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  • Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War by Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu
  • Andrew Gordon (bio)
Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War. By Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012. xi, 314 pages. $39.95, cloth; $39.95, E-book.

With particular attention to Japan, this book explores the connections among some of the “parallel baseball universes” (p. 1) that existed inside and outside [End Page 465] the territory of the United States from the 1870s through the 1950s. The author engages two main questions. One is specific to this sport: “why and how did baseball manage to become a transnational pastime in certain parts of the world (but not others)?” (p. 2). The other, more interesting and ambitious, is the question of what the adoption or adaptation of baseball “reveal[s] about the United States’ engagement with the wider world” (p. 2). Guthrie-Shimizu’s focus is on flows and networks of people, money, commodities (sporting goods), and sporting practices enabled by the technologies of an era of globalization, particularly new forms of transportation and communication. Imperialism and capitalism are put forward as the driving forces of globalization, while discourses and divisions of class, race, and gender (manliness more than femininity), as well as nation, are introduced as the critical sources of tension in the globalization process. This framework is by now a relatively familiar one. The interest of the book lies not in conceptual innovation but in the deeply researched and nicely narrated depiction of baseball as part of this process—in the author’s words, “how intimately and unexpectedly the two nations were intertwined through multitudes of networks, both apparent and hidden” (p. 7).

The first chapter, “Pacific Crossings,” effectively traces the diverse routes by which baseball entered Japan (noting as well that American baseball had multiple points of origin). The narrative features a number of energetic young advocates, such as a returning student and railroad engineer (Hiraoka Hiroshi) captivated by the “technological marvel” of the train as well as the excitement of the game (p. 20). One theme of the study is the connection between boosters of business and of sports, best exemplified in the career of A. G. Spalding, who early on saw the potential in cultivating a global market for bats and balls. The growing popularity of schoolboy baseball in Japan by the late nineteenth century is persuasively explained as both “manifestation and propellant” of an “incipient experiential consumerism” spreading in Japan and the United States (p. 37). Shimizu-Guthrie also seeks to explain the ascendance of baseball over cricket, at a moment when the British and American presence in Japan was roughly comparable. She offers two reasons without reconciling or weighting them: greater ease of access to baseball equipment, thanks to Spalding, and a “greater class and nationality blindness” on the part of the American sport (pp. 26, 32).

The next two chapters explore connections between colonialism, immigration, and baseball on both sides of the Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a story of baseball becoming “a cultural auxiliary” of two at times intersecting colonial orders (p. 41). Shimizu-Guthrie chronicles the place of the sport as it was brought by missionaries and military men to U.S. territories in the Pacific and Caribbean, most notably Hawaii and the Philippines and Cuba, and as it was brought by Japanese to [End Page 466] Korea, Taiwan, and Southern Manchuria. The Korean story is particularly intriguing, in that the Americans first introduced the game to Koreans, only to be displaced by Japanese. In both Taiwan and Korea, the game served as an outlet for anticolonial or nationalist sentiments in games between Taiwanese or Korean teams and Japanese ones. The narrative is sloppy in places (the Japanese placename for Seoul, Keijō, is rendered as Kyōjō, and the March 1 uprising of 1919 is introduced as the May 1 Movement [p. 71]), but the author does present some intriguing parallels in the colonial practices of Americans and Japanese. Both put baseball to use in “molding the behaviors of their colonial...

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