From: keis@psy.uwa.oz.au (Keis Ohtsuka)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.japan
Subject: Re: Recommend History Books/Authors?
Date: 13 Jan 1993 03:37:51 GMT
Organization: The University of Western Australia
NNTP-Posting-Host: wapsy.psy.uwa.oz.au

hiraga@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Yuzuru Hiraga) writes:

>I won't be that harsh, as Cuba (and Taiwan too, I think) also regard
>baseball as their national sport.
>And in a formal sense, the national sport of Japan (Kokugi) is sumo.

The word, "national institution," refers to a custom or a habit
that many people in a given country passionately follow. For example,
"Cricket is a national institution in Australia." It does not
matter whether the government attaches an official definition or not.
The fact that it is practiced and followed by many would be sufficient
to call it as such. 

>Pro-baseball in Japan was born somewhere in the 30's.
>The All-American team at the hype of Yankees' golden age visited
>Japan (including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, among others).
>They won all the games, but in one game at Kusanagi, Shizuoka,
>a 19-year old rookie named Sawamura Eiji nearly cornered the major
>leaguers, though allowed Gehrig a home-run and lost 1-0.
>Sawamura led a short but brilliant professional career, but was
>later drafted and like many of his colleagues, never came back.
>We can imagine a Japanese version of "Field of Dreams" here,
>and such sentiment is prevalent among the baseball community.

I don't agree with you about the date of the birth of the Japanese
professional baseball. 
Yes, the American professional
baseball club visited and played against the Japanese baseball
players as you indicated. However, I am not sure if the Japanese
players lived by playing baseball full-time in 30s. I always
thought that the professional baseball league was founded soon
after WWII. (Chunichi Dragons in Nagoya is one of the oldest
baseball club.)  

During WWII, many American professional baseball players were
fighting wars agaist evil axis powers. The major league baseball
continued despite dwindling numbers of professional players but
minor leagues faced acute shortage of players. As an inventive
solution to bring baseball to grass root levels (traditionally
minor leagues filled this role), American Women's Professional
Baseball League, recently portrayed in "League of Our Own,"
was founded to fill a vacuum. One of the star players of Women's
Professional Baseball League lives in Champaign, IL. but rarely
talked about it even to her friends and colleagues that there was
a women's professional baseball league during 1940's. She
gave an interview once to "News Gazette", a Champaign-Urbana
newspaper. She was rather upset about the movie, which was
shot in Decatur, IL, a neighboring city few months prior to the
interview, in which 
the baseball players' personal lives (love life?) were 
freely dramatized. The baseball player claimed that the "girls" were
chaperoned and nothing like that in the movie ever happened
as far as extra-ballpark activities are concerned. She 
reminishes her days as a professional baseball player as the
happiest time of her life as she enjoyed playing the game.

And you know the rest of the story, forgotten Americana and
baseball indivisible under God..