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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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I always thought the Japanese love of baseball was a holdover from the post-war American occupation.

People expect that, but it isn't actually, predates it by a century. And there were professional leagues in the 20s long before the second world war.

You had people saying "the game spread, like a fire in a dry field, in summer, all over the country, and some months afterwards, even in children in primary schools in the country far away from Tōkyō were to be seen playing with bats and balls." as far back as 1907

We had a big presence in Japan for a while after they opened up to us:

Horace Wilson, an American English teacher at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo, first introduced baseball to Japan in 1872, and other American teachers and missionaries popularized the game throughout Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. Popularity among Japanese grew slowly and led to the establishment of Japan’s first organized baseball team, the Shimbashi Athletic Club, in 1878. The convincing victory of a team from Tokyo’s Ichikō High School in 1896 over a team of select foreigners from the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club drew wide coverage in the Japanese press and contributed greatly to the popularity of baseball as a school sport. The rapidly growing popularity of baseball led to the development of high school, college, and university teams throughout Japan in the early 1900s.

Ironically, while we already had pro teams, it sounds like the American org that became the MLB was only established in 1871, so our love of the sport really doesn't predate theirs by all that much.

Another interesting thing is that baseball was quite popular in England for a time before it faded away.

Rounders (the version of base ball that was codified in Ireland in 1884, so well after the Kinckerbockers codified American baseball and around the same time that the NL was formed) was one of the big team sports for schoolgirls in the UK (alongside netball and field hockey) and Ireland. It only went into decline in the 21st century once there was a serious attempt to push women's cricket.

TIL that the claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball was a myth created to refute the idea that baseball was derived from rounders. Unsurprisingly, the truth is that both games derived from informal "base ball" games with uncodified rules that originated in England and were played across the English-speaking world - similarly to how Rugby, association football, and gridiron all developed independently from uncodified proto-football.

You're right, it's absolutely fascinating that baseball was ever popular anywhere.

Wow, I had no idea, that's really interesting!

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