, very interesting issue. You know, it's fascinating to me to look at how sport and culture and to some extent politics, government activity influences organized sporting events like baseball and that you and I as Americans, when we watch the game of Japanese baseball, we can clearly see that it's different. It's very, very enjoyable. You know, there's no question. I love Japanese baseball, but it is different for the reasons that your article and what you have explained over the last half hour. So any including comments, Jim, on that? Are you going to be writing an article about the future of Japanese baseball next? I can interview you about. Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly. Well, actually, I guess the next one will be about how Japanese baseball has influenced baseball around the world, which is more of a future thing. Oh, interesting. But I guess the other thing is that if you look at American baseball, you'll find that the same sort of the same thing is going on in the United States. If you look at American baseball and you see the way MLB owners speak about the minor leagues, you'll see just the absolute reflection. You know, when they talk about minor league players, it's not that different from Jeff Bezos talking about unionization of the Amazon distribution centers. They are happy at their work. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Jim. Well, thank you again so much for waking up early on Tuesday morning. No, my pleasure. So it's all good. Yeah, this is so much fun. I enjoy talking to you so much. And so I want to thank all our viewers for tuning into the show or watching this maybe on community TV, Jim, later, or also be rebroadcast on the ThinkTech website. So my show will be on hiatus for the next slot because of the upcoming Labor Day holiday, but we'll be back on again in a month or so with another topic about looking to the east. So once again, thank you so much, Jim. And goodbye, everybody. Thank you. Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.