Download or read book Remembering Japanese Baseball written by Robert K. Fitts and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game transports us onto diamonds and into dugouts on the other side of the globe, where the vigorous sportsmanship of the game and the impassioned devotion of its fans transcend cultural and geographic borders and prove that baseball is fast becoming an international pastime. Called Yakyu, baseball has been played in Japan since the 1890s but has only recently gained a substantial global following. Robert K. Fitts chronicles the nation’s distinctive version of the sport as recounted by twenty-five of its players. Fitts’s careful choice of subjects represents the experiences of a mix of American and Japanese players—including stars, titleholders, and members of the Japanese Hall of Fame. Informal, candid, and remarkably specific, these recollections describe teammates and opponents, corporate owners and loyal fans, triumphs and frustrations, collectively capturing all the spirit and emotion engendered by the game from decidedly personal vantage points. Throughout, readers glimpse the unique traits of baseball in Japan and discern how the game has evolved since its inception as well as how it differs from its American counterpart. An unparalleled introduction for an American audience, Remembering Japanese Baseball is augmented by photos of its twenty-five interviewees and a timeline demarking milestone moments in the game’s Japanese history. Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa! and The Meaning of Ichiro, provides the foreword.
Download or read book Remembering Japanese Baseball written by Fitts, Robert K. and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wally Yonamine written by Robert K. Fitts and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wally Yonamine was both the first Japanese American to play for an NFL franchise and the first American to play professional baseball in Japan after World War II. This is the unlikely story of how a shy young man from the sugar plantations of Maui overcame prejudice to integrate two professional sports in two countries. ø In 1951 the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants chose Yonamine as the first American to play in Japan during the Allied occupation. He entered Japanese baseball when mistrust of Americans was high?and higher still for Japanese Americans whose parents had left the country a generation earlier. Without speaking the language, he helped introduce a hustling style of base running, shaking up the game for both Japanese players and fans. Along the way, Yonamine endured insults, dodged rocks thrown by fans, initiated riots, and was threatened by yakuza (the Japanese mafia). He also won batting titles, was named the 1957 MVP, coached and managed for twenty-five years, and was honored by the emperor of Japan. Overcoming bigotry and hardship on and off the field, Yonamine became a true national hero and a member of Japan?s Baseball Hall of Fame.
Download or read book Banzai Babe Ruth written by Robert K. Fitts and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In November 1934 as the United States and Japan drifted toward war, a team of American League all-stars that included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, future secret agent Moe Berg, and Connie Mack barnstormed across the Land of the Rising Sun. Hundreds of thousands of fans, many waving Japanese and American flags, welcomed the team with shouts of "Banzai! Banzai, Babe Ruth!" The all-stars stayed for a month, playing 18 games, spawning professional baseball in Japan, and spreading goodwill. Politicians on both sides of the Pacific hoped that the amity generated by the tour--and the two nations' shared love of the game--could help heal their growing political differences. But the Babe and baseball could not overcome Japan's growing nationalism, as a bloody coup d'état by young army officers and an assassination attempt by the ultranationalist War Gods Society jeopardized the tour's success. A tale of international intrigue, espionage, attempted murder, and, of course, baseball, Banzai Babe Ruth is the first detailed account of the doomed attempt to reconcile the United States and Japan through the 1934 All American baseball tour. Robert K. Fitts provides a wonderful story about baseball, nationalism, and American and Japanese cultural history.
Download or read book Issei Baseball written by Robert K. Fitts and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball has been called America's true melting pot, a game that unites us as a people. Issei Baseball is the story of the pioneers of Japanese American baseball, Harry Saisho, Ken Kitsuse, Tom Uyeda, Tozan Masko, Kiichi Suzuki, and others--young men who came to the United States to start a new life but found bigotry and discrimination. In 1905 they formed a baseball club in Los Angeles and began playing local amateur teams. Inspired by the Waseda University baseball team's 1905 visit to the West Coast, they became the first Japanese professional baseball club on either side of the Pacific and barnstormed across the American Midwest in 1906 and 1911. Tens of thousands came to see "how the minions of the Mikado played the national pastime." As they played, the Japanese earned the respect of their opponents and fans, breaking down racial stereotypes. Baseball became a bridge between the two cultures, bringing Japanese and Americans together through the shared love of the game. Issei Baseball focuses on the small group of men who formed the first professional and semiprofessional Japanese baseball clubs. These players' story tells the history of early Japanese American baseball, including the placement of Saisho, Kitsuse, and their families in relocation camps during World War II and the Japanese immigrant experience.
