Playing in Isolation: A History of Baseball in Taiwan (review)

In the past, little attention outside of Asia has been paid to Taiwanese baseball. Beyond awareness of the island’s dominance of the Little League Baseball Tournament from 1969 to 1996 and the recognition that pitcher Chien-Ming Wang of the New York Yankees hails from Taipei, the story of the development of baseball in Taiwan has eluded the scrutiny of American scholars of the game. Junwei Yu has sought to remedy this situation with Playing in Isolation: A History of Baseball in Taiwan. An assistant professor of recreation and sports management at Taiwan’s Shu Tei University, Yu offers a fairly comprehensive picture of Taiwanese baseball, warts and all, based not just on field work and research but also on personal experience, having briefly played amateur baseball in high school and subsequently serving as official scorer for the under-sixteen International Baseball Federation competition in 1997.

One of the most interesting chapters of Yu’s book is devoted to the introduction of baseball to Taiwan by the Japanese as one tool among many to eliminate Confucianism. As Yu notes, baseball wasn’t so much adopted by the Taiwanese as it was imposed upon them by Japanese expansionists, beginning in 1895. In fact, baseball did not come naturally to the Taiwanese. “Those who labor with their minds govern others, and those who labor with their strength are governed by others,” a central tenet of Confucianism, Yu observes, lead to the dominance of wen, which he defines as “sedentariness,” over wu, which he defines as “physicality or martial prowess” in Taiwanese culture prior to the Japanese invasion (10). Not without resistance from their elders, Taiwanese children, at whom this particular method of “Japanization” was aimed, embraced the sport.

While Playing in Isolation presents this early history of the sport in Taiwan in a fairly clear manner, providing copious details about the early success of youth baseball on the island in bridging the cultural gap between the Han Chinese, indigenous Taiwanese (referred to here as aborigines), and their Japanese conquerors, the book is less successful in its presentation of the events precipitating Taiwan’s involuntary Japanization and Taiwanese history in general. The author assumes too much historical knowledge on the part of his Western readers, referring, for example, to Japan’s war against China following the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” without offering even a brief explanation of the event. This continues to be a problem throughout the work. Later, Yu refers to the “2/28 tragedy” of 1968, suggesting that it caused a generation of Taiwanese to lose faith in the government, without any discussion of the Kuomingtang (KMT) massacre of innocent Taiwanese citizens following an antigovernment protest. Certainly American readers are woefully uninformed about Asian history. But since Yu’s target readership is, in fact, comprised at least in part of Americans, he would have done well to offer a bit more explanation of these watershed events in Taiwan’s history, particularly as they relate to the game.

Also striking is Yu’s discussion of the way in which Taiwan’s aboriginal population adopted the game while under Japanese rule. Yu takes no pains to explain indigenous culture, noting only that headhunting was practiced by the aborigines. It is unclear, moreover, whether he laments or applauds the Japanization of the natives, writing, “After being incorporated into the same [Japanese] machine, the aborigines used their headhunting courage on the diamond and played an important role in the development of Taiwanese baseball” (18) He equates the athletic ability of the indigenous Taiwanese with “headhunting courage,” which is quite jarring and seems to border on the same type of ethnocentrism displayed by the Japanese, who assumed the aborigines would be natural baseball players since they were good at throwing rocks.

As Yu notes, the Japanese were not the only ones to use youth baseball, by far the dominant form of the game in Taiwan, as a tool for propaganda and government control. Taking...