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Reviewed by:
  • Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan
  • Joel S. Franks
Andrew D. Morris . Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 271 pp. Cloth, $49.95.

In Colonial Project, National Game, Andrew D. Morris has provided us with a challenging and important book. It is challenging because Morris borrows extensively from the sometimes innovative and sometimes smugly obscure interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. It is important because Morris deftly links a relatively little known region of baseball history to a global context fraught with complexity.

Lying several miles away from the southeastern coast of China, the island of Taiwan has been invaded and occupied by the Dutch, Spanish, Chinese, [End Page 163] and Japanese. In 1895, China ceded Taiwan to Japan after being humbled militarily by the rising Asian empire. As in the case of most colonial experiences of the time, the Taiwanese, comprised in part by ethnic Han people originating on the mainland and a comparatively small population of aborigines, experienced an erratic set of colonial policies at different times aimed at assimilating them, on the one hand, and brutally subjugating them, on the other.

Introduced to baseball by Americans, Japanese colonizers brought the sport to Taiwan. The colonizers generally loved the sport and wanted to be able to play it while living in Taiwan. However, the colonizers also came to the realization that they could assimilate the Taiwanese through baseball, much as Americans used the sport to try to assimilate Filipinos. In Taiwan, however, baseball's effectiveness in binding the Taiwanese to their Japanese colonizers proved only partial.

To explain, Morris employs the concept of "glocalization." Admitting the term does not "roll off the tongue" (5), Morris asserts that it clarifies the history of baseball in Taiwan better than globalization, which tends to "focus on one-sided models of cultural contact, like the famed notion of 'Cocacolonization,' which describes a simple imprint of American ways on vulnerable Others" (5). Thus, while the Taiwanese appreciatively embraced much of the Japanese style of baseball, they tried to do so on their own terms, reflecting their experiences as Han or indigenous Taiwanese. We can find similar examples in the way that south-central Asians and Afro-Caribbeans adapted to the colonizer's use of cricket to bind them to the British Empire. Indeed, Japan adopted the baseball of American neocolonists, but did so decidedly on its own terms.

Japanese authorities in Taiwan and the Japanese in general were challenged by Taiwanese-especially indigenous Taiwanese-baseball. Morris writes about the Kanõ High School team that during the 1930s not only regularly beat Taiwanese opponents but did well in Japan's famed Kõshien high-school tournament in 1931. The Kanõ squad consisted of young men of Japanese, Han, and aborigine ancestry. Creating something of a sensation among Japanese baseball fans and the media, they also posed a dilemma in that the colonized were not supposed to regularly defeat the colonizers in their favorite sport. A combination of responses was put into place to explain the ability of Kanõ to win second place in the vaunted tournament, and to explain that, in particular, indigenous ballplayers were key to that team's success. The Japanese press often exoticized, on the one hand, and respectfully extolled, on the other, the Taiwanese visitors. At the same time, it credited Japan for setting the Taiwanese, even aborigines, on the road to assimilation.

This is all pretty fascinating. However, the story gets no less interesting [End Page 164] after World War II when a defeated Japan surrendered Taiwan to the Republic of China (ROC). Led by the authoritarian government of Chiang Kai-Shek, the ROC was not universally received as a liberator by the Taiwanese. After all, as many Taiwanese figured, the Japanese were not consistently brutal and they did introduce baseball to the island. Moreover, the ROC's decision to set up shop on Taiwan after the communist takeover of China scarcely made the Taiwanese any more comfortable with Chiang Kai-Shek's frequently vicious and corrupt rule. As for honoring and supporting the Taiwanese's favorite sport, the ROC proved, at best, reluctant...

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