View the H-Diplo Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Diplo's February 2013 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Diplo's February 2013 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Diplo home page.
---------------- H-Diplo Roundtable Review www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables Volume XIV, No. 21 (2013) 18 February 2013 ---------------- Copyright (c) 2013 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for non-profit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author(s), web location, date of publication, H-Diplo, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses, contact the H-Diplo editorial staff at h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu. ---------------- Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse Roundtable Web/Production Editor: George Fujii Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux Introduction by Thomas W. Zeiler ---------------- Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu. Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3562-3 (cloth, $39.95). Stable URL: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIV-21.pdf ---------------- Contents [Page numbers refer to the PDF edition] Introduction by Thomas W. Zeiler, University of Colorado Boulder 2 Review by John Gripentrog, Mars Hill College 7 Review by Scott Laderman, University of Minnesota, Duluth 10 Review by Elizabeth V. O'Connell, Stony Brook University 14 Review by Steven A. Riess, Emeritus, Northeastern Illinois University 18 ---------------- Introduction by Thomas W. Zeiler, University of Colorado Boulder Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu has brought to bear her historical knowledge, especially of U.S.-Japan relations, her enviable language skills, and her passion for baseball to extend and deepen our understanding of transpacific exchanges through time. The four reviewers recognize her contribution to the study of American foreign relations history, American studies, the growing subfield of sports and diplomacy, and even the importance of the state (she makes a good case for the transnational connections to international politics). Her adaptation of transnational methodology and wielding of globalization as an interpretative architecture are impressive, and provoke us to think in new ways about the United States and Japan. While Transpacific Field of Dreams does not necessarily decenter America - a trend that has taken root among scholars of U.S. diplomacy, led by Thomas Bender's call for truly comparative and world history and contextualizing U.S. power within the global arena - Guthrie-Shimizu tries to privilege the foreign as much as the United States.1 She has heeded that call and advanced us further down the road charted also by Akira Iriye, who, in internationalizing history, turns somewhat away from the state and toward studies of broad global trends, such as investment, migration, and technology transfers. Such research (as the commentators and the author acknowledge) on U.S. foreign relations within the world is accelerating, and this book is part of that movement. Linked to this pursuit is a focus on identity. While Guthrie-Shimizu focuses on how U.S.-Japanese relations were affected by baseball, she also spends considerable pages discussing values - American values that shaped Japan, Japanese resistance and acceptance, and the change wrought, especially in Japan, by these cultural pressures. And what was more American than baseball, after all? Actually, this book speaks to a growth industry that has compelled diplomatic historians to weigh culture as an element in foreign policymaking. While historians may agree with Iriye that the joining of international history with studies of cultural relations is an exciting endeavor, some scholars in U.S. diplomatic history maintain a focus on homefront culture and its impact abroad, the government's cultural diplomatic initiatives, and binational cultural contacts, just as Transpacific Field of Dreams does. Finally, Guthrie-Shimizu makes a contribution to sports history, namely, how sports deepens our understanding of diplomatic history. The boom in scholarship, as Steven Reiss notes, shows that sports is no longer thought of as just fun and games, or the subject of fans and hobbyists. For a while now, studies in the wide-ranging field of professional and amateur, adult and youth, and team and individual athletics have revealed that the history of all sports concerns more than competition. They are closely aligned to business and profits, organizations, culture, and media. The field of sports is serious, and engages most major trends in the historiography through innovative methodologies. Sports lends itself to analysis of non-state exchanges because they are not often officially sanctioned, although the links between the transnational "movement" of games, athletes, and organizations, and national governments, are close and complex ones. But the clarity of where the state stops and private citizens emerge is not always evident. Stretching back to the immediate post-World War II period, even agents of the state - soldiers - became diplomats by using sports to make contact with average citizens under occupation. Such was the case for American soldiers (representatives of the state) in Japan, who played baseball with the beleaguered citizenry in city streets. The state was instrumental in building cooperative relationships, while turning over the mechanisms and processes to private groups and individuals. While the state often dictated transpacific relations, it is just as clear that athletics operates at a different level, somewhat beyond the reach of governments. Such transnational notables as the tennis player Arthur Ashe, or cricketeers from the West Indies, influenced the movement against apartheid. Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Argentinian President Juan Peron, and other leaders might hold the podium, but Canadian hockey players, Cuban track stars, British soccer hooligans, and Pakistani and Indian field hockey teams grab the headlines, and attention of the masses, in ways that shape policy. So did Babe Ruth in Japan. To be sure, international athletes can easily become pawns in the great game of power politics, and in the final analysis, few become political champions like Ashe and the boxer Muhammad Ali. But they can forge out ahead of the crowd (and governments), making the links across borders that states try to obstruct. Thus, Ali called attention to Islam, and the American sprinters in Mexico City in 1968 to black nationalism. I wonder how much the baseball players were similarly influential, because Guthrie-Shimizu presents them as agents, rather than initiators, of change. In any case, transnationals matter. Baseball has long had close affiliations with international politics in many eras, including the Cold War. The recent study by Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out, published a few years ago, actually implicates baseball for abetting imperialism since the late nineteenth century by promoting the American dream and way abroad, and being a carrier of U.S. economic, cultural, and, on occasion, military and national security interests.2 Baseball toed (and still does) the government line of jingoistic patriotism, get-tough foreign policies, the self-interested commodification of the sport, and was the hegemonic lure of the best foreign players to American shores. Polemical, yes, but Elias' treatment does illustrate the ways that baseball and diplomacy merged. Studies have also begun to relate the history of the international arena to baseball in various locales, such as in Taiwan and that nation's climb out of Japanese colonialism (which introduced the game) through the sport. So, I am not as concerned as John Gripentrog is in this forum that Guthrie-Shimizu digressed too far afield by discussing the truly transpacific impact of baseball, beyond Japan. Alan Klein, who engages in sophisticated treatments of borderlands history with the sport, has done similarly by bringing to the baseball table notions of imperialism, liberation movements, Marxism, nationalism, regionalism, economic integration, immigration, race, and consumerism - all of which are relevant to diplomacy (especially between the United States and Mexico).3 Transpacific Field of Dreams demonstrates that baseball reflected larger diplomatic concerns and issues of national identity in international culture, and was also a transnational disseminator of values, business practices, and politics in its own right. Baseball relations mimicked the flourishing (and contested) bilateral trade relationship, and mimicked the flows of textiles, televisions, and Toyotas that shaped the diplomatic relationship but remained autonomous within the context of the alliance. The state was not always a determining factor, but baseball sometimes determined politics, especially by being a cultural agent of change - and that, I believe, is Guthrie-Shimizu's fundamental contribution to scholarship. The reviewers have recognized many of these themes, and offer insights of their own. John Gripentrog endorses the effort to show how culture affects societies, individuals, and, one would presume, nations and their relations to each other, though he wishes there had been a bit less theory and fewer forays into the wider transpacific region. He, like all of us, begs for more, especially in tying the era Guthrie-Shimizu reviews to the past twenty years when Japanese players