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>> Eiichi Ito: Good afternoon, welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm Eiichi Ito, one of the two reference librarians in the Asian Division of the Library of Congress. We are delighted to have all of you here for today's program, a panel discussion entitled, Playing and Talking About Baseball Across the Pacific. This program will be recorded and made available for later viewing online so now is a good time to turn off mobile devices if you have not done so already, thank you. I'd like to thank Exhibition Office for their support for this event and the excellent work with the ongoing baseball [inaudible] exhibit, and related programs. Exhibit itself will end on July 27th. This event is also sponsored by the Asian Division, one of four international divisions in the Library of Congress. The Asian Division maintains the largest Asian collection outside of Asia, with more than 4 million physical items in 179 Asian languages, including a rare book collection with more than 50 thousand items. The collection can be accessed in the Asian Reading Room, which is open from 8:30-5:00, Monday through Friday. Next, please welcome my colleague, Cameron Penwell, who will serve as a moderator for today's program. Thank you.
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>> Cameron Penwell: Good afternoon, my name is Cameron Penwell, and together with Eiichi Ito, I work as a Japanese reference librarian in the Asian Division here at the Library of Congress. Welcome, and thank you for coming out to our event today, Playing and Talking About Baseball Across the Pacific. And here, it might be hard to see, but we have some people who are quite literally playing baseball across the Pacific, these are members of the University of Washington, baseball team, playing on the deck of the ship as they travel to Japan for their second visit in 1913. Well, we're fortunate to have four engaging panelists here today; Robert Fitts, William Kelly, Chandra Manning, and Bill Staples. And I look forward to hearing them speak about their recent research, writing, and teaching activities related to the study of baseball in Japan and the United States. Shortly, I will introduce each panelist and innovate them to speak individually for 10-15 minutes each. Afterward, we hope to have around 30 minutes or so for free discussion among the panelists, to expand on points of common interest in their presentations, and also to explore connections among their areas of expertise. Due to an event shortly following this one, our event staff will need to begin their work in this room promptly at 3:50, with this consideration in mind, we may not have time to open up the floor to questions from the audience, however, we do have space reserved after the program, at the end of the hallway in room 110, where books from each of the panelists will be available for purchase and also signing, and also, if you have any questions for any of the individual panelists, that'd be a great time and opportunity to approach them individually and have a conversation after the program is over. And if you haven't had a chance to check it out, please do see the library's Baseball Americana Exhibit, on the second floor here in the Jefferson building on your way out. Now, before we begin with the panel, I have just a couple of preliminary comments; first, the Asian Division's Japanese collection holds more than 1.2 million monographed volumes in addition to tens of thousands of journal issues and microfilm items. The collection has great breadth and depth, and as I was delighted to learn while preparing for this event, it contains many excellent resources for the study of Japanese baseball, and we've presented a sampling of those, a very small sampling of those on the back table in the room so please take a look at your leisure. Just to highlight, if you're interested in exploring any of these resources, we have periodicals from the Occupation period, and also further in the post-war from the '70s up to the 2000's. We have a couple hundred Japanese language monographs on all topics of baseball, and a great new resource we have is the separates industry history database, which looks like a very fascinating and rich resource for the study of sports and baseball in post-war Japan. Now second, I presume that everyone here today has an interest in baseball and/or Japan, probably both, that being said, I think something that is not always well-known among baseball fans is just how far back the story of baseball goes in Japan.
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So I have three very brief but important days to try to give you a mental map to get a sense for the chronology of some of the topics we'll be discussing today. The first is 1872, which is, according to the traditional narrative, as baseball was introduced by the American educator, Horace Wilson. Fast-forward to 1896, the Ichiko High School Baseball Club, pictured here, defeats a team of expatriate foreigners from the Yokohana Country and Athletic Club. And this was important for two reasons; one, it shows just how much the club baseball as a sport, had grown over the last 20 years, and two, it really gave a sense to Japanese baseball players, hey we can be as good or maybe even better than these American's who came and taught us the game in the first place. And finally, 1935, the establishment of the forerunner of Nippon Professional Baseball. So professional baseball's already in full swing, even before World War II began. Now, likewise, the same hold true I believe, for Japanese American baseball. There's just a lot that most people don't know, I should add that May is Asian Pacific American Heritage month and it is especially timely to highlight this point, in reading Bill Staples book, Kenichi Zenimuro, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer, I immediately came upon an eye opening chronology in the book's forward, that was written by former Seattle Mariners manager, Don Wakamatsu, the first Asian American to hold his position in the major leagues. So if you look here on the slides, 1897, the first person of Japanese ancestry attempted to play in the majors. 1903, first Japanese American baseball team was organized. 1905, major league color line was drawn against Japanese players. And in 1910, the first Japanese American league was founded. Now we'll hear more details about this later on, but just to give you an idea of how far this history goes back. Finally, for those of you who may not be familiar with the ubiquity of baseball in popular Japanese culture in daily life, I just had to share this image that Japanese friend happened to share on social media this past week, this is a Hiroshima Carp branded shower head, so in addition to your baseball cap and t-shirt, you can show your support for the home team while you're taking a shower after going to the baseball game as well. So, as we begin, just keep these dates in mind, and I think we'll discover that there remains much to be learned through the lens of baseball regarding U.S. Japan relations, ideas around national identity, history of the American migrant experience, and the fight for equal treatment under the law, regardless of race or national origin, in American history. Now, I would like to innovate our first speaker, Dr. Chandra Manning, Professor of U.S. History at Georgetown University. Professor Manning researches and teaches U.S. history with a focus on the 19th century. Her first book, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, won the Avery O. Craven Prize in 2007, from the Organization of American Historians. Published in 2016, her second book, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War, is a portrait of the union army's escaped slave refugee camps and how they affected emancipation and citizenship in the United States.  Professor Manning is also an avid Boston Red Sox fan, and for several years, she has taught a perennially popular course at Georgetown on the history of baseball. To tell us a little bit more about this experience of teaching baseball in the classroom, please join me in welcoming Professor Chandra Manning.
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>> Chandra Manning: Alright well, first of all, thanks so much, Cameron, thank you Eiichi, thank you to all the panelists and to all of you for being here. Anybody who knows me--
>> [inaudible] 
>> That is the are not one. Anyone who knows me, knows that I will talk about baseball at any time, so delighted to be here to do it today. Let's see if we can find--
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>> She's presenting your presentation, is that yours?
>> She could talk to mine, it [inaudible] 
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[ Inaudible ] 
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>> Chandra Manning: There we go, that looks more familiar, thank you very much. I wonder how long it would have gone before I would have realized it. What I'm going to do today is a little bit different from what my colleagues are going to do. They're going to be talking from their own sort of deep research base, but I'm going to be talking to you specifically about teaching baseball. And about how we can use baseball or how I like to use baseball to really open up students ideas, to really open up the world for them, in a way that they hadn't really thought of before. I bright a couple copies of the syllabus if any of you would like it, I will not test you on the reading and you don't have to do the final paper, but I'll pass those around in case they are of interest. Thank you. And teaching baseball is really a great way to approach many topics with students in the history of the United States. It's a great way to really get them to wrestle with questions of gender, with questions of race, with questions of the relationship between labor and capital in U.S. history. Certainly with questions of class and my perennial favorite, what the heck was the progressive era anyway? Personally as a historian who writes a lot about slavery and emancipation, I also need a break every other year and baseball is it. So, teaching the history of baseball class is a real pleasure for me. But, among other things, it's a terrific way of innovating students to really learn about U.S. foreign relations and the politics of overseas expansionism from a unique angle, one they haven't thought of before. And one that often disrupts things that they thought they knew. So what I'd like to do with my time today really, is a little mini demonstration of how baseball can do these things in class with students. So, imagine yourselves, you're all now about 19 years old, and sitting in a Georgetown lecture hall, hopefully not right after lunch, don't fall asleep on me, but we're going to do just a little mini, a little mini class. And one of the techniques that I like to use, is to start with sort of a provocative or outrageous question that's going to go against everything students think they know, and then to go from there to get them to consider some new ideas. So today's question is, what does Japan have to do with the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York? Because that iconically American place and institution. Answer number one, obviously Eiichi will be there someday, guessing when is a favorite suppertime sports at the Manning household but that's not what I mean today. What I mean today, is what does Japan have to do with putting the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York? And to answer that question, I want us to go back farther than you think, I want us to go back to the 1870's and we have to look not just in Cooperstown, New York, but really we have to look around the world to answer this question. So, what is going on with baseball around the world in the 1870's? Well, in the 1870's baseball is growing in lots of places and it's very fluid in many places, not just the U.S. but many places, and we'll start with the U.S. rather than outside the U.S., I want to disrupt my students' thinking, I want to get them to think in new ways. I don't want to give them heart attacks, so we'll start with the U.S. where they expect us to start. And in the U.S. context, in the 1870's, what is baseball up to? Well, baseball, organized baseball still exists largely in U.S. cities in the 1870's, most American's do not yet live in cities in the 1870's so organized baseball is still confined to where most American's aren't yet living. The 1870's are the first decade of professionalization in American baseball. And it's important to note, and this one rocks their world, that in the 1870's, there are professional women's teams as well as professional men's teams. It is not yet clear that baseball, professional baseball, is going to be a men's game. And in fact, professional baseball teams, a part of both men and women, are regarded as suspect, paying people to play a children's game? You have got to be kidding me! Now men's baseball will eventually gain acceptance, professional baseball will eventually gain acceptance, the world you know will come into being, but the 1870's are a key decade in which that begins to happen. One of the key figures of making that happen, is the fellow in the Boston shirt, in the bottom, my right, your left I think, corner, Mr. Albert Goodwill Spalding, often known as A.G., that's him older in the middle. Spalding started out as a pitcher, but he turned, become a league official and a businessman, and he's a really important figure for understanding the develop of professional baseball in the United States. In 1876, he helped found the National League, which is the National League that you know and love today. He also, in 1876, founded A.G. Spalding and Brother's Sporting Goods Emporium, in Chicago, which is the beginning of the Spalding Sporting Good business, also still in existence today. 
