Nothing goes together quite so nicely as baseball and apple pie. Except maybe baseball and sushi. And sake. Or so the Japanese would certainly have you believe. The fact is, while we love our national pastime, lots of other countries out there share our passion for that little stitched, white ball, and among them, Japan may one of the more interesting. This article over at the Continental in-flight Magazine is all about the Japanese fascination, if not obsession with baseball.
It offers some scintillating insight into how and why the sport has become such a big deal over there ,and how they play the game a little bit differently. One thing that didn’t surprise me, but that I thought was cool ,was that there are fewer “stars” over there ,as the Japanese way favors teamwork over superstardom. that’s a fine idea, and one would guess that might also lead to fewer ejections for steroid use (hello!?). I had though that baseball was a relatively new phenomenon in Japan, but it turns out that it was brought to the island in 1872 by Horace Wilson, an American teacher at what is now Tokyo University. Japan’s first team was called the Shimbashi Athletic Club and was organized in 1878 by Hiroshi Hiraoka, who worked as an engineer on U.S. railroads and returned home with a suitcase full of gloves. (OK, I don’t know if that’s true, but it could be).
Anyway, as a nice dose of a different culture this morning, I figured y’all would like the article.