entered the major leagues. Like Gripentrog, Scott Laderman applauds the effort to link local and national societies and politics to the transnational and transpacific. Both also are fascinated by the world tours, and the detailed (sometimes overly so) examination of Occupation relations, educational systems, and the like. That comes with the turf, because Guthrie-Shimizu is building on work on globalization and baseball while adding her own considerable cultural analytical tools to the diplomatic history kit. Laderman also hits on one of the pitfalls of researching everyday lives when it comes to sports; there is little documentation from athletes (though some have kept diaries) to give us a true bottom-up feel of events and contacts. Elizabeth O'Connell notes that Shimizu-Guthrie seeks to add to Jacques Barzun's famous statement that "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball" (so oft-cited that I was going to use it in this introduction) by expanding its meaning to include connections across oceans and borders. She then does a wonderful job of summarizing this wonderful book, chapter by chapter. Like O'Connell, Steven Riess - one of the deans of baseball and sports history - also provides a superb synthesis of the book. He launches his critique with a justifiable survey of works that have linked baseball to diplomacy and the projection of America abroad. Like Gripentrog, he would have liked to see Shimizu-Guthrie bring the story to the present. Readers will do well to ponder these critiques, and also do themselves a favor and get hold of Transpacific Field of Dreams. Participants: Thomas W. Zeiler received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts and is Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the Editor of Diplomatic History. He has written on U.S. diplomacy and globalization, including American Trade and Power(1992), Free Trade, Free World: The Advent of GATT (1999), Dean Rusk (2000), Globalization and the American Century (2003), Unconditional Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire (2006); and Annihilation: A Global History of World War II (2011). John Gripentrog is Associate Professor at Mars Hill College near Asheville, NC. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006. He teaches courses in both U.S. foreign relations and Modern Japan. In addition to "The Transnational Pastime: Baseball and American Perceptions of Japan in the 1930s," which appears in Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No. 2 (April 2010), he is the author of a commemorative essay on the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, published on SHAFR.org. He is currently working on an interwar history of U.S.-Japan relations. Scott Laderman, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, is the author of Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and the co-editor, with Edwin Martini, of Postwar Interventions: Transnational Legacies of the Second Indochina War (Duke University Press, forthcoming). He is currently completing an international political history of surfing for the University of California Press. Elizabeth V. O'Connell is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York system. She studies U.S. history in the early cold war, focusing on the relationship between popular culture and gender identity. Her dissertation is titled: "Gods of the Diamond, Heroes of the Republic: Baseball and American Manhood, 1941-1963." She has also contributed anthology articles analyzing the gender-based reputations of professional athletes in Major League Baseball and professional tennis. Steven A. Riess, Ph.D (University of Chicago, 1974) is a Bernard Brommel Research Professor, emeritus, at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. The former editor of the Journal of Sport History, he is the author of several books including The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime. Horse Racing, Politics, and Crime in New York, 1865-1913 (2011), Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era, rev. ed., (1999), and City Games: The Evolution of American Society and the Rise of Sports (1989), and editor of Sports in America: From Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century, three vols. (2011). He is currently writing Horse Racing, the Chicago Way: Politics, Crime, and the Turf in the Windy City, Chicago. 1865-1971, and editing the Blackwood Companion to American Sport History. Notes 1 Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nation's: America's Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in A Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 2 Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (New York: The New Press, 2010). 3 Alan M. Klein, Baseball on the Border: A Tale of Two Laredos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) ---------------- Review by John Gripentrog, Mars Hill College A few years ago I read an account by an American veteran of World War II who reflected on one of his bombing missions against Japanese forces in the Pacific in 1944. As his B-25 squadron descended toward a small New Guinea island, out of a jungle clearing appeared a baseball diamond-with a game in progress. "None of the crews reported firing on the baseball game," the veteran recalled. "Perhaps it all happened too fast. Or maybe for a fleeting moment we were kindred spirits sharing a sympathetic pause for a common cause."1 Remarkably, amid a well-documented 'war without mercy,' the connective tissue of a transnational game may have scored the difference between life and death. This anecdote reinforced in my mind not only the complex layers of the human condition, but also the subtle and multifarious ways in which cultural practices affect relations between individuals and societies-an increasingly resonant notion among historians who study foreign relations. Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu's Transpacific Field of Dreams, which examines baseball's unique role in the history of U.S.-Japan relations, is a welcome addition to this thematic thrust. Guthrie-Shimizu deftly illuminates the transnational pastime as a manifestation of globalization, rightly arguing that the study of baseball "enables us to trace and analyze the interconnections, material and metaphorical, human and institutional, that began to sprout and thicken across national boundaries in many parts of the world after the mid-nineteenth century" (2). In the process, the author has unearthed what she refers to as an "enduring undertow of affinity and comparative historical parallels" between Japan and the United States (6). The scholarly windfall for this multi-archival research is particularly lucrative in highlighting the myriad unconventional transpacific networks that developed beyond the realm of high politics-"collective bonds neither totally amenable to state control nor summarily replaceable with local or national allegiances" (6). The result is a study teeming with a curious assortment of Japanese and American individuals summoned from the margins of history. These positive contributions are undermined only slightly by an overly ambitious objective to incorporate circum-Pacific baseball connections as well, including developments in Japanese and American colonial and semi-colonial contact zones. The broadened foray, however interesting at times, tends to distract from the narrative as a whole. Moreover, the introduction begs for a rewrite that more simply states the book's aims, which by my count, enumerated at least eight objectives, some of which were unnecessarily tangled in academic jargon. It did not do justice to the engaging pages that followed. Guthrie-Shimizu leads off with a richly woven narrative of baseball's rise in Japan during the early Meiji Era, which was inextricably linked to the nineteenth century's technological innovations in transportation and communication; "[p]ractical applications of new technology, steamships, railways, intercontinental telegraph connections, and the mass proliferation of print media made it possible for many people...to become part of a larger world in ways previously unimaginable" (3). The resultant globetrotting phenomenon was most emphatically realized in a Japanese nation opening up to the world after a long samurai slumber. The author succinctly retells the Meiji government's active recruitment of westerners to assist in modernizing Japan, so-called oyatoi or "hired hands" (12). America sent the second-largest number of workers, some of whom arrived in Japan with bat and ball. In standard accounts, the story typically begins and ends with a cursory reference to Horace E. Wilson, an American instructor at a Japanese high school who came to be called the 'father' of baseball in Japan. Guthrie-Shimizu, however, not only brings Wilson to life with an enhanced biographical sketch but introduces readers to a cohort of young American oyatoi who played a fundamental role in baseball's ascension in Meiji Japan, such as Edward Mudgett, Albert Bates, and Leroy Lansing Janes. The transoceanic journeys and cultural interactions of these men reflected "the imbrications of a world rapidly becoming interconnected...." one that made possible baseball's "swift transmission" (14),. Importantly, it was not a one-way dynamic. We learn that several Japanese who had traveled to and lived in the U.S. in the late 1800s also played key roles, especially Hiraoka Hiroshi. The author rightly gives this railroad engineer and Boston Red Stocking fan his due. Hiraoka, who spent six