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I have a pink Spalding ball in my office, to throw against the wall when I need something to like get my brain going or when I got a kid in there I need to entertain, and it goes back to this guy. So, in the 1870's, we have Spalding and others, really beginning to organize this amorphous thing called baseball, and baseball is beginning as a professional endeavor at least, to definitely be a men's game. But it's growing elsewhere in the world too. This is not the only place baseball is really developing in these years. So let's look elsewhere. By the 1860's, sugar workers in Hawaii are playing baseball, which I don't have a picture of, if anyone finds a picture of Hawaii workers, sugar workers in the 1860's, playing baseball, I would love it. I don't have one but they were. In Cuba, baseball's probably in existence by 1864, but it's definitely there by 1866, because when U.S. sailors docked in Havana in 1866, they found Cubans already playing and they didn't learn it in 20 minutes. In 1878, the Liga de Beisbol Professional Cubana was established by Emilio Sabourin, 1878, that's just two years after the establishment of the National League in the United States. So professional baseball in Cuba goes all, or organized baseball in Cuba, pardon me, goes back almost to the exact same time. It's Cubans, not American's, it's Cubans, who introduce baseball to Mexico, via the Yucatan Peninsula, and also to the Dominican Republic in the 1870's, that's the one that in my household is a really big deal, because that brings us Big Papi, David Ortiz, who adorns every wall in my kid's bedroom. Where's Japan? We're getting there. At the same time, in the 1870's, an intentionally outward looking [inaudible] government in Tokyo, sent Japanese students abroad, to observe and to observe, including in the United States, and also invited advisors from Great Britain and France, Prussia, and the United States to come to Japan to consult on various aspects of science and technology, and agriculture, and education. U.S. advisors in particular, specialized in agriculture, education, and in the case of one Horace Wilson, he's the, standing up in the top row with the mustache, he taught math, he taught English, and in Tokyo, he also taught baseball. Meanwhile, Japanese students who had been sent abroad to observe, come home and they also begin spreading the game of baseball in Japan. One of those students is Hiraoka Hiroshi who, when he was in the United States, met none other than Albert Goodwill Spalding. He became fascinated with railroads and with baseball. He studied both throughout the United States, and returned to Japan as both a railroad engineer, and a disciple of baseball. In 1878, as you can see from the screen, he founded the Shinbashi Athletic Club and built the very first baseball field, that we know of, in Japan. The [inaudible] field for members of the Shinbashi Athletic Club. Baseball spread very quickly, quite quickly among Japanese youth, not least because Japan had physical education in schools as early as the 1880's, the United States wouldn't institute it universally until after 1/3 of all World War I recruits failed their physicals, that's when the U.S. gets gym class, Japan had it earlier. And it's one reason why baseball spread quite quickly there. Now, Spalding and Hiroshi stay in teach with each other and Hiroshi's enthusiasm gave Spalding the business man, a great idea. Why not market his sporting goods in Japan as well as the United States? So it was as early as 1884, Spalding's annual official baseball guide starts to be available in Japan. Exhibition games, good will games, began to take place between the U.S. and Japanese colleges. There's a clear moment of open exchange between the two countries around this institution of baseball. But at the same time, in the 1880's and into the 1890's, the national mood in the United States is really souring. And it's particularly growing suspicious of all things foreign. 1882, with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, that would be the first time that American's would restrict migration and it was symptomatic of a general anti-Asian feeling that was mounting in the late 19th century. 
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As that feeling is mounting, the quest, the United States quest for overseas possessions really climaxes at the turn of the 20th century with the Spanish American War and subsequent revolts in Cuba and the Philippines. A very quick timeline here, so I'm not going to quiz you on it. I won't need to spend a ton of time, but in 1898, Spain seeded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, to the U.S. and the U.S. also formally annexed Hawaii that year. That was the easy part, defeating Spain was easy, trying to figure out what to do next turned out to be trickier, Filipinos rebelled against American occupation, leading to a long messy conflict through 1902. For our purposes, the pertinent point of which is that by the turn of the century, we have a sort of hyper aggressive form of nationalism, usually called jingoism, plus a creeping suspicion of all things foreign, just in the air in the United States. While Japan defeats Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, making Japan appear to be poised to become a real power, perhaps a source of competition to the United States in the Pacific, which further stokes U.S. suspicions. So for these and other reasons, the U.S. becomes very interested in projecting American power abroad, and does so, partly by sending troops and fleets to far flung locals around the globe. But something strange happened; when U.S. troops arrive in foreign locals, when they get to places in the Caribbean or Latin America, or Japan, what do you suppose they find? They find people already playing baseball. And sometimes, beating them at it, as in the 1896 game that Cameron introduced at the beginning. So in this particular atmosphere, suddenly baseball status as a uniquely American game, starts to matter to its promoters in the United States, especially one named Albert Goodwill Spalding, who becomes very motivated to demonstrate what he called, the purely American origins of baseball, for reasons of both business and politics. The business side, well we'll get there in a second, so what's he do? How does he decide to establish these purely American origins of baseball? He establishes in 1905, something called the Mills Commission. Mills is right next to him in the picture. Spalding has the fur coat, Mills is right next to him. The Mills Commission's charge is to discover the purely American origins of baseball, which they do through a method that would never make it through History 101 these days, but what they do is they just send people to ask recollections, when do you first remember learning to play baseball? And they get plenty of accounts, and none of them agree, which stands to reason because the game sort of develops organically. But they get one, sent by an old man named Abner Graves, who sent a story about Abner Doubleday, who would go on to fight in the Civil War, dreaming of baseball and drawing a diagram of it one summer day in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839, where a group of farm children begin to play it. Now this is perfect for Spalding's purposes, it's exactly what he wants to hear. There are a few problems, A, Abner Graves is only 5 years old in 1839. His memory's not great. B, and probably more troubling, Abner Doubleday was nowhere near Cooperstown, New York in 1839. But no matter, this story really works for Spalding. So he really, he widely circulates it and he's motivated to do so for reasons of both business and politics. Business, partly because in 1906, Mizuno starts to manufacture sporting equipment in Japan. There is a competitor to Spalding, in fact, my oldest kid's favorite glove, like sleeps with it at night glove, is a Mizuno glove. This is a problem for Spalding. In terms of politics, the sort of so-called, yellow peril, the suspicion of all things Asian is really intensifying in the United States at exactly this moment, culminating in 1907 with the gentleman's agreement restricting Japanese immigration to the United States. So for all these reasons, there is a popular will to embrace this Doubleday myth, despite its obvious falseness. So the myth of baseball's birthday in 1839, in Cooperstown, New York, at the hands of Abner Doubleday, was born. And was still floating around decades later when the Great Depression hit in the 1930's. That Great Depression hit the town of Cooper-- hit all of upstate New York, including the town of Cooperstown, very hard.