Download or read book Remembering Manzanar written by Michael L. Cooper and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the use of rare historic footage and photographs, and personal recollections of a dozen former internees and others, this documentary explores the experiences of more than 10,000 Japanese Americans who were relocated to a remote desert facility during World War II.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Baseball written by Leonard Cassuto and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-21 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball is much more than a game. As the American national pastime, it has reflected the political and cultural concerns of US society for over 200 years, and generates passions and loyalties unique in American society. This Companion examines baseball in culture, baseball as culture, and the game's global identity. Contributors contrast baseball's massive, big-business present with its romanticized origins and its evolution against the backdrop of American and world history. The chapters cover topics such as baseball in the movies, baseball and mass media, and baseball in Japan and Latin America. Between the chapters are vivid profiles of iconic characters including Babe Ruth, Ichiro and Walter O'Malley. Crucial moments in baseball history are revisited, ranging from the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal to recent controversies over steroid use. A unique book for fans and scholars alike, this Companion explains the enduring importance of baseball in America and beyond.
Download or read book Sport Memory and Nationhood in Japan written by Andreas Niehaus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book clarifies and verifies the role sport has as an alternative marker in understanding and mapping memory in Japan, by applying the concept of lieux de mémoire (realms of memory) to sport in Japan. Japanese history and national construction have not been short of sports landmarks since the end of the nineteenth century. Western-style sports were introduced into Japan in order to modernize the country and develop a culture of consciousness about bodies resembling that of the Western world. Japan’s modernization has been a process of embracing Western thought and culture while at the same time attempting to establish what distinguishes Japan from the West. In this context, sports functioned as sites of contested identities and memories. The Olympics, baseball and soccer have produced memories in Japan, but so too have martial arts, which by their very name signify an attempt to create traditions beyond Western sports. Because modern sports form bodies of modern citizens and, at the same time, offer countless opportunities for competition with other nations, they provide an excellent ground for testing and contesting national identifications. By revealing some of the key realms of memory in the Japanese field of sports, this book shows how memories and counter-memories of (sport) moments, places, and heroes constitute an inventory for identity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.
Download or read book Baseball Saved Us written by Ken Mochizuki and published by Lerner Publishing Group. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Author Ken Mochizuki reads his award-winning book. There is some soft background music, and a few gentle sound effects, but the power of the words need little embellishment...This treasure of a book is well-treated in this format." - School Library Journal
Download or read book Mashi written by Robert K. Fitts and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 1964, the Nankai Hawks of Japan’s Pacific League sent nineteen-year-old Masanori Murakami to the Class A Fresno Giants to improve his skills. To nearly everyone’s surprise, Murakami, known as Mashi, dominated the American hitters. With the San Francisco Giants caught in a close pennant race and desperate for a left-handed reliever, Masanori was called up to join the big league club, becoming the first Japanese player in the Major Leagues. Featuring pinpoint control, a devastating curveball, and a friendly smile, Mashi became the Giants’ top lefty reliever and one of the team’s most popular players—as well as a national hero in Japan. Not surprisingly, the Giants offered him a contract for the 1965 season. Murakami signed, announcing that he would be thrilled to stay in San Francisco. There was just one problem: the Nankai Hawks still owned his contract. The dispute over Murakami’s contract would ignite an international incident that ultimately prevented other Japanese players from joining the Majors for thirty years. Mashi is the story of an unlikely hero caught up in an American and Japanese baseball dispute and forced to choose between his dreams in the United States and his duty in Japan.
Download or read book Tokyo Junkie written by Robert Whiting and published by Stone Bridge Press, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tokyo Junkie is a memoir that plays out over the dramatic 60-year growth of the megacity Tokyo, once a dark, fetid backwater and now the most populous, sophisticated, and safe urban capital in the world. Follow author Robert Whiting (The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, You Gotta Have Wa, Tokyo Underworld) as he watches Tokyo transform during the 1964 Olympics, rubs shoulders with the Yakuza and comes face to face with the city’s dark underbelly, interviews Japan’s baseball elite after publishing his first best-selling book on the subject, and learns how politics and sports collide to produce a cultural landscape unlike any other, even as a new Olympics is postponed and the COVID virus ravages the nation. A colorful social history of what Anthony Bourdain dubbed, “the greatest city in the world,” Tokyo Junkie is a revealing account by an accomplished journalist who witnessed it all firsthand and, in the process, had his own dramatic personal transformation.
