Double Binding of Japanese Colonialism: Trajectories of Baseball in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea (original) (raw)
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Cultural Studies, 2022
This article studies baseball played at ‘the margin of empires.’ It attends to the manifestations of ‘baseball complex’ – the persistent sociopsychological a!ective force for baseball that derives from personal experiences/memories and political/historical institutions – in two geohistorical contexts: Japanese American internment in the US during World War II and Taiwan around the 1930s under Japanese rule. Besides historical references, newspaper reports and critical scholarship, two films are taken as core texts of analysis: Desmond Nakano’s American Pastime (2007), which enacts a story of baseball in the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, USA during the second World War, and Umin Boya’s Kano (2014), which tells the story of Kano baseball team emerging from Taiwan under Japanese colonization. My reading draws attention to the stratified power structure that characterizes the margin of empires and suggests to move beyond the binary comprehension of baseball as either a tool of acculturation and colonization (for the imperial and dominant) or a medium of social ascendancy and cultural assimilation (for the colonized and minoritized). I argue that baseball not only could be utilized by those holding power or those obviously minoritized/colonized, but could be needed urgently by those caught in-between the powerful and the disempowered, such as the marginalized whites assigned to guard over Japanese Americans on sites of the internment or the Japanese relegated to Japan’s colony in Taiwan. Moreover, by foregrounding baseball’s trans-Pacific trajectory and exploring baseball’s entanglement with the triangulated power processes between the US, Japan, and Taiwan, I challenge the static meaning of baseball while testing out cinema’s value in simulating historical situations and changes.
Professional baseball, America's pastime, during the period following the Second World War, tells the story of new integration within the sport: Major League Baseball's color-line is smashed with the inclusion of UCLA product Jackie Robinson in 1947. Also during this time, the historic career of Yankee great Joe DiMaggio, a second-generation Italian American immigrant from the Bay Area, was also coming to its end. Missing from this narrative are the Japanese American players, famous on the West Coast for the talented teams produced within their communities. At this time, Japanese American players had much success playing in the professional leagues of Japan. This paper investigates the complex transformation of Japanese American racialization and Japanese American baseball as an agent of United States influence and partnership with Japan following the devastation of the war and the atomic bombs and explores the role of the great American pastime in both the domestic and the international arena.
Taiwanese Baseball: A Story of Entangled Colonialism, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism
2009
This article is about the development of baseball in Taiwan, and how it has been connected with Taiwan’s entangled history of Japanese colonization, the Chinese Nationalist’s authoritarian rule, the ethnically stratified social structure, and the emergence of the Taiwanese identity. Baseball was foreign to Taiwan when it was first introduced to the island. The sport then crossed the ethnic and class boundary between the Japanese colonizer and the Taiwanese islander in the 1920s, later the Taiwanese natives and the Chinese mainlanders in the 1970s, and in turn became a symbol of Taiwanese nationalism. This article argues that baseball does not circulate a fixed meaning as it travels to different places. The story of Taiwanese baseball indicates the interpenetration of colonialism, class, ethnicity, and nationalism.
Bushidō Baseball? Three ‘Fathers’ and the Invention of a Tradition
Social Science Japan Journal, 2008
Japanese baseball is often presented as an example of an unchanging Japanese ‘national character’, and Japanese baseball players are depicted as contemporary versions of the samurai, living and playing baseball according to a code of ‘yakyūdō’ (‘the way of baseball’, thought to be a present-day incarnation of bushidō, ‘the way of the warrior’) by both Japanese and non-Japanese commentators alike. In this paper, however, I argue that rather than Japanese baseball's ideology and practices being reflective of a unique and unchanging ‘essence’ of Japan, they are the result of specific individuals and institutions interacting under particular historical and social forces. Moreover, although the dominant ideology in Japanese baseball has been couched in the rhetoric of bushidō for over 100 years, it is in fact closer to 19th-century Western notions of amateurism, sportsmanship and chivalrous masculinity than the ethos of samurai of earlier centuries. This is largely due to the efforts of Christian socialist Abe Isō, considered to be both the ‘father of Japanese socialism’ and the ‘father of Japanese baseball’, as well as his students Tobita Suishu and Saeki Tatsuo, known as the ‘father of student baseball’ and the ‘father of high school baseball’, respectively.
The Formation of First Professional Baseball Team in Japan
Since it was first played in the 1870s, baseball has become a de facto national sport for Japan. This paper investigates the expansion of the sport, and the shift from amateur to professional baseball, with a focus on Japan’s first professional baseball team, the Nihon Athletic Association (日本運動協会, henceforth NAA, est. 1920). It considers the social and cultural context of the professionalisation of baseball in Japan during what was the golden age of a college baseball, and investigates the influence of early American baseball techniques on Japanese players, and how this served to cultivate a professional practice. Moreover, it considers the place of the professional baseball player within the newly expanded categories of occupation in Japan at this time. In order to contextualise this development, this study begins with an examination of the pre-history of the NAA.
Baseball was introduced to Korea by American missionaries in 1905, as a beaming sign of modernity and American hegemony. Yet, the sport was popularized in Korea during the Japanese Occupation (1910-1945). While there was a general fascination with the sport as experienced by Korean youth, baseball functioned for contradictory purposes. Firstly, Koreans played baseball as a medium of cultural conciliation with the Japanese colonialists. On the other hand, baseball also provided a few opportunities through which the colonized expressed anti-colonial sentiments toward the Japanese rule. According to Cho, baseball in Korea had taken root in relation to both colonizers, i.e. Japan and the U.S. as the sport remained popular in Asian countries, including South Korea, during the Cold War era. To date, the popularity of baseball among Koreans can still be accounted for through the ongoing relations they share with their past colonizers.