Here’s a book that appeared just in time for the latest World Baseball Classic and the latest Asian Studies Association meeting. I’ll have to restrain myself from sharing too many excerpts from it.
From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 4-6:
American faith in baseball as constitutive of “all that was good” led the authorities during the U.S. Occupation of Japan immediately after World War II to sponsor its resurgence. Baseball in Japan had come on hard times under wartime austerity partly because it was the enemy’s game, and partly because it was thought to be indulgent, a kind of luxury that was also called the “enemy” in a wartime slogan, zeitaku wa teki (“luxury is the enemy”). The Americans assumed baseball would help democratize postwar Japan because of its intrinsic American-ness. But it wasn’t as if baseball was a foreign pastime. It had been a vibrant part of Japanese life since the late nineteenth century. Japanese went along with the American discourse on baseball and democracy for their own reasons, but mainly so they could play and watch baseball again. In my capacity as president of a small-town league I had already been primed to consider the social impact of youth baseball. As a historian I perceived an opportunity to examine how two distinctive national cultures imbued the game with different values.
An alternative and immediately more obvious research question was, simply, why were the Japanese teams that arrived in Williamsport so consistently among the best? Over the course of my research the American popular press reported what I already knew, that Japanese teams practiced year-round and dawn to dusk on weekends. But surely there was more to it than that. There is a vibrant community of scholars and knowledgeable fans writing on the Japanese high school and professional games, but a literature survey showed no scholarship on Japanese Little League—none in English, and very little in Japanese. The Japanese-language studies focused for the most part on the deleterious effects on young arms throwing hardball, plus a few sociological studies from the 1970s. For a historian, it is exciting to come across a topic that no one has written about. And I felt I had special insight since postwar Japanese history was my specialty and I had a half dozen years’ experience helping to run a Little League in the United States.
A visit to Little League’s Peter J. McGovern Museum suggested reconstructing this history was going to involve much more than the archival work of conventional history research. Apart from some marginally relevant correspondence, a smattering of mentions in Little League newsletters, and the occasional recent testimonial by visiting U.S. veterans who happened to have played some small role in its origins, not much documentation remained from the early years. As archivist Adam Thompson explained, Little League had moved offices every few years as the international program grew, and likely much of the documentation was simply tossed.
Although Little League Japan had been founded in 1964, their head office was small and had no archive. What I discovered on my first visit to Tokyo was that no one knew much, and those that knew a little often mis-remembered, usually because of logical but faulty assumptions. The Little League Japan leadership provided a vague explanation that Little League got started on American military bases and from there spread to local Japanese communities, and that at some point the trading company Mitsui Bussan and the media company Fuji Sankei began to support the program, as they still do. But beyond that, memories of dates and names for the early years were as misty as a riverside field on a cool autumn morning. For example, the website for the Kunitachi League, the first Japanese team to play in the World Series, indicated that the Little League got started in that western Tokyo suburb in 1949; but a search of back numbers of the U.S. military’s Pacific Stars and Stripes revealed that Little League did not appear in Japan until 1954, and then only inside the American military dependent community. In 2015, when prominent Chōfu Little League and Little Senior (teenage) League president Hayashi Kazuo was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, it was stated that he started the formal Little League organization in 1964 with Mitsui and Fuji Sankei support. But one of my earliest contacts from Mitsui with firsthand knowledge insisted his company didn’t get involved until 1969. So, I knew if I embarked on this project, the first steps would demand an old-fashioned kind of history. Before considering the big questions, I had to deduce the nitty-gritty developments from as many sources as I could: newspaper clippings, old commemorative pamphlets, municipal histories, contemporary sociological studies, interviews with former players, as well as the various baseball episodes in contemporary literature, film, school readers, and the graphic youth cultures of manga and anime.
Far Outliers 