Contesting the Myths of Samurai Baseball: Cultural Representations of Japan's National Pastime by Christopher T. Keaveney (review)

Those without particular interest in the place of sports in Japanese society are often surprised by their historical depth in modern Japan and their importance in multiple institutions, from schooling and media to urban transit networks and corporate organization. Many find it equally surprising that in the Meiji period, it was neither the indigenous sumo nor the East Asian martial arts but the American national pastime of baseball that quickly also became Japan's national pastime, which it has remained for over a century. Thus it is welcome that Christopher Keaveney so insightfully explores how baseball has been represented in fiction, film, and manga across the Meiji, Taishō, Shōwa, and Heisei eras.

Samurai baseball is a clever term that has been used by a number of writers to characterize a distinctive Japanese style of play emphasizing self-sacrifice and discipline, loyalty to team and manager, commitment to form, and unwillingness to stand out. These qualities suspiciously fit a dubious national character type, but in the case of baseball there is some historical justification. After appearing in Japan in the 1870s, baseball gained popularity in the 1890s when it became the central sport of the elite boys' schools, especially the First Higher School (known as Ichikō) in Tokyo. This was at a time of strongly nationalist sentiment, when several Meiji ideologues were selectively reformulating earlier warrior codes into modern versions of bushidō (the Way of the Warrior). The Ichikō baseball club embraced this language to characterize its spirit and style of play, and when it won several surprise victories in the late 1890s over a team of adult Americans based in Yokohama, both the team and its selfstyled "samurai baseball" were celebrated in the new national press.

Keaveney's core argument is that baseball from the 1890s on has been largely appreciated and, less often, critiqued for embodying such traditional cultural values as a distinctly Japanese code of sporting conduct (pp. 5, 17). His opening chapter reviews the Meiji beginnings of baseball and the "samurai-zation" of the schoolboys' playing style; it is basic, but useful for those unfamiliar with this early history. Chapter 2 is especially interesting for its focus on Masaoka Shiki. Well known to literary scholars as Meiji Japan's foremost haiku poet, Shiki was also a lover and celebrant of baseball, a passion that sprang from his years of playing the sport at Ichikō. From the 1880s, his prolific essays, poetry, fiction, and newspaper commentaries popularized baseball not only by systematically explaining it but also by beautifully rendering an aesthetics of watching and playing the sport: "Beyond the hedge, a withered field of grass and a ball game" (ikegaki no / soto wa kare no ya / tama asobi), went one of his hundreds of baseball haiku (p. 49).

In chapter 3, Keaveney turns to the treatment of baseball in twentieth-century films, and even those familiar with early Japanese cinema may be surprised by the extent to which baseball was "a source for plot, setting, conflict, and metaphor" (p. 61). In part this was due to the association of both baseball and cinema as Western imports that were quickly worked into the fabric of Japanese modernity. Keaveney begins with the shomingeki genre of 1920s and 1930s cinema, which highlighted an emerging suburban middle-class lifestyle, noting some of the baseball themes in Ozu Yasujirō's early films. But it was Shōchiku Studio's Shimazu Yasujirō who was especially taken by the sport, as is most evident in Tonari no Yae-chan (Our Neighbor, Miss Yae), his 1934 masterpiece (pp. 66–69). Moving to postwar cinema, Keaveney juxtaposes Suzuki Hideo's 1955 Fumetsu no nekkyū (Immortal Hero) with Kobayashi Masaki's 1956 Anata o kaimasu (I Will Buy You). In both films, youthful struggles to succeed in baseball are tied melodramatically with opposition from parents, romance, and marriage prospects. By the 1970s and films...