years in America, returned to Japan to create, among other things, Japan's first private baseball club (1878) and baseball-exclusive playing field (1882). He also had the gumption in 1884 to write sporting goods pioneer and former Red Stocking pitcher A. G. Spalding with a request for balls and assorted equipment. Spalding responded with a cache of free equipment and several copies of Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide, which, as Guthrie-Shimizu makes clear, "helped accelerate the standardization of play and rules in the land of eager neophytes" (29). The author shows how the simultaneous explosion of school-sponsored baseball clubs at both the high school level and emergent Tokyo-area colleges drove the game's national popularization. A definitive 'Meiji moment' of sorts came in the summer of 1896 when a team from Ichiko-a prominent feeder high school for Tokyo Imperial University-played a four-game series against a team from the American expatriate community. Before stunned Americans and euphoric Japanese spectators, Ichiko clobbered the Americans 29-4, 32-9, and 22-6, before falling in the fourth game 14-12. Guthrie-Shimizu frames an important discussion on nationalism and race with a beautifully told baseball 'coming of age' story. Indeed, she concludes her important first chapter by proclaiming, "Japan, like the United States, had found its national pastime" (39). The opening chapter's delightful momentum is slowed, however, by chapter two's expansive framing of baseball's linkages to America and Japan's Asian-Pacific imperial outposts and settler communities. While some readers may find significance and resonance in the author's assertion that baseball's "developmental trajectories paralleled circuitous paths taken by the band of offshore Americans and Japanese who traversed the geographical expanse of the circum-Pacific hemisphere, carrying colonial aspirations and civilizational pretensions" (72), I found the discussion cumbersome and distracting from the heart of the matter. A desire to tell a larger story also dampens parts of chapter three, though the continued development of Japanese baseball in late Meiji-aided by homegrown baseball publications, sporting goods manufacturers, and intercollegiate competition-is expertly told. We also see the dawn of intercollegiate baseball exchange between U.S. and Japanese universities. The budding transnational exchange sets the tone for a golden era of baseball tours, competition, and instruction. Amid the smattering of scholarship on baseball linkages between America and Japan, doubtless the most popular has dealt with the touring major league 'all-stars' that visited Japan in 1913, 1922, 1931, and 1934.2 What is remarkable is that some of Guthrie-Shimizu's most compelling scholarship deals with the more well-covered topics. This clearly can be attributed to her multi-archival approach and fluency in Japanese and English. Context is crucial in historical understanding, and Guthrie-Shimizu's layered, multi-perspective account fills numerous gaps in previous renderings, especially from the Japanese side. For example, whereas previous scholarly works offered only a glimpse of significant Japanese baseball tour impresario Shoriki Matsutaro, the author provides insight into his background, motivations, and mode of operations. The result is a greater understanding of how the major league tours of 1931 and 1934 came to be. Another contextual merit of Guthrie-Shimizu's study is that the wild enthusiasm of Japanese fans welcoming major league players no longer comes across as some sudden, irrational outpouring, but rather as a logical consequence of a nation that, like the U.S., had found its national pastime in the nineteenth century. The author's chapters on baseball during World War II and the U.S. occupation of Japan are more thorough than anything to date. The occupation chapters, however, suffer at times from too much detail. Coverage of the 1949 tour by Lefty O'Doul's San Francisco Seals minor league team runs nearly 10 pages. The significance of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers' (SCAP) "cultural diplomacy" notwithstanding, it's too long. And, then, regrettably, a great piece of research comes to a rather abrupt conclusion. The final chapter makes references to a few linkages and parallels in the 1950s, but fails to comment on the great wave of Japanese professional players who began entering and succeeding in the major leagues in 1995 with Hideo Nomo's historic debut for the Los Angeles Dodgers. It was a missed opportunity to tie the likes of Horace Wilson, Hiraoka Hiroshi, Lefty O'Doul, Sawamura Eiji and Shoriki Matsutaro to Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, and Matsui Hideo, among many others. Guthrie-Shimizu's book nonetheless is a well-researched and well-written study of a unique aspect in U.S.-Japan relations. Her scholarship reflects the continuing-and refreshing-trend among historians of foreign relations to find interstate significance and meaning beyond the realm of high politics. Notes 1 David Brennan, "When Baseball Intervened," Purple and Gold Chi Psi Alumni Magazine, Summer 2004, 5. 2 For brief overviews of the 1931 and 1934 tours, see Joseph A. Reaves, Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2002), 55-73; Richard C. Crepeau, "Pearl Harbor: A Failure of Baseball?," Journal of Popular Culture 15:4 (1982), 67-74; and Robert Sinclair, "Baseball's Rising Sun: American Interwar Baseball Diplomacy and Japan," Canadian Journal of the History of Sport, 16, no. 2, (1985), 44-53. For a combined look at the 1931 and 1934 major league tours and the 1935 Tokyo Giants tour to the U.S. set within the political context of the decade, see John Gripentrog, "The Transnational Pastime: Baseball and American Perceptions of Japan in the 1930s," Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No.2 (April 2010): 247-273. ---------------- Review by Scott Laderman, University of Minnesota, Duluth Frontiers of Sport Baseball is not uniquely American. Americans may wish it were so, but it is in fact a game with transatlantic roots - at least in part - that is played just as passionately, if not more so, in a number of places outside the United States. Cuba immediately comes to mind. So does the Dominican Republic. And then, of course, there is Japan. As Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu makes clear in her excellent new book, baseball has been a significant thread in the fabric of Japanese life since at least the early twentieth century. Japanese baseball may have originated with Americans in the 1870s, but it was not long before Japanese indigenized it, and within a few decades it became just as much 'Japan's game' as it did America's. One of the great strengths of Guthrie-Shimizu's book is its compelling demonstration that baseball is not merely a national sport, whether of the United States, Japan, or any other nation. It is truly transnational, connecting numerous countries,, to expand on the book's subtitle, in peace, war, and all points between. Sport has been a relative latecomer to the cultural turn in diplomatic history. Tom Zeiler, Barbara Keys, and Heather Dichter have produced important studies, as have non-diplomatic historians - Gerald Gems, Douglas Booth, Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, et al. - focusing on cultural imperialism, apartheid, and colonialism in Hawai'i, among other issues.1 To these foundational works must now be added Guthrie-Shimizu's Transpacific Field of Dreams. The book is certainly ambitious. Not content with providing just an entertaining story to appeal to baseball's large popular readership, Guthrie-Shimizu attempts - successfully, in my view - to connect this quintessential pastime to empire-building, the structural transformation of the United States (and world), and transpacific state relations. Baseball, Guthrie-Shimizu writes, "enables us to trace and analyze the interconnections, material and metaphorical, human and institutional, that began to sprout and thicken across national boundaries in many parts of the world after the mid-nineteenth century" (2). This was an era that saw society transformed by technological change, and baseball, she notes, not only relied on but richly illustrates this transformation. Moreover, baseball "further illustrates how a cultural practice can powerfully mediate affective relationships between individuals, groups, and societies and sometimes even shape interstate relations in tangible ways" (2-3). I agree with Guthrie-Shimizu that sport offers an ideal window for examining such matters. She is right to treat baseball as not only a source of pleasure, as sport is generally supposed to be, but also as a form of work. It is wage work to those who play it professionally, of course, just as it is a profit-making enterprise to those who own its teams, equipment businesses, and related institutions. But baseball is also cultural and diplomatic work. Players (and owners) may not always be fully conscious of how this is so, but this does not make the game any less consequential. And it is indeed consequential. The originality of Guthrie-Shimizu's account comes not so much in its tracing of baseball's American and Japanese histories. There is already considerable scholarship outlining these national developments. Where Guthrie-Shimizu makes a major contribution is in her connection of the local to the national and the national to the transnational. For instance, the Japanese embrace of American baseball in the