Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime

2. Japan: The Hanshin Tigers & Japanese Professional Baseball

2 | Japan The Hanshin Tigers Japanese Professional Baseball As Dan Gordon’s chapter describes, Kōshien Stadium’s opening in as Japan’s first full-dimension baseball park was sponsored by the Asahi Newspaper Company as the new venue for the national schoolboy tournament that the newspaper had inaugurated in and had so rapidly gained popularity. But the prime mover in the stadium’s construction, and then its owner and operator, was the Hanshin Electric Railroad Company. Why a railroad firm? Particularly in Osaka and Tokyo but also in other growing Japanese cities, this was an era of fierce competition between private urban railroad companies to build terminals and commuter rail lines through the metropolitan regions, vying for riders, for customers at the department stores and other retail businesses built around their terminals and stations, and for residential land they bought and resold along their rail lines to ensure a steady ridership . Building tennis courts, swimming pools, amusement parks, and athletic stadiums were additional projects to induce riders, and this fueled a boom in recreational and spectator sports in the s and s. In the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto metropolis, five major rail companies crisscrossed the region with rival lines, and four of them built sports stadiums that featured baseball. Amateur baseball at this time moved from being a purely school sport to becoming urban entertainment. Companies began to sponsor employee teams around this time, and there were a few attempts at fully professional clubs, but it was not until the mid- s that a professional league of ฀ ฀ The Hanshin Tigers and Japanese Professional Baseball six teams was established. The main force was the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Newspaper Company and its powerful owner, Shōriki Matsutarō, who had sponsored several visits by U.S. All-Stars (including Babe Ruth in ) and was stunned by the huge welcome and attention given the series . He then sent a group of Japanese players on an extended exhibition tour of the United States in . The core of that team returned to become the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. Several other newspaper and railroad companies joined in sponsoring teams that began tournament play in . Among these was the Hanshin Railroad Company, which immediately recognized the opportunity to find more commercial use for its Kōshien Stadium and formed a team, the Hanshin Tigers. The small league shifted from tournament to league format in and played into the wartime years before ceasing at the end of the season. Its revival was encouraged in by General Douglas MacArthur as a means of fostering an American spirit in occupied Japan. A two-league structure was inaugurated in in part because MacArthur believed it was a more democratic format than the original single league. The Hanshin Tigers chose to remain in the Central League with the Yomiuri Giants while other Osaka-area railroad teams (Hankyū, Kintetsu, and Nankai) joined the new Pacific League. After some fluctuation , eventually there were six teams in each league, with the league champions meeting in a postseason best-of-seven-games Japan Series. Japan Professional Baseball ( ) has remained at twelve teams and never expanded as did through the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, before and after the national high school tournaments in April and August, for a season that now runs from early spring through late fall, Kōshien is home to another level of baseball, the professional game. And the team that calls the stadium home, the Hanshin Tigers, evokes the same intense media attention and fan feelings that Gordon has described for the schoolboy tournaments. There are few stadiums in the global baseball world like Kōshien that are so powerfully central to the parallel worlds of amateur and professional baseball. The difference is the national sentimentality that has made Kōshien the country’s mecca of high school baseball and the schoolboy athletic spirit versus the local and heavily partisan passions that Hanshin fans ฀฀ ฀ ฀ throughout the region invest in a team that is deeply beloved but seldom successful. The team, many have observed, is the Boston Red Sox or the Chicago Cubs of Japanese professional baseball. In particular, because it chose to remain in the Central League with the powerful Tokyo-based Yomiuri Giants, Hanshin has come to bear the burden of Osakans’ rivalry with the national capital in what remains the country’s predominant spectator sport. The Giants have always been Japan’s most popular and prestigious team...