From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 112-114:
Taiwan’s Chinese Baseball Association, in association with Lions Club International, had also invited Yoshikura to bring a Kansai Renmei team to Taiwan for a series of five exhibition games that August. Both nanshiki [rubber baseball] and hardball baseball were popular pastimes in Taiwan, a legacy of the island’s prewar years as a Japanese colony. In preparation for an event loaded with patriotic interest, Taiwanese leaders arranged for the Hongye and Chuiyang teams, the winner and runner-up in Taiwan’s 20th Annual Provincial Children’s Cup in May, to train for as long as a month at a military base. The Kansai team, rostered from seven of the Kansai Renmei teams, defeated Chuiyang 1–0 in the first matchup. But they lost to the powerhouse Hongye “Maple Leaf” team 7–0 in front of 20,000 in Taipei Stadium and a live television audience. They lost again to a national Taiwanese all-star team the next day, 5–1, and again to Hongye the day after, 5–2. Kansai saved some face by winning the final game against a provincial all-star team from Jiayi.
The large numbers viewing this series of games in person or on television illustrated and spurred Taiwanese enthusiasm for the international Little League competition that soon far exceeded interest in Little League baseball at this point in Japan. It also presaged the popular interest in Hongye and Taiwan’s dominance of the Little League World Series for the next twenty years. A staggering two-thirds of the island’s population watched a middle-of-the-night broadcast of the island nation’s Little League championship game in 1971.
The Kansai squad’s 1968 visit became a Taiwanese national phenomenon, symbolic of several interconnected and competing ethnic and national tensions characteristic of the island community, which historians of Taiwan baseball agree was a “defining moment in the history of Taiwan nationalism.” For one thing, the ruling Nationalist KMT/GMD, the former mainland government that had been pushed into exile on the island, had not promoted baseball at all since it had not been played in China. Baseball was, ironically enough from an American perspective, intimately tied to Taiwan’s colonial era as subaltern in Japan’s empire, an inconvenient fact the Nationalist press avoided. Yet a vibrant baseball culture continued, even at the elementary school level. The fact that the Hongye school was from a mountainous Bunun Aborigine district in the southeastern Taitung Province added an ethnic dimension to the story, so the team’s success against the Japanese suggested the possibility of a native Taiwan free of Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT/GMD mainland rule. As elaborated by Andrew Morris, David Harney, and others, the official Republic of China government attempted rather to coopt Hongye’s success in an anti-communist agenda affirming the Nationalist government rule by celebrating a capitalist work ethic in the face of their impoverished background.
The ideological import for the Japanese was rather straightforward in comparison to the situation for their hosts, for whom nationalist and ethnic pride competed in overlapping discourses between mainland Chinese and island Taiwanese identities. The Taiwanese hosts to the Kansai delegation rather celebrated the historic connection. At the official ceremony, for example, one Taiwan parent who had played at Kōshien in the prewar imperial era recited a poem on the “way of baseball” spirit by the recently deceased Kondō Hyōtarō, a fabulously successful baseball coach who took his multi-ethnic Jiayi team to Kōshien four times in the early 1930s. And at least one member of the Kansai delegation reconnected with acquaintances from the prewar colonial years.
As discussed in chapter 4, the 1967 West Tokyo Little League success in the American-sponsored Little League venue affirmed the older Japanese Little League leadership’s nationalist desire for approbation of Japan’s remarkable postwar recovery. The warm reception for the August 1968 Kansai Renmei delegation allowed a measure of nostalgia for Japan’s imperial era, despite the team’s modest performance against the former colony’s teams. In Japanese recollections of the trip, Hongye’s hardscrabble origins are conveyed by images of barefoot players. And it is suggestive that such recollections mention the delegation’s gifting of their hardball equipment as an act of noblesse oblige befitting, viewed from traditional East Asian notions of imperial governance, the beneficence of a former colonial ruler.
Far Outliers 