Baseball, it’s America’s pastime. There is no sport more historically intertwined with the United States and its identity, and baseball’s popularity is largely confined to the Americas. So how come it is the most popular sport in Japan?
Shohei Ohtani was already one of the world’s most famous athletes when he signed the largest contract in sports history late last year. To enlist his services for the next decade, the Los Angeles Dodgers rewarded Ohtani with a $700 million deal, yet almost the entirety of the contract will be deferred until after Ohtani is likely to have retired. For each of the next 10 years, Ohtani will be paid $2 million by the Dodgers, which he will earn in addition to any current endorsements. From 2034 until 2043, Ohtanti will be paid $68 million dollars a year. Not a bad way to begin retirement.
There have been Japanese players who cracked Major League Baseball before Ohtani. Ichiro has the most hits in a single season; Matsui was loved in the Bronx; Darvish has been a semi-consistent All-Star since coming into the league. But none of them reached anywhere a superstardom quite like this. The uniqueness of a genuine, two-way star, the first in almost a century since the great Babe Ruth, gives Ohtani a heightened value (even in a year without pitching). So, too, does his global appeal – specifically, his stratospheric popularity in baseball-loving Japan.
International stars in American sports are plenty (Nowitzki, Ming, Antetokounmpo, Jokic, Ovechkin, Acuna and Soto, to name only a few) and can be cashed in on, but Ohtani is a different proposition – both as an athlete and an asset. Baseball is sewn into the fabric of modern Japan, a wealthy country of 125 million people where Ohtani is the biggest athlete of them all.
How did baseball start in Japan?
The first record of the sport in Japan is in 1872, when an American English teacher named Horace Wilson introduced it to the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo. This was only four years after the start of Emperor Meiji’s reign and the birth of the Empire of Japan. With imperial rule came a period of rapid modernization, which included an increased emphasis on fitness, physical education and team sports, and historians link the rise of baseball with a wider quest for national and individual ‘self-improvement’.
Baseball in America was not that much older, itself a product of the mid-1800s that only really took off in the 1860s and 1870s. Japan was a couple of decades behind, but by the 1890s, ten schools in Japan had reputable baseball teams and the sport had captured swathes of the nation’s imagination.
In his 1980 paper, Baseball and the Quest for National Dignity in Meiji Japan, Professor Donald Roden studies why baseball struck such a chord with Japan during this time. “Of the outdoor games that attracted Japanese youth at the turn of the century, none rivaled baseball in igniting enthusiasm among players, spectators, and readers of an expanding popular press,” he explains. “Baseball rose from oblivion to embody the Social Darwinist spirit of competition and “vigor” (genki) that swept Japan in the 1890s” and “heralded a new chapter in Japanese-American relations.”
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A key reason baseball was allowed to thrive in this period was a shift in how Japan looked at “Outdoor games” among students at school and university. What had previously been viewed as recreational and unserious activities were replaced by Western team sports, “characterized by formal organization, rigorous training, strict rules, and the presence of officials at all matches,” according to Roden.
This was certainly part of the motivation at Waseda University, who were early to set up an official baseball team under the management of Abe Isoo, a Christian Socialist and pacifist who is often called the “father of Japanese baseball”. It’s a somewhat generous title, he reportedly took little interest in the sport before joining the university, but then became an advocate for its effect on individual personalities and teamwork, and would spend much of the next four decades pioneering the sport in Japan.
Another fascinating component of baseball’s rise in Japan was the way it fused modernity and tradition. While it stoked the spirit of a burgeoning, forward-looking United States, Roden argues that the characteristics of the sport appealed equally to Japanese fans looking backward. “Unlike the mindless tackling and punching that were sanctioned in American contact sports, baseball struck a harmonious balance between physical strength and mental agility. The resulting demand for concentration and finesse harkened to the cultivated martial ideals of the samurai gentleman. Thus, at the end of the century, while Americans in Yokohama played baseball to be more American, Japanese students, especially in the higher schools, turned to baseball in an effort to reify traditional values and to establish a new basis for national pride.”
Shared popularity but different ethoses set the stage for international showdowns. In a game played in Yokohama in 1896, a team from Ichikō High School defeated a team of foreigners playing for Yokohama Country & Athletic Club. The result made waves in Japan, and led to another soar in popularity for the sport. Less than a decade later, the first Japanese side would make the journey to play in America, led by Abe Isoo.
When did baseball become professional in Japan?
By the 1920s, professional baseball was simmering in Japan and in 1934, the Great Japan Tokyo Baseball Club was formed. That year, an American All-Star team including names like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Lefty Gomez traveled to the country as ambassadors for the sport. Hundreds of thousands of fans lined the streets of Tokyo to welcome the stars, who were slated to play 18 games in the country. The United States team won all 18, and Ruth hit 13 home runs during the tour.
You can see some footage of the tour below.
In 1936, Japan’s first fully professional league was established. Five other teams joined the Tokyo club in Japanese Baseball League, though the impending Second World War meant it was suspended in the early 1940s and restarted when the war was over.
The JBL disbanded in 1949 and was reformed a year later as the Nippon Baseball League, which remains the highest level of baseball in Japan to this day.
How big is baseball in Japan now?
Sumo is Japan’s national sport, but baseball is the most popular. From the NPB, right down to the highly competitive and closely followed high school tournament, millions of people follow the sport each year.
In 2023, over 25 million people attended NPB games. The most recent figures also suggest that over 7 million people engaged in playing baseball over the previous 12 months. This includes organized teams, batting cages or just throwing the ball around. With Shohei Ohtani the nation’s biggest athlete continuing to set pace for a Hall of Fame career, even on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, those numbers might just keep growing.
Enjoy this Great Big Story? Check out the video below!
Japan is not the only country in Asia that loves baseball. In South Korea, it is also far more than a game. American missionaries first brought the sport to the peninsula in 1905, and today the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) features 10 teams and a unique sporting culture all its own. The city of Busan and its hometown Lotte Giants have a particularly passionate fan base. From the hitters’ flashy bat flips, to the team’s famous “cheermaster” and its unlikely American super fan, consider this video your crash course on the joyful madness that is Lotte Giants fandom.
