How Japan Fell in Love with Baseball

Every four years, athletes across the world converge for the World Baseball Classic. While the United States’ legacy in baseball is storied, one of its fiercest rivals on the international stage is team Samurai Japan.

But Japan’s dominance in the sport is no accident. It reflects more than 100 years of history in which baseball served as a symbol of open borders, a tool for connection and a source of national healing. 

An American English teacher is widely credited with formally introducing baseball to Japan. Horace Wilson moved to Tokyo in 1872, 18 years after the Treaty of Kanagawa reopened the country’s borders to the United States after more than two centuries of limited foreign contact. In Tokyo, Wilson taught the game to his students at a preparatory school.

The sport had been previously mentioned in newspaper articles, but Wilson’s influence traveled farther than sporadic games, says RJ Lara, director of collections and archives at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. “A lot of these kids he was working with were not from the Tokyo area,” Lara says. “After he taught them the game of baseball at the preparatory school, they went back into their communities and taught them how to play.”

Community clubs in Japan were formed as early as the late-1870s. By the 1890s, baseball became normalized as a collegiate pursuit. In 1905, the Waseda University Baseball Club toured the United States, an experience that left a lasting mark on the game in Japan. Abe Isoo, the Waseda team’s manager, was so taken with the university pennant flags he saw waved in grandstands that he adopted the practice at home. Isoo had Waseda flags handed out before games and instructed people on how to cheer—ushering in the frenetic group chants still heard at baseball games across Japan today.

The attitude toward the sport really began to change when Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, “Lefty” Gomez and other Major League Baseball (MLB) heavy hitters embarked on a goodwill tour of Japan in 1934.

“Thousands upon thousands of people lined the streets just to welcome Babe Ruth,” Lara says. “And he was in the back of a convertible waving at the crowd. It’s this incredible moment. It started a Babe Ruth craze.”

The frenzy minted 17-year-old Eiji Sawamura a national hero, when on November 20, 1934, the high school pitcher struck out Ruth, Gehrig, Charlie Gehringer and Jimmie Foxx during an exhibition game at Kusanagi Stadium. When the Philadelphia Athletics’ team manager tried to recruit the young upstart, Sawamura declined, telling The Japanese-American Courier: “Going alone to an unknown country where I had no friends and little knowledge of the language was a little too much for me.”

However, Sawamura wouldn’t have to wait long to play baseball professionally. The Japanese Baseball League (restructured into Nippon Professional Baseball in 1950) officially began in 1936, with Sawamura pitching for the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants.

World War II halted baseball’s growth in Japan. Players were drafted into the war effort (including Sawamura, who died in 1944 at age 27), and the 1944 season was truncated. By 1945, play stopped entirely as stadiums were repurposed into military training grounds and fields to grow food. After Japan’s surrender in August 1945, Americans used many of those spaces for their own bases during postwar occupation. 

Baseball’s return was gradual. On October 28, 1945, Waseda and Keio universities faced off in a game, followed by a handful of exhibition matchups that November. But sports on the professional level remained paused until 1949, when former major leaguer Lefty O’Doul—inspired by his memories from the 1934 tour—brought the San Francisco Seals to Japan for a series of new goodwill exhibition games. General Douglas MacArthur blessed the mission, calling it “the greatest piece of diplomacy ever.”

During the first game of the tour on October 15, 1949, Tsuneo “Cappy” Paul Harada, a Japanese American major in the United States Army, was hired to serve as liaison between the military and the baseball world. He ordered the Japanese flag to fly alongside the American one. It proved to be a groundbreaking gesture, signaling a meaningful step toward reconciliation in the years after the war.

“They said the sounds in that stadium were crying in immense emotion,” Lara says. “That is what ignited professional baseball starting back up in Japan.”

Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball became formally linked in 1964 when Japanese pitcher Masanori Murakami was sent to the U.S. as an “exchange student” and was quickly recruited by the San Francisco Giants. When the Giants tried to keep him, a contract dispute with his Japanese team led to the 1967 Working Agreement, a pact that required both leagues to honor each other’s contracts and effectively barred Japanese players from moving to the MLB.

That barrier held until 1995, when Hideo Nomo exploited a loophole to join the Los Angeles Dodgers. His success sparked “Nomomania” and revitalized MLB after the 1994 strike that led to the cancellation of the World Series that year. Nomo also introduced many American fans to Japan’s thriving professional league. Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto even presented President Bill Clinton a baseball glove autographed by Nomo, a diplomatic gesture that underscored how deeply the sport had come to connect the two nations.

Today’s influx of Japanese talent in MLB is the modern fulfillment of this century-long exchange.