nineteenth century was certainly an embrace of a foreign game, but, even more fundamentally, it was an embrace of a foreign notion: physical exertion for its own sake. To Japanese, writes Guthrie-Shimizu, this was "thrillingly unfamiliar" (14). Most of these exertions initially took place in Japanese schools, and it was in these schools - primary, secondary, and tertiary alike - that baseball really took root. Guthrie-Shimizu thus spends a great deal of time tracing the transpacific relationships of Americans and Japanese in the two countries' educational systems. Ample attention is given to Americans working as teachers in Japan, where baseball was introduced by these teachers and became, for some, an example of "muscular Christianity" (17) and "a vehicle of Christian male fellowship" (18). There is also ample attention given to Japanese who studied in the United States and became important proponents of 'America's game' upon their return home. To these Japanese and their compatriots, baseball represented "modernity incarnate," a crucial understanding to "an urbanizing society eager for social experimentation and cultural innovation" (22). There are at times dizzying levels of detail in the unfolding of this educational narrative, and it can occasionally be difficult to remember who did what, where it happened, and when it all took place. Yet this detail marks the depth of Guthrie-Shimizu's research, which has been organized and pulled together well. Probably the most fascinating portions of Transpacific Field of Dreams to me are the political analyses of American-Japanese encounters on, and occasionally off, the baseball diamond. There are the obvious cases freighted with international meaning, such as when visiting U.S. military personnel played against Japanese teams. But there are also the more surprising American tours. There was the visit of the Philadelphia Bobbies, for instance, an American women's team that toured Japan in the mid-1920s to "promote baseball among Japanese women" and "encourage them to come to America" (126), though, in the end, the tour met mostly with disappointment. There were also various cases of multiracial squads that toured Japan and elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific. And then there was the visit to Japan of a Negro League team in 1927. The Americans played extremely well, compiling a 23-0 record against "top-class local collegiate and club teams" with only a single tie (the Daimai Club, which was a "powerhouse" in Japan's semipro industrial league). But even more significantly, they made a very favorable local impression. The squad demonstrated "impeccable sportsmanship and fair play" (129), even going so far as to graciously accept, rather than contest, poor calls made by local umpires. The Negro Leaguers played against not only Japanese squads but a multiethnic team from the visiting Fresno Athletic Club, and in Hawai'i on the way home they played teams of Japanese and Chinese Americans. (They beat the former but lost 3-1 to the latter.) The United States was of course deeply segregated at that time, so by shifting our focus to Japan, its imperial territories, and Hawai'i, Guthrie-Shimizu importantly reminds us that, from this "decentered vantage point," the racial segregation of America's major leagues was an aberration rather than the baseball norm (130). Transpacific Field of Dreams is at heart an analysis of the globalization and subsequent appropriation of American culture, and, in focusing on baseball's spread across North America and the Pacific, Guthrie-Shimizu does a masterful job in identifying the structural architecture that enabled this process. This includes the creation of the transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century and the growth of shipping lines and then air travel in the twentieth; the global ambitions of equipment manufacturers such as Albert Spalding and then the rise of homegrown entrepreneurs in the Japanese islands; the founding of schools and universities throughout Japan that drew on an American educational model - and often American educators themselves - with its attention to a modern curriculum for both mind and body; the Japanese media companies who developed that nation's baseball press, as well as those companies that saw profit potential in the creation of an organized professional league; and of course the state policies that expanded both nations' borders and thus the number of their baseball diamonds, from the settler societies that emerged in the wake of Japanese imperialism in Asia to the American military personnel who played against both native populations and immigrant communities in the American territories of Hawai'i and the Philippines. If I had to identify one shortcoming in Transpacific Field of Dreams - and such is the nature of these roundtables that I must - it is that we don't hear much from the grassroots. The book would have been enriched if it included, if possible, more of the voices of those who made the transnational journeys so astutely addressed by Guthrie-Shimizu. How, for instance, did American ballplayers touring Japan or its colonies - and especially American players of color - feel about Japanese colonialism? How did they feel about American colonialism? What did these players think about playing in Japanese colonies such as Korea and Taiwan or in the American colony of the Philippines? How did Japanese players feel about Hawai'i, both its American annexation and its unusual racial politics? How did the touring Americans? It may be that the answers to such questions are out of reach, as the documents that might tell us simply do not exist. Given the breadth of Guthrie-Shimizu's research, in which she seemed to leave no stone unturned, I am inclined to think they must not. Yet the questions are, to me at least, nagging ones. In her analysis of American ballplayers touring Japan just weeks after the 1931 Manchurian Incident, for example, she notes how they were "honored with a tea at the official residence of the prime minister, Wakatsuki Reijiro, who was then busy deflecting worldwide opprobrium over the nation's military aggression in Manchuria" (135). Did any of the American players object to this Japanese aggression? If so, did they make their objections known? Guthrie-Shimizu notes that press photos of the event were made available to the foreign press and that these were intended "to showcase U.S.-Japanese friendship seemingly unperturbed by the military aggression" (135). How did the Americans feel about being used as diplomatic tools? Were they troubled about the role they arguably played in softening the image of Japanese imperialism? Or elsewhere and at other times, were American or Japanese players bothered about their role in camouflaging American empire-building? While these are, I think, important concerns, they are but minor quibbles in the face of Guthrie-Shimizu's achievement. This is undoubtedly an important book. It is important, of course, for its rich illumination of the overlapping worlds of Japanese and American athletes, industrialists, entrepreneurs, and government officials in the tumultuous decades since the 1870s. On this basis alone Guthrie-Shimizu has succeeded in expanding our scholarly horizons. Yet the book is also important for what it suggests about the state of our field. Sport has indeed arrived. In the hands of a scholar such as Guthrie-Shimizu, sport provides a revealing lens through which to examine global state politics, the spread of race and gender ideologies, tourist flows, and cultural diffusion and imperialism. Deeply researched, elegantly written, and chock full of fascinating detail, Transpacific Field of Dreams makes an important contribution to American and Japanese international history. Notes 1 Thomas W. Zeiler, Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006); Barbara Keys, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006); Heather Dichter, Sporting Democracy: The Western Allies' Reconstruction of Germany Through Sport, 1944-1952 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2008); Gerald R. Gems, The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Douglas Booth, The Race Game: Sport and Politics in South Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1998); and Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai'i (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2011). Dichter and Andy Johns are also at work on a much-anticipated collection of essays on sport and U.S. foreign relations. Heather Dichter and Andrew Johns, eds., Diplomatic Games: An International History of Sport and Foreign Relations since 1945 (in progress). ---------------- Review by Elizabeth V. O'Connell, Stony Brook University Diamond Diplomacy Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu's Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War begins with the cultural historian Jacques Barzun's famous line: "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball" (1). This phrase is familiar to those who study baseball, for it has been quoted by many scholars seeking to explain the role that baseball (organized and amateur) has played in American society since the nineteenth century. For such academics, baseball is more than a simple bat-and-ball game, it is a lens to view American history and the interactions of race, class, and gender throughout.1 Yet Guthrie-Shimizu argues for the expansion of Barzun's sentiment. She suggests that baseball had spread into the Caribbean and across the Pacific by the