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So, the Clark Foundation, a private foundation, essentially a sort of private chamber of commerce in Cooperstown, New York, got the idea of reviving the local economy by reviving the Doubleday myth, and putting something related to baseball in Cooperstown, New York. And they get in touch with Ford Frick of the National League, and say we'll pay for it. And together they come up with the idea of the Baseball Hall of Fame. So 1939 is set as baseball's Centennial year and the grand opening of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, happens in 1939, that is where it resides to this day. I would be shocked if there aren't at least half of the people in this room who have made a pilgrimage to it at some point in your lives. So, is it there because of Japan? This is the in class moment. Well, not exactly, but we can't tell the story of how the Hall of Fame got there without taking Japan into account. Telling the story of a Hall of Fame in this way, really helps underscore the trans-Atlantic circulation that is endemic to the game right now, has always been, that there's always been a circulation and exchange at the heart of the game of baseball. And when we tell the story of the Hall of Fame this way, that's when those trans-Atlantic roots become more visible and apparent. And a space is really created for them to understand today's international 40 man rosters, not as some radical departure, but really as a true characteristic of the game from the beginning. And as an expression of an international tradition really quite as old as the game itself. So, test next Tuesday, thank you all.
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>> Cameron Penwell: Alright, thank you very much. Next I would like to introduce Bill Staples Jr., board member of the Nisei Baseball Research Project, Chairman of the Asian Baseball Committee, and member of the Society for American Baseball Research, or SABR, as it's commonly known. An expert on Japanese American and Negro League baseball history, Mr. Staples has spoken at numbers conferences, including the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball in American Culture, held at the aforementioned National Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York. Mr. Staples has also been very active in preserving Japanese American history in his home state of Arizona, especially with regard to the Gila River Interment Camp there. His book, Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer, won the 2012, SABR Baseball Research Award, and his latest book, and I'm really excited about this one, Gentle Black Giants: A History of Negro Leaguers in Japan, was published just last month. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Bill Staples.
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>> Bill Staples Jr.: Okay, okay. Well it's an honor to be here today, to talk about baseball across the Pacific, and I want to start with this photograph, and this gentleman right here in the middle, that's manager John McGraw, and this is 1913, on his world tour, and a year later when he came back, he said, mark my prediction, some star ball players will come out of Japan within the next 10 years. Now he was a smart guy, but he was about 50 years off when it comes to Major League Baseball, with Masanori Murakami, in '64, but I like to think that he was talking about star players like Kenishi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball pioneer. And I'm going to talk about him today, Kenishi Zenimura. I want to cover his life before the war, during the war, and after, and just talk about his legacy and why he's important. Alright, let's get started. So, as Cameron mentioned, I've written the book on Kenichi Zenimura, and I have a new book coming out called, Gentle Black Giants, which is related, Zenimura inspired some of those tours and I want to make sure everybody gets the commemorative bookmark with the Zenimura baseball card on it, so you get to take home a little history there. Alright, so prior to 2004, I knew nothing about Kenichi Zenimura, and I'm honored to say that I am now the official caretaker of Zenimura's home plate, which is in Cooperstown, and I'll talk a little bit about that later, during the Q and A, but it's quite an honor. Zenimura did have a Hall of Fame career, as a player and manager, and international ambassador. And if he is to be recognized someday by Cooperstown, or perhaps even the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in Tokyo, it will be because of his work as an international ambassador and what he did to help build the bridge across the Pacific between the U.S. and Japan.
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But first let me talk about him as a player, I want to highlight some of these other Nisei players who were picked to play ball with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, back in 1927; Harvey Iwata, Fred Yoshikawa, and Johnny Nakagawa, great Japanese American ball players. In my opinion, Johnny Nakagawa probably could have played major league baseball. I've looked at all the stats and he's competed quite well against Negro League players, Pacific Coast League, et cetera. But the stars never aligned for him. There's a lot of debate about Mr. Zenimura because of his size, as you can see, next to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but I would say that Mr. Altuve would have something to say about that, in terms of smaller players being able to compete. Basically the same size difference between the players, some of the players today. Alright, I did, or Cameron did mention, 2006 I went to Cooperstown and presented and in that presentation we talked about the desire and asked, if you will, for a permanent exhibit to honor Japanese American baseball in Cooperstown. They currently have one for African Americans, Women in Baseball, and Latino Baseball, but that was 2006, and surprisingly, 2019, still nothing to this day. So it's Asian Pacific Heritage month, it's a great time to remember that and put out that request again. There was some discussion that maybe they were waiting for this guy to get into the Hall of Fame, and it will be 2025 when he's eligible, but they keep changing the rules in terms of, you know, how people are recognized in Cooperstown, and they just created something called, the early baseball era, and Kenichi Zenimura is now a nominee for that category. We've been talking with baseball writers and they're going to be discussing his candidacy. Now if he were to make it, I would imagine that his plaque would cover these four items, and I'll just talk through it briefly; recognized as the father of Japanese American baseball, Zenimura was a celebrated player, manager, league organizer and global ambassador who used the game to break down barriers during his 40 year career, from 1915-1955. He led three goodwill tours to Asia; 1924, '27 and '37, and played key roles in inspiring other tours, including the Negro League Philadelphia Royal Giants in '27, and Babe Ruth's in '34, that spurred the start of pro baseball in Japan in 1936. During World War II, he was incarcerated at Gila River, Arizona, where he built a diamond in the desert that gave hope to thousands behind barbed wire. And after the war, he helped improve U.S. - Japan relations by facilitating tours on both sides of the Pacific and continued to scout American ball players for professional teams in Japan. So, quite a career that he did have. So I want to talk about his life, quickly. He was born in Hiroshima in 1900, his family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii in 1907, 1920 he went to the mainland, he was actually on his way to Iowa to play baseball. I think he got distracted by a woman in California, his wife, he ended up staying in California. And then he really got disrupted with World War II and going to Arizona during the war years. And that's how I learned about his story. 1915 he's playing for the Honolulu Asahi, one of the top semi-pro teams in Honolulu, and at that time, Hawaii was a very multi-cultural baseball paradise; African American teams, Chinese teams, and of course, Japanese teams as well. By 1919, he's able to take the Honolulu Asahi up to the senior level, and really made them a competitive team. He kind of outgrew that environment and he moved to the United States in 1920, where he joined the Fresno Athletic Club, which was actually founded by this gentleman, the year before, 1919. His name is Frank Takizo Matsumoto, and he played an important role in Zenimura's career for the next 30 years. So we'll come back in the story. But Zenimura eventually took over as the captain of the Fresno Athletic Club. And at that time, unfortunately, California was the epicenter of anti-Japanese sentiment. But Zenimura intentionally used the game to go into these small towns and break down barriers and build relationships with people in those towns. He also forged relationships with the African American teams of California and invited them to come and play on his Japanese ball field that he had built in Fresno, California in 1925. He believed that to be the best, you had to play against the best, and he scheduled games against the Pacific Coast League teams like the Salt Lake City Bees, and they did eventually beat them, 6-4, in 1924. And on that team was Frank "Lefty" O'Doul, Lefty O'Doul would later play a role in U.S. - Japanese relations and we think this might be one of the earliest interactions documented between O'Doul and people of Japanese ancestry.
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But it was the 1924 tour that really put Zenimura on the map. A reporter for the Japan Times said that, Zenimura is one of the smartest, most colorful players the writer had ever seen. He was a terror on the diamond and a man who played every position in baseball. He was tricky, shrewd, and positive poison to every opponent. And that reputation stayed with him throughout his tours in 1927, and in 1937, when he attempted to play in an amateur tournament in Japan, he was banned from playing because they thought that he was a professional back in the U.S. So what that allowed him to do was, he became a scout, he scouted for some Japanese teams there, and he was also able to reconnect with his son, who was being raised by his mother in Japan. So that's kind of interesting that the Zenimura family was split through that divide if you will. Which I hear is maybe quite common back then. But when the war broke out, part of the Zenimura family went behind barbed wire and the other part of the family was fighting for Japan. So really interesting dynamics. So World War II, 120 thousand Japanese  - Americans are incarcerated by the United States government, Zenimura is sent to Gila River, Arizona and the first thing he does is build a baseball field with his sons and it's a beautiful stadium out in the middle of the desert, on the Indian reservation, the Gila River Indian Reservation, and it seated over about 7000 individuals. And it was quite the center point for the community and it really created a great sense of hope for everyone there. As George Omachi said, "It was demeaning and humiliating to be incarcerated in your own country. Without baseball, camp life would have been measurable." Alright, after the war; so August 1, 1945, Zenimura writes a letter to the Gila River Courier as his family is leaving the camp, the war is essentially over, but we all know that a week later something big happened. Try to speed up the mutual feeling between Americans and Japanese. It's much easier to make efforts of starting a better understanding between us in the field of sports, than trying to talk your way through the rough spots. So even after the war, he's trying to use the game of baseball to improve relations between the two countries. And that he did, in the 1950's he welcomed the Tokyo Giants to Fresno, literally in their home, there are stories of him at a party, you know, with the Giants, but they did compete as well. And he also coordinated contracts and scouted players, the first Americans that played for the Hiroshima Carp, he organized that as well. Fibber Hirayama, a great all-star player, he scouted and helped him play over in Japan. And up until even the mid-1960's, he is now scouting for different teams and scouts, including the Chunichi Dragons, so very active. So his legacy; I do equate Japanese - American baseball to African American baseball and the Negro League history. Similar struggle, different impact, equally important. Whereas African Americans immigrated baseball, Japanese - Americans internationalized it. I think the star players from Japan, who are in the game today, are indebted to Kenichi Zenimura and other Japanese - American pioneers. When you look at the characteristics of Japanese - American baseball, I point out five of them in the book, they had their own leagues, they competed against high caliber competition, ambassadors before the war and after the war, and the history inside the camp. Now Zenimura was not the first to form a league, or even a team, and he didn't have the best numbers, but he, in my opinion, he is the most important. And they say the same thing about Jackie Robinson, and his impact in Negro League baseball, and Major League Baseball as well. So that's why he's worthy of the title, the father of Japanese - American baseball. So looking at some of the numbers and what he did do to help build the bridge to the Pacific; between 1905 and 1940, there's roughly 100 tours, 98. And you see that the Japanese  Americans, along with Japanese teams, accounted for 55% of those tours. That's important because major league stars back then, get a lot of the credit for helping to establish baseball in Japan. Babe Ruth appeared in 34, and the next thing you know, they have their leagues. That wasn't quite the case, there was quite a building up of talent and opportunity if you will. And then when you look at Zenimura's role between 1923 and 1940, there are 53 tours going back and forth between the U.S. Zenimura was involved in 17 of them, so that's basically 1 out of every 3, where his, he either led the tour or he influenced or was involved. So his fingerprints were on a lot of those tours as well. One of those tours was the Philadelphia Royal Giants, which the book, Gentle Black Giants, is based on.
