From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 39-41:
Japanese society had not yet reached the level of affluence sufficient for parents to afford registration fees, so leagues had to be fully supported by sponsorships and donations. Each team required from $200 to $300 in 1959 dollars for equipment, uniforms, insurance, and charter fees. For their original Tiger squad, Hatch and his wife bought the uniforms from Takada and sewed on the team name and Little League patches. With more kids wanting to play, soon enough it became apparent they needed sponsors if they were going to equip all their teams adequately. Hatch was lucky in that among the first journalists to cover his team was Bobby Hirai, a colorful Canadian-born reporter for the Mainichi Newspapers who had an entrepreneurial bent. Hirai helped Hatch make important connections in the Japanese and foreign business and media communities.
Hirai had a long career as a facilitator between Japanese and foreign celebrities and corporations. The son of the chief officer at Mitsui Bussan’s Toronto Office before WWII, Bobby grew up with a love for ice hockey and dancing. Repatriated to Japan as a teenager with his family in 1940, he began two years of intensive study, including formal Japanese, at Keimei, a special school set up by the Mitsui family for returnee children, followed by a year at Waseda’s International School before beginning Keio University. During the wartime era of animosity toward the English-speaking world, his mother insisted he keep a secret English-language diary to maintain his fluency, and despite official government policies mandating frugality—“luxury is the enemy,” as the slogan went—he routinely visited the Philippine embassy carrying a change of clothes so as to enjoy their surreptitious dance parties. Immediately after the war his natural English ability was quickly recognized by two reporters for the G.I. newspaper Yank, one of whom was the famous postwar literary agent Knox Berger. As a gofer and translator, for about half a year he scrounged everything from printing presses for the G.I. publication to lodgings for his reporters. It was during this stint that he was present when former wartime Prime Minister Gen. Tōjō Hideki famously shot himself in an attempted suicide moments before his arrest for war crimes. After returning to and graduating from Keio University, Hirai worked as a journalist for Mainichi. Eventually he created a career for himself handling logistics for visiting foreign celebrities and mediating between Japanese and foreign, mainly U.S., corporations.
Although Hirai never served in the U.S. military, his Canadian background and Occupation-era interpretation services made him a member of what historian Guthrie-Shimizu calls a community of entrepreneurial, transnational brokers like “Cappy” Harada that helped mediate American and Japanese baseball interests. Men like Harada and Hirai benefited from connections in a “new military-sanctioned sports entertainment business that would become a cultural manifestation of the American overseas military presence and a staple of American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.”
In the post-Occupation 1950s, the conditions favorable to American-led sports initiatives still applied for Little League, and Hirai helped Hatch tap into these resources. In addition to favorable coverage Hirai came to Hatch’s aid when he was having trouble getting the official league rules translated. And Hirai arranged for Hatch to meet a number of key expat businessmen who provided essential support for his teams.
First among these American supporters was Davey Jones, a longtime Pan-American public relations executive based in Tokyo, and “one of the boys” in Bobby’s group of cronies in Tokyo. Pan-American had a history of supporting sporting events in Japan, and Jones proved an ally of Hatch’s Little League. Following Hirai’s introduction, Jones and Pan-Am sponsored a luncheon meeting with many other members of the American business community in Tokyo on July 12 in that first year. These business leaders created a board for the Kunitachi Little League, with Hatch as its president and officers from Pan-American, the Tokyo Lions Club, as well as the Kunitachi city government. Pan-American and the Lions Club (#503) became the main sponsors in 1959, and the new league’s four team names reflected their sponsorship: After the Tigers, the other teams were the Lions, the Clippers, and the Orions (the last two after Pan-Am’s legendary prewar pan-Pacific service and icon).
Far Outliers 