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

CHAPTER 1. Pacific Crossings

On December 30, 1907, Abraham G. Mills, the fourth president of the National League of Base Ball Clubs (NL), issued the final report of a special seven-­ member panel appointed by Albert G. Spalding, a kingpin of American professional baseball’s founding brothers, to determine “the true origins of America’s national pastime.” The commission, which included two U.S. senators, was charged to “weigh all available evidence” against the claim made by English-­ born baseball writer and statistician Henry Chadwick that the game had evolved from the British folk game of rounders. After three years of intermittent investigation, the Mills Commission definitively dismissed Chadwick’s thesis, reporting that baseball was solely of American origins.The singular basis of this unequivocal conclusion was written testimony sent to Spalding by Abner Graves, a former resident of Cooperstown, New York. Sixty-­ eight years after the alleged event took place, the informant recalled that his childhood friend Abner Doubleday, a West Point graduate and a Civil War hero (who also happened to be Mills’s commander in the Civil War), had single-­ handedly invented the game of baseball in 1839 on a playing field in the pastoral upstate New York village. Baseball scholars, such as Robert W. Henderson and Harold Seymour, have long since debunked this Doubleday-­ Cooperstown foundational myth. The current scholarly consensus holds that no single individual created baseball; rather, it evolved incrementally from various forms of bat-­and-­ball folk games, including British rounders. This cultural form of transatlantic hybrid pedigree grew into a modern team sport in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York in the early nineteenth century, with each of these burgeoning northeastern American cities developing its distinctive formats of the game. These regional archetypes competed for dominance in midcentury America, but by the eve of the PACIFIC CROSSINGS ​ 1 12 | Pacific Crossings Civil War, New York’s variant became ascendant. It spread far and wide across the reunited nation after the war, claiming the moniker “America’s national pastime” along the way.1 Unlike the contested hagiology of baseball in the United States, the genesis of baseball in Japan has been free of the polemical debate and manipulation of historical evidence that surrounded the mythologizing of the game’s “immaculate conception” in Cooperstown. Not surprisingly, Japanese baseball historiography has been unburdened by vested interests in either affirming or disputing the quintessentially “American”—as opposed to British—origin of the sport. Nor was there any compelling need or organized attempt, as there was in turn-­ of-­ the-­ century America, to make baseball serviceable to the narrative of post–Civil War intersectional reconciliation and link its “purely American origins” to overarching American nationalism.2 Both scholars and popular chroniclers of Japanese baseball have long reached the consensus that rudimentary forms of baseball, introduced in the early 1870s, had multiple known roots. One pointed to a cohort of young American men who came to Japan as oyatoi (meaning “hired hands”) employed by the Japanese government, provincial political leaders, and private patrons to participate in the nation ’s modernization project. Minor quibbles over particular “firsts” have existed among devoted aficionados and custodians of baseball trivia, but they never assumed divisive proportions, certainly not to the degree necessitating the creation of an investigative commission.3 Scholars of Japanese baseball alsowidelyacknowledge that disseminators of the American cultural form were not Americans alone. The game made its way to Meiji Japan, embraced by Japanese adolescents who, through various types of study-­ abroad opportunities, received education in Gilded Age America. By the end of the nineteenth century, baseball blossomed into a transoceanic pastime fostered in multiple networks built and sustained byaspiring Americans and Japanese who chose to cross the Pacific with a variety of aspirations in their hearts. Baseball in Early Meiji Japan As part of the state-­ driven modernization program, rulers in Tokyo recruited over three thousand experts, the oyatoi, from Europe and the United States after Japan’s reluctant “opening” to the West, the historical process initiated by Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy. These hired foreign nationals assisted, first, the decaying Tokugawa shogunate and the Meiji imperial government that replaced it in 1868 in adopt- Pacific Crossings | 13 ing Western science and technology and building institutions of governance to handle the demands of a complex modern society. Fourcountries (Great Britain, France, Prussia, and the United States) supplied the bulk of these foreign consultants and technical assistants, and lines of...