A Pinch Hitter Has Entered the Game: Transnational Encounters in Japanese American Baseball

by Victor Curiel

April 23, 2020

Baseball has connected the United States and Japan ever since Commodore C. Perry landed in Tokyo Bay in 1853. A watershed moment that has seen homages and satires portrayed in various media including in episode 23 of the popular anime Samurai Champloo that has Mugen, a central character, beating the American baseball team upon his first attempt at the game.^[1] American employees introduced baseball while tasked with providing western knowledge to Japan, and that exchange continued as Japanese citizens began to migrate to Hawaii and later to mainland United States by the 1890s. The immigrant story that unfolded is one tied to a push and pull dynamic that encourages assimilation. However, immigration is also a communal experience that instinctively produces ethnic enclaves that preserve ethnic traditions, and baseball served as a connecting force for various Japanese American generations. Baseball was fundamental to Japanese communities assimilating to the United States. A sport that gained popularity during the Meiji government's modernizing campaign, it became the premier group sport played by Japanese elites and later by the working-class migrants coming to Hawaii and then mainland United States. It was the Japanese embrace of baseball before World War II that helped assimilate them into American society and provided a different narrative, one that countered the militaristic narrative associated with Japan's global military endeavors.^[2] In Pocatello, Idaho, in particular, baseball provided a means for the Nisei generation to stay connected to their Japanese roots while at the same, allowing them to embrace cultural customs regarded as inherently American. It was as Elmer Berry restated from Albert G. Spalding, author of Baseball: America’s National Game, “Baseball is peculiarly American in its temperament and psychology… It is our national game… by nature and characteristics… The game ‘fits’ Americans."^[3]

In 1935 Japan's first professional baseball teams visited the United States, and the citizens of Pocatello had the privilege of watching the Tokyo Giants play the Pocatello Indians.^[4] The tour by American baseball legends like Babe Ruth and by the Japanese All-Star team to the United States helped improve American perceptions of the Japanese. The Salt Lake Tribune, for example, states that 1,700 fans showed to see the unreal Japanese pitcher whose fastball "was the best in these parts in a long, long time."^[5] Not only were the fans coming out in droves to watch baseball but were mesmerized by the polite habits of the Japanese team, who bowed to umpires, which led the Salt Lake Tribune to write, "No wonder the umpire looks surprised. The poor fellow who stands behind the plate gets nothing but courtesy."^[6]

However, the growing sense of comradery quickly shifted as Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor. A few months after the bombings, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, as a means to thwart "espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material."^[7] The law was directed against the Japanese community but, in theory, applied to anyone considered a potential risk based on ethnic connections to enemy states. Congress followed suit by passing Public Law 503, allowing courts to enforce Executive Order 9066.^[8] After encouraging voluntary evacuation away from western coastal states, the Western Defense Command (WDC) began to remove and detain Americans of Japanese ancestry forcibly. In the next six months, the WDC moved over 122,000 Japanese Americans to assembly centers. As the reality of the situation began to set in, one of the first challenges the detainees faced was to establish a semblance of normalcy and continuity while facing the encircling barbed wire fences. Throughout many camps, sports ranging from basketball to football became a familiar activity that imbued with them a sense of normalcy. Still, it was as Ken Mochizuki said, "baseball [that] saved us.” Baseball was such a large part of everyday life in the prison camps that the Minidoka Irrigator quoted an internee saying that, "Old man baseball reigns supreme among our dads and have helped make life in this camp more pleasant for him."^[9] Baseball helped sustain hope along with community cohesion when Executive Order 9066 disrupted the lives of thousands of Japanese Americans. It was also a chance for the Japanese to further prove their allegiance to the United States. As one internee at the Manzanar prison camp said, "Putting on a baseball uniform was like wearing the American Flag.”^[10][11]

Even after the war, baseball did not stop serving as a tool to connect Japanese Americans to their Japanese roots while also maintaining an American sense of identity. Kent W. Hadley exemplifies this. He was not only a baseball star but, as Ernie Stites of the Idaho State Journal stated in 1964, "Pocatello's ambassador to the people of Japan."^[12] Hadley, a native of Pocatello, attended Franklin Junior High school and found his footing playing for Coach Verl Thornuck's Pocatello Team while at Pocatello High School, where he graduated in 1952.^[13] That team would go on to win second place in the national playoffs and eventually landed him a spot playing for USC and even more impressively a spot with the New York Yankees. The interchanging of players from the United States to Japan and vice-versa helped expedite the healing of wounds from WWII. Along with creating world-renowned figures, baseball served as a political symbol of newly forged cultural partnerships. Yet there was still an assumption that "[Japan has] never been a member of the world community, not in the Edo period, not in the Meiji era and not today," as Tokyo-based journalist Midori Masujima wrote in a widely read magazine essay. That all changed when the Los Angeles Dodgers signed Hideo Nomo, an outstanding pitcher who blazed a trail for other Japanese players like Ichiro Suzuki.^[14] Suzuki's ability was able to, as Masujima wrote, "amount to a vindication of Japan itself."^[15]

Baseball opened up contact zones that would have been otherwise constrained by international restrictions or racial perceptions. Baseball allowed so many people from different ethnic backgrounds to occupy interlocking spaces as both player and spectator, and because of this, baseball served as a cohesive force in building collective bonds between Japanese Americans and other Americans. Regional stories captured the various ways that baseball served as a means of applying and ascribing American cultural practices and, with it, the idea of who was American.

Victor Curiel earned his bachelor's degree from California State University Long Beach in History focusing on revolutionary, race, and gender history. He is currently a graduate student of history at Idaho State University and is working on a thesis regarding a transnational analysis of various race riots in the United States and abroad. He is a big fan of the Canadian band PUP and rapper J. Cole; they are huge influences on his research.