^M00:40:00
But that relationship goes all the way back to 1925, where Zenimura was competing against the LA White Sox at the time. They did change their name to the Philadelphia Royal Giants when they went to Japan. It was the 4th of July, 1926, 4th of July weekend, where Zenimura already had his tour in place, in 1927, where he convinced manager, Lon Goodwin, that he should be taking his team as well. So I'm not saying that Zenimura organized it and put everything in place, but he was a spark and a connector to help make that possible. And the same thing is true with the 1934 tour. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, they came to Fresno, California and we've all seen this famous photograph here, but during this stay in Fresno, there was a banquet where Zenimura and Babe Ruth discussed him going to Japan. And that discussion, to our pleasant surprise, was captured in a recently discovered letter that Zenimura wrote to several people in Japan, this one in particular is Masaru Kataoka, who was a newspaper executive and a former ball player, and Zenimura writes; Babe Ruth is interested to visit Japan and he asked me to try to line things up so that he may be able to come with our team. I wrote to Meiji University, asking them to what extent they can offer to have Babe Ruth come, and he says, his prediction, I believe that it will be a draw to have Babe Ruth in Japan. So pretty easy prediction but. And sure enough, it was, and if you want to learn more about that, this Rob, is for you, a promotion of Bansai Baseball, wonderful book on Babe Ruth's tour. So one individual, and someone I talked about before, is Takizo Frank Matsumoto, he's now on the Japanese side, organizing a lot of these tours. In 2016, to our pleasant surprise, he is now in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. We had written a proposal in 2007, asking for Zenimura to be recognized, and we highlighted everything that Matsumoto did with him, and they picked him, and not who we nominated. So they, but their relationship is very symbiotic so they've recognized the yin, we're now going to ask them to recognize the yang, if you will. So with that, about fifteen of Zenimura's peers from that era, are recognized in Tokyo, twelve players, three ambassadors, who knows, he may be next. I did recently have the opportunity to visit Tokyo and we met with the executives at the Hall of Fame there, had great conversations, although I do not speak Japanese. So, I had a translator there. And the gentleman at the far right, his name is Don Nomura, and Don was my translator. Don was also the agent for this ball player here, named Hideo Nomo, who played back in 1995, had a very important role. So we're in good hands with Don Nomura, and hopefully he can help getting Zenni in over there. So where can you go to learn more about Kenichi Zenimura? You can visit my blog at Zenimura dot com, and now Gentle Black Giants, NiseiBaseball dot com is for the Nisei baseball research project, we have a very active Facebook site as well. My book is probably more appropriate for the college and adult reader, but there's some great children's books about Zenimura, Baseball Saved Us, Barbed Wire Baseball, and A Diamond in the Desert, for the middle school reader. Wonderful movie came out in 2007 that's based on Zenni's life, American Pastime, that still holds up, it's fun to watch. Two documentaries that I participated in; one with NHK and one with TV Asahi. And if you visit Arizona, come visit Nozomi Park, it's in honor of Kenichi Zenimura, nozomi is the Japanese word for hope, and it is to honor the game of baseball that gave individuals hope there, but also the hope that we don't repeat the same mistakes from the past. And of course, you can go to Cooperstown and see Zenimura's home plate exhibited there. And hopefully, in the near future, we will have Baseball's Bridge to the Pacific a permanent exhibit, and who knows, maybe Zenni will be honored as well. Alright? So thank you.
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>> Cameron Penwell: Okay, thank you very much. I would now like to invite Dr. Robert Fitts, originally trained as an archeologist, with a PhD from Brown University, Dr. Fitts is now active as a baseball historian and author, he has published four books on Japanese baseball, and is also an expert in the area of Japanese baseball cards. His books include; Remembering Japanese Baseball, which was awarded the Sporting News Society of American Baseball Research, 2005 award, for baseball research, Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball in 2008, the aforementioned Bansai Babe Ruth, recipient of the Society of American Baseball Research's Seymour Medal for Best Baseball Book of 2012, and most recently, in 2015, Mashi: The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams of Masanori Murakami, the First Japanese Major Leaguer. As we learn more about Mashi's life, please join me in welcoming Dr. Robert Fitts.
^M00:45:35
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>> Robert Fitts: So Monday was Mashi Murakami's 75th birthday. So I thought we'd celebrated today by telling you a Mashi story. In the bottom of the 8th inning, on September 1, 1964, Jack Lee's voice boomed over the Shea Stadium loudspeakers, attention please, ladies and gentlemen, now coming in to pitch for the Giants, number ten, Masanori Murakami. The left field bullpen gate swung open and a Japanese stepped onto a major league field for the first time. Masanori walked slowly to the mound, a wad of chewing gum in his mouth, 40,000 fans were on their feet, cheering, clapping, whistling. Murakami's heart skipped a beat. To remain calm, he hummed to himself, the song Sukiyaki. It took Mashi just 13 pitches, 10 thrown for strikes, to polish off the [inaudible], marking what the San Jose Mercury News called, an historic occasion for baseball and Japan. Now Mashi was an unlikely candidate to be the first Japanese major leaguer. He was a good high school player, but not a star. He'd only pitched one inning in the famed Koshien [inaudible] tournament. He had no thoughts of turning pro, he thought he'd go off to college and become a salary man, but to his surprise, Kazuto Tsuruoka, the manager of the Nankai Hawks, showed up to his house and offered him a contract to turn professional. Now, Mashi had no intention of signing. He listened politely and decided alright, you know, I'm going to go to college anyway. But as Tsuruoka's leaving the home, he turns to Mashi and says, if you sign with us, I'll send you to the United States to learn American baseball, and this excited young Mashi, but he had no interest in American baseball. Instead, he really wanted to go because that's where his favorite TV show, Rawhide, was filmed. So Mashi spends his first year in the Japanese minor leagues, he's just 18 years old, he's a country boy, he's very naive. So Tsuruoka decided he's going to board him in his own home, and not let him stay with the older players. So for 1 year, Mashi becomes basically an adopted son. He takes meals with the family, he has chores, he follows their household rules. In the beginning of 1964, Tsuruoaka announced that the Hawks had reached an agreement with San Francisco Giants, to send three prospects to the American minor leagues for seasoning. The agreement was just two pages long and written entirely in English. And viewing it as a mere formality, the Hawks decided not to translate it, they just signed it. What they missed was this clause stating that the Giants could buy the contracts of any of these players for only $10,000. Now Mashi, and his two teammates here, show up to San Francisco spring training in March of 1964, and this is big news, it's the first Japanese to come over to play in the U.S., even if it's only at the minor league level. So they are, in the sports pages across the country. Mashi is assigned to Fresno, a single A California league, and there he meets Bill Werle, and Werle does something that changes his life. Mashi had been a starting pitcher, and Werle looks at him and turns him into a reliever. And for Mashi, this is a huge demotion, because in Japan at that time, relievers were not important. Starting pitchers were where all the glory was. And he was like, what's wrong with me? And he had a lot of soul searching to do. Now Mashi thought he was only going to be in the United States for one year.
