Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War

CHAPTER 7. A Field of New Dreams

The war in the Asia-­ Pacific ended on August 15, 1945, with Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers. Within a scant two months, baseball returned to the prostrate nation. The restoration of organized baseball at all levels—professional, semipro, and amateur—began in the early postsurrender months with the full blessings of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), the political authority now in control of the country. With the return of organized baseball, the game’s attendant institutions, such as national tournaments, national governing bodies, and baseball journalism, also quickly burst back into life in occupied Japan. Despite, or perhaps because of, the paralyzing material shortage and the emotional dislocation wrought by the long, drawn-­ out state of war, Japanese of all categories—men and women, young and old—­ devoured baseball in all of its permutations. By the time the Allied occupation formally ended in April 1952, baseball had clearly eclipsed sumo in popular appeal and established itself as the most beloved mass spectator sport in postwar Japan. During the seven years of the Allied occupation, Japanese professional baseball evolved into a successful commercial enterprise in a format resembling, at least in form, the U.S. major leagues, possessing a two-­ league structure complete with a players’ association and the Commissioner’s Office. In the meantime, Japan’s semipro industrial league virtually became a regional branch of the NBC, the governing body of American semipro professional baseball now encompassing military teams under its umbrella. In the early postwar years, the American occupation overlord and its Japanese partners worked closely together in crafting baseball into a new national iconography of peace, democracy, and freedom, signifying both continuity with an idealized yesteryear and a clean break from the reA FIELD OF ​ NEW DREAMS ​ 7 A Field of New Dreams | 199 jected past. The rhetoric of baseball as America’s and Japan’s shared pastime and cultural connective tissue was strategically circulated by both parties. In the spate of early postwar baseball magazines, American major-­ league stars, both old and new—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, and Bob Feller—became idolized again as models of fair-­ playing, hardworking , ambitious, and financially successful manhood, fit for emulation by boys and young men of New Japan. In this carefully reconstructed symbolic order, baseball expanded its presence in Japan’s cultural landscape, this time as a metaphor for democracy and American-­ style consumer culture and a symbol of a new partnership between the two nations forged in the darkening shadows of the Cold War. The almost seven years of the American-­led Allied occupation of Japan also meant an opportunity for a new cast of characters to exercise leadership in the reconstructed U.S.-­ Japanese baseball brotherhood, while leaving room for holdovers from the prewar years to reassert themselves. Front and center in this reconfigured transpacific sporting fraternity were Major General William Marquat, the director of SCAP’s Economic and Scientific Section (ESS), and his aide Captain Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada, a California-­ born Nisei who played liaison between Japan’s baseball lobby, SCAP’s upper echelons with close personal ties to General Douglas MacArthur , and American organized baseball. Together, they championed baseball as a tool for democratizing the former enemy country and shepherded professional baseball as a remunerative business enterprise during the postwar reconstruction. In every way, the rebirth of organized baseball in Japan after World War II was a binational project, invested with complex political agendas, social purposes, and cultural symbolism. It was also during this early postwar decade that American baseball capitalism conquered its final continental frontier—the U.S. West—and built a bridgehead to Asia. The Return of Baseball to Occupied Japan On November 23, 1945, at Tokyo’s Jingū Stadium, the Japanese enjoyed a much-­ awaited opportunity to satisfy their long pent-­ up craving for baseball , the game that had until a little over two months before been reviled by their militarist government as an “enemy sport” incongruent with the nation’s “true spirit.” On a crisp autumn day, 6,000 residents of the flattened capital city gathered at Jingū Stadium (which had been commandeered by the U.S. Eighth Army on August 18 and renamed “Stateside Park”) and savored the spectacle of an east-­ west game played by former 200 | A Field of New Dreams Japanese professional ballplayers—including Fujimura Tomio, Tsuruoka Kazuto, and Chiba Shigeru—who had either eluded the draft or...