Download or read book The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers written by William W. Kelly and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baseball has been Japan's most popular sport for over a century. The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers analyzes Japanese baseball ethnographically by focusing on a single professional team, the Hanshin Tigers. For over fifty years, the Tigers have been the one of the country’s most watched and talked-about professional baseball teams, second only to their powerful rivals, the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. Despite a largely losing record, perennial frustration, and infighting among players, the Tigers remain overwhelming sentimental favorites in many parts of the country. This book analyzes the Hanshin Tiger phenomenon, and offers an account of why it has long been so compelling and instructive. Author William Kelly argues that the Tigers represent what he calls a sportsworld —a collective product of the actions of players, coaching staff, management, media, and millions of passionate fans. The team has come to symbolize a powerful counter-narrative to idealized notions of Japanese workplace relations. The Tigers are savored as a melodramatic representation of real corporate life, rife with rivalries and office politics familiar to every Japanese worker. And playing in a historic stadium on the edge of Osaka, they carry the hopes and frustrations of Japan’s second city against the all-powerful capital.
Download or read book Barbed Wire Baseball written by Marissa Moss and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a boy, Kenichi “Zeni” Zenimura dreams of playing professional baseball, but everyone tells him he is too small. Yet he grows up to be a successful player, playing with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig! When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, Zeni and his family are sent to one of ten internment camps where more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry are imprisoned without trials. Zeni brings the game of baseball to the camp, along with a sense of hope. This true story, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, introduces children to a little-discussed part of American history through Marissa Moss’s rich text and Yuko Shimizu’s beautiful illustrations. The book includes author and illustrator notes, archival photographs, and a bibliography.
Download or read book The Chrysanthemum and the Bat written by Robert Whiting and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nikkei Baseball written by Samuel O. Regalado and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nikkei Baseball examines baseball's evolving importance to the Japanese American community and the construction of Japanese American identity. Originally introduced in Japan in the late 1800s, baseball was played in the United States by Japanese immigrants first in Hawaii, then San Francisco and northern California, then in amateur leagues up and down the Pacific Coast. For Japanese American players, baseball was seen as a sport that encouraged healthy competition by imposing rules and standards of ethical behavior for both players and fans. The value of baseball as exercise and amusement quickly expanded into something even more important, a means for strengthening social ties within Japanese American communities and for linking their aspirations to America's pastimes and America's promise. With World War II came internment and baseball and softball played behind barbed wire. After their release from the camps, Japanese Americans found their reentry to American society beset by anti-Japanese laws, policies, and vigilante violence, but they rebuilt their leagues and played in schools and colleges. Drawing from archival research, prior scholarship, and personal interviews, Samuel O. Regalado explores key historical factors such as Meji-era modernization policies in Japan, American anti-Asian sentiments, internment during World War II, the postwar transition, economic and educational opportunities in the 1960s, the developing concept of a distinct "Asian American" identity, and Japanese Americans' rise to the major leagues with star players including Lenn Sakata and Kurt Suzuki and even managers such as the Seattle Mariners' Don Wakamatsu.
Download or read book Gentle Black Giants written by Kazuo Sayama and published by Nbrp Press. This book was released on 2019-04-20 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1927 and 1934, the Philadelphia Royal Giants embarked on several goodwill tours across the Pacific-to Japan, Korea, the Philippines and the Hawaiian Territories. As African-Americans, they were relegated to second-class citizenship in the U.S., but abroad they were treated like kings. Unlike the previous tours of major league stars who ridiculed their opponents through embarrassing defeats, the Royal Giants made the games competitive, dignified and enjoyable for opposing players. In Gentle Black Giants: A History of Negro Leaguers in Japan, Kazuo Sayama and Bill Staples, Jr. chronicle the tours of the Royal Giants and demonstrate that without the skill and humanity displayed by the Negro Leaguers, Japanese ballplayers might have become discouraged and lost their love for the game. Instead, the experience of sharing the field with these "gentle, black giants" kept their spirits high and nurtured the seeds for professional baseball to flourish in Japan.
Download or read book Taking in a Game written by Joseph A. Reaves and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2004-05-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Taking in a Game, Joseph A. Reaves examines the development of baseball in Korea, the Philippines, Mainland China, and Taiwan, as well as the more widely known story of baseball in Japan. In this entertaining and informed account, Reaves covers everything from baseball in Qing Dynasty China in the nineteenth century to the 2000 Sydney Olympics bronze-medal match between Japan and Korea. Reaves guides the reader through a history of Asian baseball, the cultures that surround it, and the future of what has become a great Asian game.