end of the nineteenth century, and so Americans never really held a monopoly on the game. Instead she proposes that those who wish to learn about the late nineteenth century (and, indeed much of the twentieth century, as her book demonstrates) should study baseball (1-2). Because Guthrie-Shimizu sees baseball as a means for understanding the interconnections of people and institutions across national boundaries, her work fits within the parameters of studies of globalization, which she defines in accordance with Charles Bright and Michael Geyer: "a process-or set of processes-in which the flows of peoples, ideas and things accelerate and the network of worldwide interconnectivity become even dense, facilitated in part by the increasing speed of communication and ease of transportation" (2-3).2 What follows, then, is an exhaustively researched examination of American-Japanese relations through baseball, from the age of Commodore Matthew Perry through that of General Douglas MacArthur. However, although the military plays a part in the narrative, Guthrie-Shimizu brings more agents of social interaction to her field of study, most notably those American travelers and settlers who were vital to America's Pacific expansion and the "opening" of Japan. Transpacific Field of Dreams is, therefore, consistent with other baseball scholarship in that it analyzes the meaning of baseball beyond its physical and spatial attributes,3 and instead finds its impact within the broader social relations in and between the two cultures. For Americans, baseball has long been associated with democracy, and spreading the game provided a means of spreading 'civilization.' Over the course of the narrative, Guthrie-Shimizu demonstrates the ways in which baseball's meaning has been transferred, contested, and conciliated. Chapter One details baseball's early days in Meiji Japan, established in part by the oyatoi, the group of young American 'hired hands' employed by the Japanese government, local politicians and private patrons, to aid in Japan's modernization. Although other oyatoi came from Europe and also brought their leisure activities (including cricket), Guthrie-Shimizu contends that baseball was able to establish a firm hold thanks to a generous contribution of equipment by American sporting goods magnate A.G. Spaulding, who sensed a good marketing opportunity for not only his business but his favorite sport (12-13, 26-29). Beyond Spaulding's contribution, however, the author points to Japanese students, many of whom came from aristocratic backgrounds, who were educated in the United States and returned home with bat and ball in hand. Their participation reinforced the sport in upper-class social circles as well as local communities and schools, and helped indigenize the game in Japan (19-22). Chapter Two focuses on the dissemination of baseball throughout Pacific colonies, both American and Japanese. New England Christian missionaries sent to Hawaii by the American Board of Foreign Missions and influenced by the muscular Christianity movement introduced the native population to baseball as a means of teaching them "civilized" physical exercise (43). The U.S. military was responsible for the game's introduction in the Philippines; stocked mainly with lower-class soldiers looking for social interaction, the military allowed games between American military teams and local civilian teams. Yet while the Hawaiians took to the game with ease thanks to indigenous bat-and-ball predecessors, Filipinos in the late nineteenth century "generally perceived exertion in solely productive, not recreational and consumptive terms" (48). Upper-class Filipinos were more hesitant than those lower in the social hierarchy to accept the game, gradually overcoming their reluctance by watching American soldiers and sailors as well as through educational initiatives sponsored by Governor-General William Cameron Forbes. Concurrently, Japanese officials such as the Taiwanese Governor-General Sakahuma Samata also introduced Western athletics into curricula, "believing that cultural practices were a penetrating device that could facilitate comity between the colonizers and the colonized" (63). Baseball thus functioned as a mediator, according to Guthrie-Shimizu, between American and Japanese colonizers and their colonial populations, first as a means of "civilizing natives" and then "as an avenue of conciliation and insidious co-optation" (73). Chapter Three examines the development of commercialized baseball on both sides of the Pacific. Despite growing political tension at the beginning of the twentieth century, the American fleet and top-ranking Japanese collegiate players were able to come together in October 1908 in the spirit of 'manly sportsmanship' and play a series of baseball games. They were joined by a shared love of the game that had manifested and was beginning professionalization (75-77). This transoceanic baseball fraternalism led to amateur, collegiate and, eventually, professional American ballplayers barnstorming the Pacific in the early twentieth-century, which is the subject of Chapter Four. The first Major-League World Tour was organized by the New York Giants' John McGraw and Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey in 1913-1914 to promote professional baseball as well as to assert American dominance. In addition to players from the Giants and White Sox, the tour also included Sam Crawford of the Detroit Tigers and Tris Speaker of the Boston Red Sox, as well as umpires Bill Klem and Jack Sheridan, and Jim Thorpe, who garnered sympathy among the Japanese audience as a fellow victim of American racism (113-119). The Major League tour was followed in 1925 by the Philadelphia Bobbies, an all-female team that played a series of games against Japanese collegiate and industrial male teams (124-128), and the Philadelphia Royal Giants, a group of fourteen African American players brought together by the Negro National League's Biz Mackey, who garnered a reputation for not only their talent but their sportsmanship and fair play (128-130). Set against the uneasy peace between the two nations in the 1930s, Chapter Five analyzes the way in which baseball continued the cultural exchange between the U.S. and Japan. Shimizu-Guthrie details the development of Japan's first commercially viable professional baseball league, as well as the planning, publicity and reception of the 1934 All-American Tour, starring "Banzai" Babe Ruth (148-152). Yet while Ruth was celebrated throughout Japan, Shimizu-Guthrie highlights American intelligence gathering by Moe Berg, a Major League catcher and Columbia University graduate, fluent in Japanese, who used his time in Japan to film the Tokyo skyline, industrial facilities, and the harbor for Secretary of State Cordell Hull, which would later be used to plan the bombing campaign against the city in 1942 (153). Chapter Six details the impact of the Second World War on the warring nations. Professional and amateur leagues in both the United States and Japan were expected to make sacrifices for the war effort; players enlisted in the armed services and materials that were used to make equipment were rationed for the duration. More than this, the meaning of baseball and ownership of the game were contested throughout the conflict. The author quotes the assertion of the U.S. newspaper, Sporting News, that "the spirit of the game [never] penetrated their yellow hides" because "no nation which had as intimate contact with baseball as the Japanese could have committed the vicious, infamous deed of the early morning of December 7, 1941" as an example of the reinterpretation of the Japanese and the cultural exchange that had occurred over the previous decades (183). The author contrasts Japanese militarism and its hostility toward recreational sport with Franklin Roosevelt's famous declaration of support for Major League Baseball as an escape, as well as the many service teams that emphasized the American commitment to the citizen-soldier rhetoric. Shimizu-Guthrie also includes an intelligent discussion of baseball within the American internment camps, where the Nikkei gathered to "ease the anguish and despair of their disrupted lives during that uncertain period" (195-196). This underscores the complexities of the Japanese-American conflict as well as of identity, of which baseball had become an important part. Chapters Seven and Eight analyze the role baseball played in Occupied Japan. American bureaucrats attempted to bring the nations together by affirming a shared love the 'American Game,' and again worked to emphasize the ties between baseball, democracy, and capitalism. Barnstorming returned with the Pacific Coast League's San Francisco Seals playing against Japanese professional teams and U.S. military teams in 1949. The tour also provided opportunities for American corporations such as Coca-Cola to gain entry to the foreign market (213-22). As the Cold War took shape and the Japanese professional leagues restructured to be more in accordance with the standards and practices of America's Major League Baseball, the United States and Japan found baseball an appropriate and accessible symbol of both the continuation and adaptation of diplomacy (224, 239). Transpacific Field of Dreams functions as a wonderful introductory text. It is impressively researched, including Japanese and American archives and periodicals as well as secondary texts, and full of fascinating stories highlighting the cultural exchange between the two nations, as well as the many different agents-political, military, civilian, and professional-that established this 'transoceanic pastime.' It will surely function as a springboard into further studies of both diplomatic ties through cultural exploits as well as comparative baseball studies. For example, scholars of gender will be interested in contrasting the acceptance of baseball as a socializing agent with the short-lived Girls' Baseball League, which Shimizu-Guthrie argues was undermined as much by "ambiguities in social purpose" as by its lack of technically proficient players (233). If understanding baseball is a means of understanding not only the hearts and minds of Americans, but also of the Japanese, Transoceanic Field of Dreams presents an important contribution to the study of the cultural ties and identities of its subjects. Notes 1 Authors include: Melvin L. Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-70 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Richard Crepeau, Baseball: America's Diamond Mind, 1919-1941 (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1980); Kathryn Jay, More than Just a Game: Sports in American Life Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Neil Lanctot, Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Benjamin Rader, Baseball: A History of America's Game (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Steven A. Riess, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Donn Rogosin, Invisible Men: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues (New York: Antheneum, 1983); Jules Tygiel, Past Time: Baseball as History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); 2 Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, "Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age,' in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 67. 3 Tygiel, Past Time; Rader, Baseball; Riess, Touching Base; Jay, More than Just a Game. ---------------- Review by Steven A. Riess, Emeritus, Northeastern Illinois University Baseball, The National Pastime: A Tale of Two Countries Fifteen years ago, I pointed out in Major Problems in Sport History (1997) that that sport and foreign relations (especially cultural diffusion and diplomacy) have not been adequately integrated into the literature.1 Actually, there was already a lot of attention given to the expansion of British sports overseas.2 In point of fact, I misspoke a bit because there was one outstanding monograph on the diffusion of baseball in Meiji Japan by Donald Roden and there were several studies of baseball's movement into Latin America by William H. Beezley, Allen M. Klein, Louis A Perez, and Rob Ruck.3 The study of how baseball made its way across borders became an even more popular topic for scholars in the ensuing years, beginning with Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria's history of Cuban baseball, The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball and Colin Howell, whose work focused on baseball's migration across borderlands. 4 There has also been considerable interest in baseball's migration to Hawaii, including Monica Nucciarone's Alexander Cartwright: The Life behind the Baseball Legend, which debunked the legend that Cartwright, one of the founders of the 'National Pastime,' had later introduced baseball in Hawaii.5 Baseball's diffusion of baseball was large engineered by the private sector, which was trying to promote the American sports business. Recently, Robert Elias argued unconvincingly in The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U. S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad that baseball contributed significantly to the rise of the United States as a world power.6 The history of baseball tours has become a veritable cottage industry, starting with the publication in 2003 of James E. Elfers' The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball's 1913-1914 World Tour. This journey to promote the national pastime globally involved John J. McGraw's New York Giants, who had won the National League pennant in 1913, and Charles Comiskey's Chicago White Sox of the American League. The six-month tour included a sojourn in Japan, and concluded with a game in front of 20,000 spectators in London.7 In 2006, two books were published about the Spalding World Tour of 1888-1889 in which the Chicago White Stockings, owned by sporting goods magnate Albert G Spalding, and a select team of other major leaguer toured the world to promote the sport and promote interest in Spalding's sporting goods: Mark Lamster's Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made It America's Game and Thomas W. Zeiler, Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire. Lamster's narrative was aimed at a popular audience. Zeiler, a renowned diplomatic historian, explores how the tour drew on elements of cultural diplomacy to inject American values and power into the international arena. However, he goes too far in claiming its role in foretelling American imperialism. Zeiler sees the baseball players and their entourage as "tourists" who disseminated American culture abroad and brought global influences back home. 8 He claims the tour helped build an imperial U.S. identity that laid the roots for the soon-to-be-acquired empire following the Spanish-American War, but the thesis is more claimed than proven. The trip was made possible by such forces as economic growth, a search for overseas markets, and growing cultural interchange that was pushing the U.S. onto the world, but that did not make it part of the march toward imperialism. In 2012 came three more travel stories, Joel S. Franks' The Barnstorming Hawaiian Travelers: A Multiethnic Baseball Team Tours the Mainland, 1912-1916; Robert K. Fitts' Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, & Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan; and Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu's Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War. Franks tells the story of the Hawaiian Travelers, a largely forgotten ball club that toured the mainland from 1912 through 1916 to promote tourism and combat racism. It started out as a mainly Chinese squad but became increasingly multiracial and multiethnic. Banzai Babe Ruth is a history of the most important baseball junket to Japan, intended to promote baseball there. However its Japanese promoters hoped it would also improve relations between two countries that shared the same favorite team sport which represented ideal values for both nations. The Major League All-Star tour was led by Babe Ruth, the biggest American hero in Japan. As expected, the major leaguers easily won every game. They were bigger, stronger, and more experienced than the smaller, less technically prepared Japanese who had no professional league. The Japanese played baseball employing the values and ideals of Bushido, such as loyalty, discipline, self-sacrifice, and honor. They believed, incorrectly, that by playing with a strong 'Japanese' spirit, they could beat the Americans. The tour grandly promoted baseball in Japan, and two years later the professional Japanese Baseball League was founded. Guthrie-Shimizu's Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War examines the istory of Japanese American baseball cultural exchanges from the late nineteenth century through the post-World War II era, following in the footsteps of scholars like Walter LeFeber and especially Akira Iriye, who emphasize the role of culture in U.S. Japanese relations. 9 Guthrie-Shimizu uses baseball to show the permeability of national boundaries, and believes that studying baseball provides keen insights into U.S.-Japanese relations and is a central means to understanding the rapid post-war reconciliation. She argues that examining baseball history enable historians to trace and analyze material, metaphorical, human, and institutional interconnections that emerged in different parts of the world; opens our eyes to the many ways that technology transformed society and culture; and demonstrates how a cultural practice can powerfully mediate effective relationships between individuals, groups, societies, and states. Her work is a study of the "process of globalization in which the flows of peoples, ideas and things accelerate, and the networks of worldwide interconnectivity become even dense, facilitated in part by the increasing speed of communication and ease of transportation."10 The author attributes baseball's popularization in Japan to such social factors as industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization of society, and the advent of mass transportation (railroads and trans-Pacific shipping) and mass communication. These were the same factors, she asserts, that pushed the game in the United States. She narrates the story of baseball's modernization as the game evolved from spontaneous play to being highly organized and commercialized, with defined structure, codified rules, symbols, and ideology. Guthrie-Shimizu notes that baseball's popularity in Japan symbolized America's growing influence in the Pacific Rim, while representing for the indigenous elite a microcosm of western modernization and American values they were attempting to import into Japan. She not only stresses baseball's functionality in Japan as a modernizing agent, but also as a way to increase Japanese self-respect in interpersonal and intercultural situations, and a means to promote and improve foreign relations with the U.S., and also as a lot of fun. Guthrie-Shimizu's narrative