Youth Baseball and Colonial Identity in Taiwan, 1920–1968

In 1968, the Hongye team walked off the baseball diamond as victors and national heroes. Their victory came at the expense of a Japanese team widely reported in the Taiwanese press as champions of the world. The athletes were children, middle-school-aged boys, representing a school in the rural southeast of the island. Their opponents hailed from the same region of Japan, Wakayama, that had produced the Little League World Series champions of the year before. The Taizhong Gold Dragons entered the Little League World Series the following year as Taiwan’s first representatives at the competition. They won the championship. As if from nowhere, youth baseball was a major event in Taiwanese public life.¹ Despite the continuing popularity of baseball in Taiwan—including a domestic professional league, participation in the Olympic games, and high-profile players arriving in the US major leagues—the Hongye team remains the most well-known sports team in Taiwanese history and one of the most fascinating sports teams to study for academics drawn to modern sport in East Asia. The team’s signature victory was more than an opportunity for Cold War propaganda grasped by the Republic of China (ROC) government: it signaled a transition in the role of baseball in Taiwanese popular culture from that of a remaining vestige of Japanese colonial influence to a representation of Chinese nationalism.

It is interesting that this transition did not occur earlier, with Taiwan’s return to the auspices of the ROC in 1945 following Japan’s defeat in World War II. Academics frequently discuss sport in terms of its value in promoting political ideologies from the top down in colonial and postcolonial societies. Taiwan is no exception.² Other approaches make the convincing argument that popular sport offered local communities an avenue of resistance within the dominant current of the colonizing nation’s cultural assault.³ This understanding of sport in colonial and postcolonial contexts can also be limiting. Indeed, Taiwanese youth baseball offers us an alternative model: that of a sporting community directly representing the colonial culture of Japanese seeking to live as members of the extended imperial Japanese cultural demesne. This cultural enclave must be understood separately from binary interpretations of ideological indoctrination and subtle resistance. Popular sport, baseball in this case, gives us insight into the relationship between the core and periphery of the colonial world and the detritus that remains following their severance.⁴

A Brief History of Taiwan as Colony and Refuge

Japan successfully colonized Taiwan in 1895 following a comprehensive victory in the Sino-Japanese War of that year. Taiwanese colonial life settled into a relatively comfortable pattern of compromise between a landed Japanese elite group and ethnic Chinese locals after an initial period of bloody conflict, though aboriginal communities on the island continued to offer significant violent resistance.⁵ The colonial Japanese settled mostly around the newly formed colonial government in the northern city of Taipei. Further south, ethnic Chinese communities predominated alongside vestiges of the pacified aboriginal society. Taiwan was not bereft of opposition to colonial rule, but relations between the Japanese colonial government and local Taiwanese remained remarkably conciliatory in comparison with Japanese experience in Korea following the colonization of that country in 1910. Improvements in the local infrastructure and limited political concessions contributed to a relatively placid political environment in colonial Taiwan.⁶

Japanese approaches to integrating the local Taiwanese population into a wider imperial Japanese identity oscillated between assimilation and coexistence. This latter policy prevailed during the early decades of colonization, but Tokyo’s growing interest in assimilating the local population accelerated from the 1920s onwards. Still, though the Japanese language was fervently promoted, Chinese became a proscribed tongue only in the 1930s with the increasing militarization of government and society back in Japan. Taiwanese baseball ironically declined during the final years of colonial rule as the Japanese sought to use the fields otherwise reserved for their favorite sport for military exercises. Otherwise, the sport prospered, a sign of Japanese success in dominating the character of colonial Taiwanese culture.

Taiwan returned to Chinese control in 1945 following...