Baseball as Education and Entertainment

Baseball’s origins in Japan date back to the 1870s, and by the 1890s, it was a popular sport at the elite preparatory schools. Baseball was propelled into national consciousness by a series of games played by the most prestigious of those schools, First Higher School in Tokyo, against a team of Americans from the port of Yokohama. Their surprising success against the experienced American adults at a moment of patriotic fervor and a revival of a samurai warrior ethics as a national template popularized these boys, this sport, and this samurai imagery as a Japanese style of playing baseball. The game then spread rapidly through a national public education system, and it was promoted by newspapers and urban transport companies. Baseball, even its schoolboy origins, was not just education but edu-tainment, a contentious hybrid of moral pedagogy and profitable entertainment. Baseball, this chapter demonstrates, played a central role in the new metropolitan modernity of early twentieth-century Japan, and this provided a complex foundation for the professional sport that was Japan’s central entertainment in the post–World War II decades.