of baseball's rise in Japan follows the current historiography, attributing the game's introduction to American educators employed by the government to teach, as well as to Japanese students returning from the United States. Particularly important was the American-trained railroad engineer Hiraoka Hiroshi, a leader in a booming, highly prestigious, and glamorous field, who established the first private baseball club, the Shinbashi Athletic Club that was popular among patricians. The growth of the game required increased access to equipment and technical knowledge that was provided by manufacturer Albert Spalding, whose guide books taught the rules of play, and described the equipment and methods of record keeping. However, the author points out that the Japanese entrepreneurs Mimatsu and Mizuno soon jumped in with their own equipment and guides. Shortly, other Japanese periodicals, books, and national press coverage abetted a growing interest. The first bastion of the game was high school teams in the 1880s. In 1896 when the Ichiko school team defeated Americans at a restricted sports club in Yokohama, they immediately became national heroes for defeating the U.S. at its own game. Then in the early twentieth century, when relations between the nations soured, baseball tours provided a venue for promoting positive relations, primarily by American collegians to Japan, reciprocated by Japanese college squads touring Hawaii and the mainland. A key to the game's success in Japan that the author overlooks was how the locals made baseball a Japanese team game that stood for Japanese values.11 Guthrie-Shimizu makes an important point in comparing how active the Americans and Japanese were in using baseball to promote their nation overseas. Both nations employed baseball to co-opt and mold the behavior of colonials, and to acculturate their own youth born overseas. Americans took the national pastime abroad in order to make money, promote American culture and values, and bring civilization, social control, and governance to their new empire. The Army employed baseball in the Philippines to facilitate its reorganization into a peace time occupying force. It served as the centerpiece for the islands' new sport culture. Baseball was very popular among the Japanese in Hawaii, where they compromised sixty percent of the population in 1895. Particular credit is given to Rev. Takie Okumura, who arrived in 1894 from Japan to promote baseball among young Japanese plantation workers, providing a cheap and clean amusement. Japanese ball clubs in Hawaii promoted cultural assimilation and ethnic pride. Following the 1909 sugarcane workers' strike, the Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Association organized ethnic based teams to promote employee loyalty and counter labor unrest by perpetuating ethnic rivalries.12 The author follows the concurrent rise of Nikkei baseball both in cities and agricultural communities on the American West Coast. Baseball gave mainland issei (first generation immigrants) a social and recreational outlet, a means to connect with their American born sons, an opportunity to make friendly contact with the broader white American population , and a way gain cultural acceptance. Yet most games were among fellow Japanese. Some community teams traveled to Tokyo, which heightened a sense of ethnic and racial identity. The Japanese were quick to use baseball in their new domains. In 1897, two years after Taiwan became a part of the Japanese empire, baseball was employed to sustain the Japanese identity of Japan's colonial staff, prepare youth for military service, and acculturate elite Taiwanese children. Baseball was also brought to Manchuria, a sphere of influence, and to Korea, which was annexed in 1910. In Taiwan and Korea, local ballplayers aspired to defeat the hated Japanese at their own game. Guthrie-Shimizu devotes a lot of attention to the baseball tours of American teams, starting with collegian nines, and highlighted by professional tours that began in 1908 with the Reach All-Stars Far Eastern Tour and the Major League World Tour of 1913-14. In 1922, Commissioner Kennesaw M. Landis sanctioned a major league tour that was also supported by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, who saw these tours as a means to restore U.S.-Japanese amity. The pro tours gave locals a sense of commercialized baseball. Players learned the need to totally devote themselves to their craft. Growing interest encouraged baseball manufacturers to sponsor primary and youth baseball; and middle schools were subsidized by private businesses. This led to creeping commercialism and payoffs to players who could become national celebrities. During World War I there was a rise in industrial semi-pro clubs, sponsored by companies, that employed former high school stars. This culminated in the 1927 Intercity National Tournament that promoted a sense of local identity and boosterism.13 Guthrie-Shimizu argues that in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the U.S. and Japan shared similar problems in amateur sport, with an overemphasis on school and college sport. Japanese high school baseball suffered the same dilemmas as American intercollegiate sports as reported in the Carnegie Foundation's American Collegiate Athletics Report (1929) by the Carnegie Foundation. Japanese high school students neglected their schoolwork, there was too much parental and alumni interference, unwholesome values were promoted, and the Tokyo Big Six high schools were beset by financial scandals. As result, in 1932, the national government put student baseball under its control. The education ministry banned corporate sponsorship of elementary schools; tightened amateur eligibility for middle school; limited tours; equired annual financial reports; and curtailed player recruitment. The nation was divided over the future of school sports, with some educators calling for the ending of student baseball, while others encouraged using school sport as part of a state directed program of national mobilization. Relations between the two countries became very strained in the early 1930s due to Japanese nationalism, militarism, and expansionism. Opinion leaders who wanted to improve relations thought that the shared interest in baseball could keep the countries from drifting apart. This led Shoriki Matsutaro, publisher of the Yomiuri Shinbun newspaper and who regularly sponsored public spectacles, to attempt to gain publicity and increase circulation by organizing a our of major league all-stars in 1934. The American roster included six future Hall of Famers, most notably Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball hero in Japanese baseball. The month-long tour, during which the Americans were treated royally, covered twelve cities with games drawing up to 60,000 spectators. The profitable tour was not competitive. The visitors won every game against their Japanese rivals, led by Babe Ruth who had 13 home runs and batted .408 Since the talented Tokyo Big 6 players were bared from playing professionals, Shoriki quickly put together a team of 'professionals' comprised of industrial leaguers and high schoolers who willingly forfeited their amateur status. They included the high school stars Sawamura Eiji, who turned pro to support his family, and émigré Victor Starffin, who was threatened with deportation back to Russia unless he complied.14 During the tour, catcher Moe Berg skipped a game, and instead went off to St. Luke's hospital to take photographs. Guthrie-Shimizu claims that he was acting as a spy and that the photographs were used in 1942 by General Jimmy Doolittle to guide his famous raid on Tokyo.15 However, there are no primary sources reporting evidence for the military use of the photographs, or that Berg did not become a spy until he joined the OSS during World War II.16 Guthrie-Shimizu argues that the tour helped lead to full-blown professional baseball in Japan, beginning with the creation of the first Japanese professional baseball team, the Greater Japan Tokyo Baseball Club with players from industrial leagues, high schools, the colonies, Hawaii, and California. One year later seven pro teams formed the Nippon Professional Baseball Association which began play in 1936. The teams were mainly owned by railroads and newspapers that saw the teams as agents of the parent companies' advertising divisions rather than an independent source of money. The author pays considerable attention to the role of baseball in both nations during World War II when it promoted morale (including that of Japanese Americans interned in concentration camps where they laid out ball fields). The pros ended up in the military, but major leaguers typically played baseball on service teams far from the battlefront to promote a sense of community, physical fitness, ethnic pride, national cohesiveness, and normality, while the Japanese sent their ballplayers to the front line because they needed combat troops. Of course there were exceptions like fighter pilot Ted Williams, and Hank Greenberg, who served 45 months in the military including in the China-Burma-India Theater, scouting locations for B-29 bombers. The major leagues continued to operate during the War, but with a distinctly lower quality due to the absence of most experienced professionals. Rosters included old and young athletes and other men disqualified for military service. However, in Japan, radio broadcasts were curtailed, equipment (rubber, leather and yarn) was heavily rationed, and