^M00:50:02
So he ate up American culture, you know, literally. He went out to the dog parks with his teammates, to the American movies, to shows, he went gambling, he couldn't speak English, he carried two dictionaries with him; one English to Japanese, and one Japanese to English, and he would quickly figure out what was going on and point to the right words. But his teammates loved him and they nicknamed him, Mashi. But on the diamond, in this new role as a reliever, he excelled. And he quickly became the top pitcher in the single A California league. Now in September, 1964, the San Francisco Giants were in the middle of the pennant race, and they needed a left handed reliever, so they decided to see how good Mashi really was. After his debut on September 1st against the Mets, Mashi-mania swept through San Francisco, and not a day goes by without huge articles in all the San Francisco newspapers featuring him. He's on radio shows, he's on TV shows. During September he became the San Francisco Giants ace reliever out of the pen. Now remember, this kid is 20 years old, he had just played minor league baseball in Japan, he's come out of single A baseball and now he's a star for the San Francisco Giants. Naturally at the end of the 1964 season, the Giants wanted to keep him. So, they get him to sign a contract with the Giants for the '65 season. And then the Giants do something silly, instead of sending a check for $10,000, with a cover letter and an explanation of what they're doing to the head office of the Nankai Hawks, they write out the check and they give it to the Nankai Hawks scout, who happens to be watching the U.S. World Series. Now in January 1965, Mashi goes home to visit his family for New Years, and he's treated like a star, hundreds of people are there at the airport to meet Japan's first major leaguer. He goes into a packed room for a news conference and then in the middle of it, the head of the Nankai Hawks steps up and drops a bomb. He says, we're not giving Mashi to the San Francisco Giants, we never agreed to that. He's going to stay in Japan and pitch for us. For the next 5 months, the Giants and the Hawks argued back and forth and you can see major league baseball gets involved, the commissioner threatens to ban all ties or the sever all ties with Japan, and it's pretty nasty. They now nickname this is Japan, the Murakami Typhoon. During this time, the press camp outside Mashi's house. Every time he leaves the house, people follow him, asking him questions. And Mashi, when he talks about it he goes, I felt horrible, here I was, at this point 20 years old, and I felt like a criminal. I had no social life, all I did was stay home. But finally, in May of 1965, the Hawks and the Giants reached an agreement; Mashi could return to the Giants for the 1965 season, and then would be allowed to decide for himself where he would finish his career. So Mashi fits right into his old team and goes right back to the bullpen and becomes an effective reliever for the Giants. Now he was, Mashi was always known for his sense of humor, he joked around with his players, was quickly accepted by his teammates, they did things like put rubber snakes in his locker room, hid his clothes during the game, the usual baseball pranks. There he is posing in the Astrodome. Now you may have heard of one of Mashi's, the most famous prank that was pulled on Mashi. Mashi's English was not particularly good, he could get around, but he didn't really understand the nuances of the language, so his catcher said, you know Mashi, when your manager comes to the mound to take the ball from you, to take you out of the game, you know you don't just hand him the ball, you have to say these words, they're very important they said, and he said okay, so he practiced and he practiced, and manager Herman Franks comes to the mound one time and Mashi goes, Herman, take a hike. And that made the pages all over the country.
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Now, during this time in San Francisco, Mashi actually stayed with a Japanese - American family, and the family showed him around San Francisco and introduced him to the Japanese - American community. And he really integrated himself, he went to socials, he had made best friends, but he also became kind of a hero for the community. He talked to many people and he became a symbol for the Japanese - American community, of San Francisco. An idea that a Japanese - American could make it in the white dominated world and white dominated baseball. And here is getting yet another award.
^M00:55:46
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^M00:55:51
On August 15, 1965, the San Francisco Giants held Masanori Murakami Day, and here he is, getting his car which was a great prize and they told him before the game, that he was going to get a red Mustang and he was very excited, getting a red Mustang. But right the day before, the Japanese Consulate complained, they said you're going to give him an American car and we're trying to promote Japanese auto industry? So they switched it out the night before and it was said he got a robin's egg blue Datsun, and he's still complaining to this day. But not all Americans loved Mashi Murakami. In June, manager Herman Franks began receiving death threats, stating that he would be killed, shot, in the stadium if he planned to pitch Mashi yet again. The FBI investigated and they actually had secret agents guarding Mashi, and Mashi didn't know this. They never found the perpetrator, there was never really a credible threat, then after about 2 or 3 weeks, they stopped the investigation. At the end of the 1965 season, Murakami has a decision to make, does he stay with the San Francisco Giants or does he return to Japan? He'd grown to love San Francisco and the United States, he wanted to remain in the majors, matter of fact he felt more at home, culturally, in the United States than he had ever felt in Japan. But he also felt a strong obligation to his former manager, Tsuruoaka. Tsuruoaka had signed him to the contract, he had let him live with his family, he'd allowed him to play in the United States, and become the first major leaguer in Japanese history. He owed him an obligation, in Japanese [foreign word]. Now Mashi knew that Tsuruoaka wanted him to return to Japan and become the ace of his staff, so, in late 1965, he announced that he would give up his dreams of remaining in the major leagues, and return to Japan to fulfill his debt to Tsuruoaka. As Japan's only major leaguer, the Japanese expected Murakami to become a super star. But it was not to be, hampered by extreme pressure, a couple small injuries, Murakami struggled. The media and the fans ridiculed him and eventually some of his own players even ostracized him, claiming he was such a distraction that they couldn't concentrate on their game. And he ended up becoming a mediocre player. He persevered, as you see, he played for 18 seasons, he won 100 games, and later became a pretty famous baseball commentator. And he's also the reason there were no Japanese playing in the major leagues between him and Hideo Nomo, because as soon as they had finally, major league baseball and Japanese baseball had got over the Murakami debacle, they came to an agreement that they would respect each other's reserve cause and no Japanese could be signed by a major league team until they officially retired, which is what Nomo did in 1995. But to this day, Mashi's still conflicted by his decision to return to Japan, as he told me, if I had returned to the Giants, I would have realized my dream but I would have to live with a sense of betraying Mr. Tsuruoaka. So I fulfilled my [foreign word] to Mr. Tsuruoaka, and forever carried a sense of regret. Thanks.
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>> Cameron Penwell: Thank you very much. Next, I would like to introduce Dr. William Kelly, professor emeritus of anthropology and [inaudible] professor of Japanese studies at Yale University. Professor Kelly is a noted scholar of the social and historical anthropology of Japan, his early work in this area includes the books; Water Control in Tokugawa Japan, Irrigation Organization in a Japanese River Basin, 1600-1870, as well as Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan. In addition, Professor Kelly's research over the past two decades has explored sport and body culture and their significance in modern Japan and East Asia. He has published numbers articles and chapters on this topic, and contributed to theorizing this growing new area of scholarship. Earlier this year, a culmination of his ethnographic field work and research on baseball in Japan was published in the book, The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers Professional Baseball in Modern Japan. Please join me in welcoming Professor William Kelly.
^M01:01:27
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^M01:01:32
>> William Kelly: Well, thank you very much, thank you all and thanks to the Library of Congress and especially for us here today, for this seminar presentation the Asian collection and its wonderfully professional staff. I feel a bit like I'm in the old Fenway Park with the obstruction poles. I sat behind a few of them in my day. I have three quick points and three images here at the end before we have some discussion; the title of this exhibit is based on Americana, but as soon as you walk through the door, you realize that this is not Americana as we have thought it before. We Americans cherish our baseball history, we know a lot about it, we've tended to be somewhat paroquial about our sense of the national pastime until recently when scholarship by people like Rob and Bill and teachings of people like Chandra, began to expand this notion of what Americana is and this exhibit does a wonderful job of opening up baseball. What we realize is, baseball was international and transnational, almost from the beginning. And this is a point I think that comes out very strongly in the three presentations before, just the ways in which baseball located itself in the Caribbean, in the Pacific, interest  Western Pacific, at the same time as it was developing here in North America, it was international and it was transnational because it depended upon the flows of people and equipment and rules and teams and ideas and political forces. One of my own very small favorite anecdotes is represented in this cover of the Saturday Evening Post in the spring of 1945. This was a time, some of you will remember, American military was making its way, fighting island by island across the Pacific to get to Japan. These were bloody battles, when the battles were over, and they were recuperating, getting ready for the next, they would get out their baseball gloves and bats and play baseball, and they were stunned in some of these islands, that the local people would come out and they already knew how to play baseball. And they would play it fairly well and they couldn't figure out how did these Pacific Islanders learn baseball? Well, they learned it from the Japanese, because the Japanese had moved in the early 1940's, island by island, taking over these islands, brought their own baseball bats and gloves and taught these islanders baseball. So when the American soldiers showed up, these islanders already knew, just like the Cubans knew baseball when the American soldiers showed up in Havana. It gives you a sense of just how complicated and sometimes how surprising are the flows of baseball throughout its history. Actually, this kind of transnationalism has given rise to a really fascinating and vibrant and important sort of literature and debates about national styles of baseball. What is the American style of baseball? Japanese style baseball? Cuban style of baseball? And there's lots of sort of interesting talk about that. This is actually not what interested me as an anthropologist of Japan, in the 1990's when I got interested in baseball in Japan. 
