Samurai Baseball: The Vicissitudes of a National Sporting Style

The conventional view of Japan's national pastime, baseball, is that it is a sport misshapen from an original exuberant American game by a Japanese national propensity to slavish loyalty and uncritical adherence to form. This substantially misrepresents the trajectory of baseball in Japan by substituting an illusory appeal to national character stereotypes for a serious historical sociology of sport. Abe and Mangan, among others, have already uncovered the complex influences of British athleticism and sportsmanship on early Japanese sport philosophies. This article depicts the subsequent history of Japanese baseball as a complex interplay of nationalized sporting style, educational pedagogy, urban entertainment, media creation, local identity and the realities of sports practices.