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After Japan’s narrow victory in the Russo-­ Japanese War, the national priorities and strategic objectives of the United States and Japan appeared increasingly at odds, especially in places like Manchuria, Japan’s new sphere of influence taken over from Russia. U.S. Navy strategists and their allies in Washington had been sounding alarms over Japan’s “stealth” control of Hawaii through settlement for some time. In American domestic debates regarding the annexation of Hawaii, they warned vociferously about the rising Asian nation’s territorial ambitions vis-­ à-­ vis the mid-­ Pacific islands. The U.S. acquisition of the Philippines augmented America’s sense of vulnerability in defending its distant colonial possession on the other side of the Pacific.1 By 1907 American navy strategists were busy formulating possiblewar scenarios predicated on future conflict with Japan.The Los Angeles Times even lamented the lack of coastal defense for San Pedro (where there was a concentration of the Japanese labor migration population) against a possible Japanese amphibious attack. Ominous clouds were gathering in America’s Pacific coastal states over the immigration issue, with the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper, increasing its drumbeat against cheap Japanese labor stealing jobs from white American workers. The immigration issue reached crisis proportions in 1906 when the San Francisco School Board attempted to segregate Japanese children into schools for “Orientals.” The deterioration of U.S.-­ Japanese relations was only temporarily allayed when President Roosevelt intervened and hammered out a series of agreements with the Japanese government commonly known as the U.S.-­ Japan Gentlemen’s Agreement.2 The heightened tensions infiltrating the interstate relationship were dramatized by the Great White Fleet’s Pacific Ocean practice cruise in ​ LEAGUES OF THEIR OWN ​ 3 76 | Leagues of Their Own 1907. Intended to awe, or at least impress, Japan with the United States’ naval capabilities and battle readiness in the western Pacific, a fleet of sixteen battleships plus auxiliaries manned by a total of fourteen thousand sailors was sent by President Roosevelt from its Atlantic home on an unprecedented peacetime world cruise. Circumnavigating the southern tip of the South American continent, the U.S. Atlantic Fleet visited Hawaii, Oceania, and the Philippines before arriving in Japan in October 1908.3 This historic visit occasioned direct U.S.-­ Japanese encounters in multiple realms. Confabulations between high-­ ranking Japanese government officials and the U.S. naval command were not the only highlight. Even schoolchildren lining the streets to cheer the visiting Americans, as if to give a lie to reports of U.S.-­Japanese animosity, did not quite tell thewhole story. While the U.S. Atlantic Fleet anchored in Yokohama, its crews challenged Japan’s top collegiate teams in baseball games. On October 19, the fleet’s all-­ star team lost to the combined Waseda-­ Keio team by a score of 5–4. The next day Keio faced the Wisconsin, and Waseda played the Ohio; on the following day, the matchups were reversed.The U.S.-­Japanese “Pacific series” concluded on October 21 with the final game, again between the navy all-­star team and theWaseda-­Keio all-­stars. It was a 1–1 tie. It was followed by a convivial gathering of players, politicians, and naval officers; libations flowed freely, and the happily inebriated participants from both sides congratulated each other on the shared ethos of manly sportsmanship.4 This little-­ known episode in U.S.-­ Japanese baseball fraternalism in the midst of interstate tension attests to the presence of a parallel social field the shared pastime was able to construct.The two circum-­Pacific imperial nation-­states grew connected through budding webs of sporting brotherhood in the early decades of the twentieth century when new local, regional , and national networks of baseball play sprouted in both countries . In the United States, the Pacific Coast League (PCL) was organized in 1903 as a premier minor league encompassing the three Pacific coastal states. The California Winter League became institutionalized in the second decade of the century as a seasonal but racially integrated professional circuit that operated in Southern California. Japanese American baseball embedded itself in semipro galaxies dotting the American West. Within the Japanese imperium, layers of student and industrial leagues rose and grew into a hugely popular spectator sport in the second and third decades of the century. Although a baseball enterprise openly run on the pay-­ for-­ play principle did not yet exist in Japan, some of the so-­ [18.118.184.237] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 16...

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