^M01:05:01
I'm not a sports scholar. Started going to Japan in the early 1970's, doing work on various other things, baseball is really important in Japan, I couldn't avoid it, I started looking at it, but what I wanted to know was, what was baseball like in Japan, how was it played, how was watched, how was it reported? And if any of you go out to National Stadium, you probably don't want to this season, it's a little disappointing, you go out to National Stadium, you're sitting there watching the game. You're not thinking oh, I'm watching American style baseball. You're not operating at that level of sort of national styles of baseball, you're wondering shouldn't we fire the manager now, or why is, you know, can so and so really get over that injury, or what is it about the Nationals as opposed to the Phillies? We were thinking, that's how we approach baseball in the U.S. whether it's as a player, as a reporter, as a fan. And I suspected the same was true in Japan. When Japanese go to Koshien Stadium, or to [inaudible] in the old days, they're not sitting there thinking about this is Japanese style baseball versus American style baseball, so what are they thinking about? That's what led me to spending 5 or 6 years with one particular team, the team is called the Hanshin Tigers, unlike the Yomiuri Giants, the arch rival of Tokyo's Yomiuri Giants, to try to understand what the experience was of the players, of the managers, of the fans, of the reporters. And the term in the title that I just want to talk about here as a third point, is the word Sportworld, see I'm not a sport's scholar. There are a lot of sports books and sports books tend to focus on individual players, individual teams, individual leagues, the history of a team over a period, and that makes for some high quality sports scholarship, but it doesn't seem to include the full-- when you go to National Stadium and you're watching these nine men on a field, they're playing baseball. When you go to Koshien and in Japan at Osaka and you look out on the field, they're nine men playing baseball. It's different baseball, different strategies whatever, but what really makes the Washington Nationals, what really makes the Hanshin Tigers, is not just the players playing the game, but everything else that surrounds it helps to produce what the Hanshin Tigers are, and sportsworld is the term that I use in sort of organizing this book, to think about all of the parts that are involved in making the Hanshin Tigers. It could be true for the Washington Nationals, it could be true for the Boston Celtics, it could be true for my heartthrob now, shell shocked Barcelona soccer team, but essentially the Hanshin Tigers are created by the relationships among, first of all the stadium itself, Koshien Stadium, we can talk about that later, the most famous stadium in Japan, has a very special atmosphere, a very special feel to it, very special smell to it, and the stadium is very much a part of what makes the Hanshin Tigers experience [inaudible] the Hanshin Tigers. The players, the managers, the coaches, the way in which a Japanese professional team is put together, it's more like an NFL team in terms of its roster of some 70 players, it has a manager, really two managers for the farm team, maybe 10-12 coaches, it's very different sort of personnel layout than an American team. Japanese teams are owned by corporations, not by individual owners, although this gentleman on the right was the long time CEO of the parent company and ran it as if he was the personal operator of the team, but the relationships between the team, the front office, and the parent company, are also part of what identifies the Hanshin Tiger experience. The fans, particularly the fans who come out to Koshien Stadium in Japan are much more highly organized and the Hanshin Tigers' fans are even more organized than the average club spans. In Koshien Stadium there are 200 different fan clubs who are organized into several different associations until 2005-2006, they were entirely independent of the club. They would have to meet with the club a couple times a year to negotiate proper behavior and they were always testing the limits of proper behavior in the fans, but the club needed the fans in order to create the Hanshin Tiger experience, and the media. Especially in the case of Japan, and especially in the case of Japanese baseball, the daily sports papers.
^M01:10:02
There are three national newspapers, their sport sections tend to be fairly perfunctory, it's not like the Washington Post or the New York Times, 2 or 3 pages. Instead these companies have separate sports dailies, more like the European case and the American case, and these sports dailies, that's one front page, have a front page that pretty much looks like a Manga cartoon, in fact, there's a lot of relationship between Manga art and sports dailies. And so this, front page that depicts some event of the previous day and the sports dailies exert enormous influence and pressure in reporting the Hanshin, in creating the narratives, the stories, the gossip, the statistics, about the Hanshin Tigers. So my point is, in thinking about this as a sports world, is not to eliminate the players but to try to put the players and what happens on the field, in the context of all of these other things together, not always harmoniously, sometimes with a great deal of conflict, but together create the Hanshin Tigers experience. There are American players there sometimes in the sports dailies, sometimes in the stands, certainly in the front office, there are arguments about these lazy American players or this American player who's doing more than some of the Japanese players, but by and large, the experience of playing and managing and watching and reporting, professional baseball in Japan, is really about the Hanshin Tigers and what everyone has invested economically, psychologically, socially, into that experience. So, that's my perspective on what I think is an absolutely fascinating exhibition and a very delightful symposium. Thank you very much. 
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>> Cameron Penwell: Alright well thank you very much Professor Kelly, that was wonderful. Now I'd like to turn to our remaining time, the approximately 30 minutes, to pose a couple of questions to the panelists, but also encourage the panelists to ask each other questions or expound upon any of the responses of each other to the questions that I'm about to pose. Firstly, I think, well maybe just because we just heard from Professor Kelly, I was wondering could you tell us a little bit, while we're still thinking about this, about the perhaps the lore or the mythology surrounding Koshien and what makes it such a vital and powerful symbol for baseball in Japan.
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>> William Kelly: Well, it's been referenced several times already and some of you know one of the key sports events in Japan is the National High School Baseball Tournament that takes place in August, there is a second National Baseball Tournament in the spring, they both take place at Koshien Stadium. Koshien Stadium dates back to the mid-1920's, when it opened it was the largest stadium in Asia, seated 50,000 people, it was a modernist icon. Now we look back and it seems very traditional but then, it had the opposite sort of feel to it. The tournament back then, because very few people went on to high school, was actually middle school, junior high school, was started by newspapers and a train company in 1915. It's always played at Koshien, that's what gives Koshien the special feel as a place. The final four in March madness rotates, the Super Bowl rotates, it's not-- the World Series rotates, it's not associated with a particular place. This high school tournament is really is unusual in global sportsworld because it is a year after year, in August, in the heat of the summer, and August is the time of month when the ancestral spirits are supposed to return to the home. So there's all of these associations in time and place, with this particular tournament, that give a special feel and a special pressure. Hanshin Tigers, you know, some of these people had played there as high school kids. Now they're coming back as professional players, they really feel the pressure of performing at Koshien and as they often did at that time, failed, the pressure was felt and the pressure was put on them by the sports dailies for their failures as opposed to the high school glory.
>> Cameron Penwell: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed your anecdote about the U.S. military discovering as they went island by island, that the local people knew baseball and that the Japanese had taught it to them, and I think that's a very fascinating and significant thread throughout all the presentations is, as it was said, just how baseball was international almost from the very beginning of its history. So on that note, I have a couple of follow-up questions for all of you, so feel free to chime in as appropriate. Perhaps I'll start with Professor Manning, I was wondering, when you present this to students, I imagine it's somewhat, as you said, you know surprising that you're wanting to shock them a little bit to get them thinking outside of the box, and that's part of the goal of historical thinking, right? Could you tell me a little bit, what are some of the surprises, especially with regards to the international aspect of baseball that you see in students in class?
>> Chandra Manning: I think the way to generalize what surprises them over the whole course of the semester is that much of what they think is new, is really old, and what they think is old, is really fairly new. So, we have sort of in our mind, what classic baseball is and we're a little foggy and if we're pressed on it, we might not all really be able to agree about when the classic era of baseball is, but we have an idea that there is a traditional, that there is a baseball tradition and many of the things that we associate with that baseball tradition are actually more 20th century innovations of that. For example, women played it as early as men, in the 19th century there are women's professional teams in the 19th century, they don't suddenly appear in the 1940's. So as a men's game, that's a newer rather than older aspect of baseball, and that really blows their mind, especially when you flip it around and introduce them to how actually deeply rooted an international flavor to baseball is. That people have played it outside the United States for almost as long as there has been baseball. So I like to give them, put them in the place of maybe a U.S. Army recruit from Nebraska or North Dakota, somewhere on the great plains, who is serving in the military and finds himself in Cuba or finds himself in Puerto Rico in the early 20th century and he's a farm kid who really hasn't seen much baseball before until he gets to Cuba, or until he gets to Puerto Rico and there they are, playing it. So that sense of what we thought was old is new and what we thought was new is old, really tends to shake students up a little bit.