American terms were eliminated from Japanese baseball as unpatriotic. In 1943 top level college and industrial ball was halted, and one year later the professionals closed up.17 Guthrie-Shimizu's final focus is the reemergence of Japanese baseball after the war. The American occupiers used baseball for social and political purposes and for cultural symbolism. Leaders of the occupation believed that baseball should be brought back as an icon of peace, democracy, and freedom. Its return would help pacify the occupied areas by providing wholesome recreation and helping to reeducate the enemy by teaching the concepts of fair play and sportsmanship. Its reestablishment would show that the Japanese people no longer detested Uncle Sam and were getting ready to rejoin the brotherhood of nations. The Japanese learned to perceive star American players as role models of fair play, hard work, and ambition, and saw the game as an ideal representation of American consumerism. The military government was so concerned about promoting baseball that it made materials to make balls a priority, staged free games for the public at military games, and reintroduced American terms and nicknames to the sport. Baseball returned to schools as part of a totally overhauled educational system that had been linked to militarism, exemplified by the martial arts, which were now banned from school. By 1946, national high school tournaments resumed. Three years later, the office of baseball commissioner was created, the Japanese Industrial Baseball Association was founded, and the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League staged the first American baseball tour since 1934, which was underwritten by American firms, like Coca Cola that were seeking new markets. An invented tradition of imperial patronage of baseball was created by the attendance of the crown prince.18 The 1949 tour was attended by about 500,000 spectators and helped promote baseball at all levels. The Shoriki Plan, implemented in 1951, created a two league and the Japanese World Series, copying the U.S., aimed at raising the level of competition. The decade of the 1950s, Guthrie-Shimizu argues, was a key temporal marker in the transpacific history of baseball. Both nations underwent a paradigmatic shift in the nature of professional baseball. She asserts the key American shift was the move to the West Coast, tied to the influence of new technologies--television and air travel, along with the historical forces that were unleashed by the post-war mass consumer society. However, before the Majors went to Los Angeles and San Francisco, there was the integration of the majors by Jackie Robinson and then in 1953, the first shift of franchise locations in fifty years when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee.19 This is a very well written book that boldly spans the Pacific in order to connect the baseball experiences of two nations. By not limiting itself to the impact of the culture-bearing nation to a subordinate one, but also by showing how the receiving nation took the cultural institution and exercised agency by adding adaptations and making the sport its own, this multi-lingual study is a model for trans-national studies. My hat is off to the author for her ambitious effort, which contains few factual errors,20 though I would have liked to have read a discussion on the more recent era when Japanese players made it to the Major Leagues. Notes 1 Steven A. Riess, Major Problems in American Sport History (Boston, 1997), iii. 2 On the expansion overseas of British sports, see Richard Ford, This Sporting Land (London, 1977); Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (New York, 1989); J.A. Mangan, ed., The Cultural Bond: Sport, Empire and Society London, 1992); Mangan, ed., Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism (London, 1988); Mangan, ed. The Games Ethic and Imperialism (New York, 1986); and especially Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (Harmondsworth, UK, 1986). For an overview of the subject of sport and imperialism, see Allen Guttmann, Games and Empire: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism (New York, 1994). 3 Donald Roden, "Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan," American Historical Review 85 (1980): 511-34. See also Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu, "For Love of the Game: Baseball in Early U.S.-Japanese Encounters and the Rise of a Transnational Sporting Fraternity," Diplomatic History 28 (2004): 637-62; and John Gripentrog, "The Transnational Pastime: Baseball and American Perceptions of Japan in the 1930s," Diplomatic History 34(2010): 247-273. See also Allen Guttmann and Lee Thompson, Japanese Sports: A History (Honolulu, HI, 2001); and Joseph Reaves, Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia (Lincoln, NE, 2002). On the Philippines, see Janice A. Beran, "American Sports in the Philippines: Imperialism or Progress Through Sports?" International Journal of the History of Sport 6 (1989): 62-87 On Mexico, see William H. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club (Lincoln, NE, 1987); and Beezley, "Bicycles, Modernization and Mexico," in Joseph L. Arbena, ed., Sport and Society in Latin America: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Rise of Mass Culture (Westport, CT, 1988), 15-28. On the Caribbean, see Alan M. Klein, "Sport and Colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean," Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 10 (1991): 257-71. Klein, Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream (New Haven, 1991); Louis A. Perez, "Between Baseball and Bullfighting: The Quest for Nationality in Cuba, 1868-1898," Journal of American History 81 (1994): 493-517; and Rob Ruck, The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic (Westport, CT, 1991). 4 Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (New York, 1999); Colin Howell, "Baseball and Borders: The Diffusion of Baseball into Mexican and Canadian-American Borderland Regions, 1885-1911," Nine: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture 11 (2003): 16-26; and "Baseball, Class and Community in the Maritime Provinces, 1870-1910," Histoire Sociale: Social History 22 (1989): 265-286 5 Baseball in Hawaii, see Frank Ardolino, "Missionaries, Cartwright, and Spalding: The Development of Baseball in Nineteenth-century Hawaii," Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 10 (2002): 27-45; Joel S. Franks, Hawaiian Sports in the Twentieth Century (Lewiston, NY, 2002); and Franks, Crossing Sides: Crossing Cultures; Sport and Asian Pacific American Cultural Citizenship (Lanham, MD, 2000); and Monica Nucciarone, Alexander Cartwright: The Life behind the Baseball Legend (Lincoln, NE, 2009). See also the special issue "Mapping the American Empire" International Journal of the History of Sport 28:17 (2011). 6 Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U. S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad (New York, 2010). 7 James E. Elfers' The Tour to End All Tours: The Story of Major League Baseball's 1913-1914 World Tour (Lincoln, NE, 2003). 8 Mark Lamster, Spalding's World Tour: The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made It America's Game (New York, 2006); Thomas W. Zeiler, Ambassadors in Pinstripes: The Spalding , World Baseball Tour and the Birth of the American Empire (Lanham, MD, 2006). , ix-xi, xiii, 3, 55-58, 118-20, 122, 124-25, 127-28, 135-36 9 Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Iriye, The Globalizing of America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Iriye, ed., 'Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Iriye, "Culture," Journal of American History.77:1 (June 1990): 99-107; Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W,W, Norton, 2002). 10 Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field of Dreams: How Baseball Linked the United States and Japan in Peace and War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012), 3, as quoted in Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, "Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in a Global Age," in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley, 2002), 67. 11 Guthrie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field, 88-94. 12 Ibid., 55-61. 13 Ibid., 95-98, 112, 121 14 Ibid., 152, 154-55. 15 Ibid., 153, citing Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (New York: Vintage, 1994), 92-95 16 For a critique of the Berg tales and the prior research on them, see Robert K. Fitts, Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage & Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 252-54 17 Guthrie-Shimizu, Transpacific Field, 176-80. 18 Ibid., 218-21 19 Ibid., 225, 236-38 20 It is questionable that the quality of play in the Negro Leagues surpassed the majors (128), and the Negro Leagues were dead a decade prior to 1962. It is inaccurate that the first generation of concrete and ballparks were built in the 1920s or were mainly in city centers since only Detroit's Navin Field (later Briggs Stadium) was downtown, and only Yankee Stadium was built in the 1920s (238). In addition, the latest research indicates that the decline of the minor leagues was not due to the advent of TV (227), but growing competition from other options. Copyright (c) 2013 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, H-Diplo, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the H-Diplo Editors at h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu.
|