>> Cameron Penwell: Thank you. Continuing on that note of the international aspect of baseball, something that stood out for me was just what a big role these international tours played in the internationalization of the sport and the diversification of the sport, in the early 20th century, specifically for Mr. Staples and Dr. Fitts, could you maybe expand a little bit or if you have any other anecdotes or some other aspects of these tours that you might like to share and I'm especially thinking, you know, we refer to them as kind of goodwill tours, you know, promoting baseball, promoting American values abroad or vice versa, for the Japanese teams coming to the U.S., experiencing American life, seeing the world. What are some of the other aspects to the tours that maybe are not so obvious aside from just kind of the enjoyment of seeing baseball played in different places? So whoever would like to go first. 
>> Robert Fitts: I'll start that, I just finished a manuscript for my next book last month which is called, [inaudible] Baseball, it's about the first Japanese immigrant baseball and why I bring that up is the first Japanese team to come to the United States was Waseda University in 1905. It was also [inaudible] in 1911, Waseda came back in 1911, there're Japanese college teams coming over to the United States every few years throughout the whole period before World War II. And when Waseda came over, their manager, a fellow named [foreign name], was also the founder of the socialist movement in Japan, and baseball for him was more than just a sport, it was almost a social movement, it was a way to instill values to youth, to create a better society, and international baseball for [inaudible] was a way to bring countries closer together. 
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So, in 1905 through 1911, when Waseda comes over, the anti-Japanese immigrant feeling in the United States is incredibly strong. But the Waseda team plays and speaks to the press at every single game, emphasizing the shared love of baseball and how the game brought the players on the field together, brought the fans together, so it's used by these collegians to bring countries closer together, beyond just playing in the diamond.
>> Cameron Penwell: Thank you, that's very interesting to hear there's multiple political angles that one could approach the kind of the goodwill and bonding across linguistic and national lines. Thank you. 
>> Bill Staples Jr.: Yeah, could I add to that? So, Keio University also visited the U.S. on that tour, I think in the early '20s was Shinji Hamasaki he's featured on the cover of the new book, Gentle Black Giants, this isn't the final copy, it's so new I don't even have a copy yet. But he was able to compete against negro league teams of the university while they were here and they exposed him to that relationship with African Americans. Then when the Philadelphia Royal Giants visited Japan in '27 through '32, it actually reinforced that. What's interesting about Hamasaki is he went on to become a manager for the Hankyu Braves, and they were one of the first teams to start recruiting African Americans to come over to Japan, and he specifically said it was earlier interactions that really opened him up and really wanted him to have African Americans on his team. So it's fascinating to see that cultural exchange and dynamic and how it impacted baseball in Japan years later in the '50s.
>> Cameron Penwell: Interesting, yes, Professor Kelly.
>> William Kelly: I can add a brief footnote to Robs mention of the Waseda tour that is also suggestive of these transnational flows, as some of you know from contemporary Japanese baseball, going to a stadium either at a high school game or a professional game, is the most animated fans you will ever see at a baseball game. You know, they are chanting non-stop, they're blowing trumpets, beating drums, it's quite disconcerting to American, to many American fans who thinks they're not really paying attention to the game. Well the cheer, not the cheerleaders but the cheer squads have been a part of the Japanese baseball almost from the beginning, but this Waseda visit to the United States in 1905 was especially important because it happened in the fall. They were playing baseball but they were going to American football games on Saturday afternoon during the tour, and they were completely flabbergasted by these collegiate, they'd show up in their raccoon coats and they had these cheerleading squads with the megaphones and leading these mid-western university student bodies in these-- and they took careful notes. I mean there is a 3 or 400 page journal that was kept by a Waseda team member about everything; baseball strategy, and one of the things was on these-- they went back and reorganized the Waseda cheerleaders along the lines of American football cheering. So in fact, the baseball cheering that you see in Japan now, in professional stadiums and high school stadiums, really has its origins in American collegiate football cheering patterns from the beginning of the 20th century.
>> Fascinating.
>> Cameron Penwell: Wow, that's very interesting, thank you, I did not realize that. They certainly are boisterous at the one Keio - Waseda game I attended was very interesting. Right, well, too, so Mr. Staples, you mentioned the new book in your comment, the Gentle Black Giants. Could you tell me a little bit about what that book explores and sort of how it came about?
>> Bill Staples Jr.: Yeah, so Kazuo Sayama is a baseball historian based in Japan, he's written dozens, if not hundreds, of books, very active. He contact me first, he was working on a book about Kenso Nushida in the 1935 Japanese - American team that competed in Bismarck, South Dakota, I'm sorry, against the Bismarck team in Wichita, Kansas, in a semi-pro tournament. So he wanted to know more about that and so I helped him with that research. And through that, he sent me a copy of his book, Gentle Black Giants. I couldn't read it. It took me about 3 years to find somebody who could help me and so we did eventually find a team of translators and it was a fascinating discovery as it came to light to me in terms of the story that he was telling. It was based on interviews of the Japanese ball players who had competed against the Philadelphia Royal Giants.
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And of course, as the title suggests, Gentle Black Giants, it really explores the way that the African Americans approached the relationship with the Japanese ball players who were still learning the game at the time. I compare it to Aikido training and in the early part of the book, there's something called the ukay-nahgay [phonetic] relationship between the teacher and the student, and it's an agreement where the teacher will not exert full force, so that the student can still learn and still enjoy while they're learning and not become discouraged. And that's the approach that the African Americans had in Japan at the time. So they said instead of saying well we're the experts here, follow us, they said you know, we're friends, let's play ball and have fun together. So it really nurtured them and helped them grow and become better ball players.
>> Cameron Penwell: As a quick follow-up, so I know you mentioned some of the parallels between Japanese - American baseball players and the Negro League players, if you could just tell us briefly, about whether or not, I mentioned at the outset this little, very briefly, the kind of announcement or recognition of a color line for Japanese players, which is obviously another thing they, another barrier they shared in common with African Americans. Could you speak briefly to that of what it was and how it functioned?
>> Bill Staples Jr.: I can, the answer is did a color line exist against Asian ball players, and the answer is, it depends. I think it depends on who you ask, where they come from, what their experiences were. For example, for years I interviewed Japanese - American ball players and I found that the ones who were raised in the mainland, who went through the interment experience, it was their opinion that a color line existed. They had felt oppressed throughout their life and it impacted the way that they viewed the world. Whereas when I interviewed ball players who came from Hawaii, they were like no, no color line existed, it was just you know, it was the opportunity was there and either I didn't succeed et cetera. But Fibber Hirayama, who was recruited by or signed by the Saint Louis Browns at the time, felt that he did not have an equal opportunity once he got into the minor leagues and that's why he chose to go to Japan and play. So really, it does depend, and I think a really good example is, you look at Jackie Robinson in 1947, and Pumpsie Green in 1959, and how it took 12 years for the color line against African Americans to really be eliminated if you will. And it was really based on geography and the mindset and the heads and hearts of those who controlled the game. So I think a lot of that applied as well to Japanese - Americans, for really, any Asian ball player. Just want to point out one really interesting thing; a gentleman by the name of Andy Yamashiro, from Hawaii, was the first Japanese - American to sign a professional contract but he did so under the identity of a Chinese American. He played under the name of Andy Yen and he played in the East Coast, and that's a complicated story as well, there's always a lot of nuance, but he maintained that name throughout his playing career while in the U-- on the mainland.
>> Cameron Penwell: Wow, that's fascinating. Oh Chandra-- yeah, please go ahead.
>> Chandra Manning: Thank you for bringing that up because I was just going to ask you something along those lines, that color line--
>> Bill Staples Jr.: About Pumpsie Green?
>> Chandra Manning: No, not about Pumpsie Green. I am such an avid Red Sox fan that I have made major life decisions around the proximity of Fenway Park. So, Boston's record on that is terrible and I have to face that. No, I wanted to ask you, the color line against African American players is, that's one of the things that surprises students, that that's a 20th century invention. That it isn't there, at first and there are some years in which African Americans sort of get snuck in by pretending to be Cuban and by pretending to speak Spanish by actually speaking Spanish and that's allowed. But an African American person isn't allowed and I wanted to know if there was a, if there was an analogous case for Asian players and it sounds like yes, it sounds like by pretending not to be Japanese, by pretending to be something else, he could find a road in. Am I hearing that right?
>> Bill Staples Jr.: Well, it's complicated because he came over in 1913 with the all Chinese team and they packaged him and marketed him as a Chinese player. So it's really tough to tell if maybe he maintained that marketing and branding because that's how they knew him, or if truly there was anti-Japanese sentiment rising and so he said it's better to be Chinese in this scenario, I'm going to continue with that. So I don't know, Rob, do you have any insight?
>> Cameron Penwell: Yes, I was going to ask if, in speaking about Mashi's case or others that you've looked at. 
>> Robert Fitts: So Bill and I love to fight about this, you know, it gets violent after a couple beers. There was, unlike the color line for African Americans, there was no rigid, but as Bill just said, rigid color line against Asians in professional or organized baseball in the United States. 
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There was strong discrimination and so what-- I, I [inaudible] what Fibber said about feeling that when he was signed for the Browns, he was not allowed to rise, I completely believe him. [foreign name] who played for the San Francisco 49ers professional football, and then went on to, spent one year in the American minor leagues before going to Japan, did not have that experience. He said yeah, there was discrimination, but he felt that if he, he felt there was a chance for him to make the major leagues. He eventually did not go to the, went to Japan because he felt he was physically not able to make the major leagues, but there he felt there was no dividing line. And so it goes, it really is not formal, the way it was against African Americans, it depends on the time, the place, so as Bill said many times, it's complicated.
>> Bill Staples Jr.: Yeah, it's complicated, if I could just add-- there's a few stories of Japanese - American ball players coming to the U.S., going to the deep south in the '50s, and they go to a public restroom and it says colored and white, and they don't know what to do. And they go into the colored restroom, or they go to the back of the bus and they're being told, no, no, no, you need to come up to the front of the bus. So there was a lot of by complicated social interactions at that time.
>> Robert Fitts: Yeah.
>> Cameron Penwell: Well one, one other topic, we have about 10 minutes or a shade under remaining. One thing I wanted to throw out for discussion is I found Professor Kelly's concept of sportsworld by interesting and being a fan, a baseball fan, a fan of the Chicago Cubs, I'm often just focused, like Professor Kelly explained, on you know, for some on the game and I might be one of those types who, you know, find loud cheering distracting. But, I really enjoyed in your introductory chapter and in what you laid out today, you know, showing how there's all these other moving parts that create the, what may be until now we might have called fandom or something like that. So I was wondering if you could  comment yourself and then turning things over to the other panelists as well, I'm course how this notion of sportsworld, especially the way that you looked at it in the case of the Hanshin Tigers, could we apply this to a case in the U.S. and what might we learn for example, if we looked at so-called Red Sox Nation with the same kind of analytic frame, what sort of things might come out, what sort of things might we see that we don't see now?
>> William Kelly: Well I think those of us who follow, and I also follow the Red Sox, and the Red Sox are a good case that would also be a good case to which one could think a little bit more contextually and comprehensively about what it takes to create and produce something called Red Sox Baseball. One of the interesting, these sports dailies I was talking about, when I was first working in Osaka, Japan, second city, it's a city of largely public transportation. Imagine getting on the metro in Washington, and the Japanese subways are sort of like the New York subways where the seats are actually against the side, and you get on the car and at least half the people on the train have a sports newspaper open, there're five different dailies so they're different but every single one of the five, every day on the front page, features the Hanshin Tigers and what they had done the day before, usually lose. But what sort of drama was being played out in the front office, or in the fans. Whether you care about baseball or not, whether you know much about Hanshin or not, your daily experience in going to work and coming home from work, is looking at these front pages. So everybody in the, everybody in Osaka sort of absorbs sort of the lore of the Hanshin Tigers and goes through, even if they don't know much about it, even if they don't actually watch the games, the Hanshin Tigers sort of works its way into the fabric of the city through the medium of these sports dailies. In the U.S., in the '90s, people are driving to work, it's an era of talk radio, you're not, you don't have time to read a newspaper, if you're waiting in traffic, talk radio, you didn't really have talk sports radio in Japan, people were reading the newspapers. They're really-- it's the same media, the same media focus in Boston and New York as in Osaka and Tokyo, but the media this is the predominant media in those different cultures is different. And so paying attention, as I say, to the media, paying attention to the fans, and the relationships between them, is sort of an, adds to our appreciation for what baseball really means in the, as a metropolitan experience.
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>> Cameron Penwell: Thank you, would anyone care to dive in?
>> Chandra Manning: I actually want to ask a question, because I've been fascinated since reading about the sportsworld and the sort of almost choreographed role for fans as you discuss it, and if I understand your work, the fans, the Hanshin Tigers fans, they're, when they sing the marches and things like that, it's mostly when their team is on offense and not defense, is that right?
>> William Kelly: Mm hmm.
>> Chandra Manning: And I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that distinction and maybe we can make nothing of it, I'm curious about if we should read anything into that. Because if you're at Fenway Park, the fans are in on every pitch, they care about the hitting for sure, but they are really in on whether it's going to be a curve or a slider, and whether the shift should be on or not. I mean, there is real involvement around defense and not just offense, and I wanted to hear you sort of just riff a little bit about, on that distinction.
>> William Kelly: Well particularly if you're a Jackie Bradley fan, that catch last night was just amazing. It is true, when you go to a Japanese ball park, you're just overwhelmed by this cacophony of sound and you think that's all they're doing. But it's actually really important that half the time, they're not cheering, that is the opponents, the small contingent that shows up, but half the time, you're not doing this, you're schmoozing. So the fan experience in a Japanese park is half the time being totally engaged, thinking that you're the tenth man on the field, that you're cheers really can motivate the hitters to do what they should do and usually don't, but the other half of the time is you are sitting there, engaging with everybody else around you. These are often people who you've been to the, you know, the 70 games with year after year, so it's an intensely social experience with the fans themselves and I think those are the two halves of the pleasures and the pains of being a Japanese baseball stadium.
>> Bill Staples Jr.: I have a sportsworld question; so the individuals of these communities, are they almost like members of the same religion? Do they relate on that kind of level like it's a religious experience when they come together and, or part of the same religious community?
>> William Kelly: You mean?
>> Bill Staples Jr.: Just the Hanshin Tigers, yeah. I'm just curious.
>> William Kelly: Well--
>> Bill staples Jr.: Because I've heard people say, baseball's my religion, you know, in terms of how much they love it.
>> William Kelly: Yeah, and you know, it's secular but there're also sacred-like rituals and when you go to the ball park in a certain way every time you're there. Have certain sort of greetings and all, and there are very similar feelings in Japan. These fan clubs are sometimes workplace groups, or high school friends, or neighborhood groups. These are people who sometimes associate outside of the ball park, they come to the ball park and they come to the ball park and they can relate. They can bond over their common passion for, it's passions, religion is a little strong. 
>> Bill Staples Jr.: A little strong, but it connects people. 
>> William Kelly: Passion can be pretty strong too.
>> Cameron Penwell: Alright, thank you. Okay, one final question, and then we can proceed down to room 100, or I'm sorry 110, at the end of the hall for the book sale and any additional questions you'd like to address to individual speakers. For Dr. Fitts, so I was very curious about this, of how Mashi kind of explains why, I was thinking why were there no other Japanese players until Nomo and you, you know, very succinctly explained it, but I was wondering, could you tell me were there any almosts or could have beens, that transpired in those decades between when Mashi left and when Nomo made his debut?
>> Robert Fitts: There were a couple, there's one very famous Japanese pitcher who I believe is near a Hall of Fame now named Enatsu, and when he retired, I believe 1980, 1981, somewhere in there, he actually tried out for the Milwaukee Brewers, probably picking the worst team at the time on purpose. But he was 42 and he just, he wasn't bad, but he wasn't good enough, they're not going to take up a roster spot. The other person who nearly made it was, Mashi Murakami, back in 1982, I think the year after Enatsu tried, Mashi officially retired from Japanese baseball and asked to come back and see if he could make the San Francisco Giants, and he did okay once again. But he was also in his young 40's and the Giants said look, you know, we're not going to use up a roster spot for you, we're just not going to do it. So he ended up spending the year as the Giants' batting practice pitcher. So at least he could get in uniform and hang out with the team one last time. So, yes.
>> Cameron Penwell: Alright, well thank you very much. Thank you all for coming today.
>> Robert Fitts: Actually can I do a real quick announcement? For those of you who love baseball, I've been very privileged to be part of a documentary on Moe Berg that will be debuting this month, it's called, The Spy Behind Home Plate, and it will debut in Washington DC at the Avalon Theatre on May 24th--
>> At 18 minutes [inaudible] Japan.
>> Robert Fitts: Right, and--
>> --important part. [inaudible] 
>> Robert Fitts: And this is the director.
>> [inaudible] story.
>> Cameron Penwell: Alright, well thank you. Thank you to our wonderful panelists and please, I do encourage you, I know you probably have questions, and I'm sorry we didn't have time to get to those, but please join us at the end of the hall, room 110, for book purchase, discussion, and any questions that you'd like to pose. Thank you.