Category Archives: economics

by | 23 April 2026 · 12:06 am

Assassin’s Lair, Memphis, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 145-147:

JUST ONE BLOCK west of the Lorraine, on South Main Street, stood a tumbledown rooming house run by a middle-aged woman named Bessie Brewer. The sign in front of the soot-darkened brick building at 422½ Main blandly announced APARTMENTS/ROOMS beneath an advertisement for Canada Dry’s Wink soda—THE SASSY ONE.

A resident of Bessie Brewer’s rooming house would later describe the place as “a half-step up from homelessness.” Its long corridors were narrow and dark, with blistered walls and cracked linoleum floors that smelled of Pine-Sol. Mrs. Brewer’s establishment was a haven for invalids, derelicts, mysterious transients, riverboat workers, and small-time crooks—rheumy-eyed souls who favored wife-beater T-shirts and off-brand hooch. Mostly white middle-aged men, they blew in on wisps of despair from Central Station a few blocks to the south and from the nearby Trailways and Greyhound terminals.

The guest rooms were upstairs on the second floor, above a grease-smeared joint with striped awnings called Jim’s Grill that sold Budweiser and homemade biscuits and pulled-pork BBQ. Rich smells from Jim’s kitchen curled upstairs, coating the flophouse tenants in a perfume of charred carbon and year-old frying oil. The tiny rooms, furnished with scuffed Salvation Army furniture, sweltered through the heat of the afternoon, even though many of the windows were crammed with ventilation fans that vigorously thunked away. For eight bucks a week, Mrs. Brewer’s tenants were satisfied with what they got and rarely complained. Among the long-term guests in her establishment were a deaf-mute, a tuberculosis patient, a schizophrenic, and an unemployed drunk who had a deformed hand. A homemade sign on the wall near Mrs. Brewer’s office admonished, “No Curseing or Foul Talk.”

AT AROUND THREE o’clock that afternoon, Eric Galt spotted Mrs. Brewer’s shingle on South Main and pulled the Mustang up to the curb alongside Jim’s Grill. A few minutes later, Loyd Jowers, the owner of Jim’s Grill, looked through the grimy plate-glass windows and saw the Mustang parked out front.

Galt had apparently been casing the neighborhood for the past half hour or so and noticed something: some of the rooms at the back of Mrs. Brewer’s rooming house enjoyed a direct view of the Lorraine Motel. He observed that while a few of the rear windows were boarded up, several remained in use; their panes, though dingy and paint smudged, were intact.

Galt stepped out of the car, opened the door at 422½ Main, and climbed the narrow stairs toward Bessie Brewer’s office. At the top of the stairs, he opened the rusty screen door.

Galt rapped on the office door and Mrs. Brewer, her hair done in curlers, opened it as far as the chain would allow.

“Got any vacancies?” he asked.

A plump woman of forty-four, Mrs. Brewer wore a man’s checked shirt and blue jeans. She had been the rental agent at the rooming house for only a month. The previous manager had been forced to leave after a sordid incident that was covered in the local papers: apparently, he’d gotten into a quarrel with his wife and ended up stabbing her.

Mrs. Brewer appraised the prospective tenant. Slim, neat, clean shaven, he sported a crisp dark suit and a tie and looked to her like a businessman. She wondered why such a well-dressed person would show up at her place—and what he was doing in such a raw part of town. “We got six rooms available,” she said. “You stayin’ just the night?”

No, Galt replied, for the week.

Mrs. Brewer promptly led him back to room 8, a kitchenette apartment with a refrigerator and a small stove. “Our nicest one,” she said. “It’s $10.50 a week. You can cook in there.” Galt glanced at the room without venturing inside and shook his head: this room wouldn’t do. The window was on the west side of the building, facing Main and the Mississippi River. “No, see, I won’t be doing any cooking,” he mumbled. “You got a smaller one? I only want a room for sleeping.”

Mrs. Brewer studied Galt. He had a strange and silly smile that she found unsettling. She described it as a “smirk” and a “sneer,” as though he were “trying to smile for no reason.” She padded down the hall to 5B and turned the doorknob, actually a jury-rigged piece of coat-hanger wire. “This one’s $8.50 for the week,” she said, throwing open the door.

Galt stuck his head inside. The room had little to recommend it—a musty red couch, a bare bulb with a dangling string, a borax dresser with a shared bathroom down the hall. A little sign over the door said, “No Smoking in Bed Allowed.” The ceiling’s wooden laths peeked through a large patch of missing plaster. Yet one attribute immediately caught Galt’s eye: the window wasn’t boarded up. A rickety piece of furniture partially blocked the view, but with just a glance he could see the Lorraine Motel through the smudged windowpanes.

“Yeah,” Galt abruptly said, “this’ll do just fine.”

Mrs. Brewer did not bother to mention that her last long-term tenant in 5B, a man known as Commodore Stewart, had died several weeks earlier and the room had not been rented since. She was happy to fill it again, but being naturally suspicious, she was a little surprised by how quickly her new guest had made up his mind.

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Filed under biography, economics, migration, nationalism, U.S.

by | 22 April 2026 · 12:13 am

Beale Street Blues, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 103-105:

THE MARCH BEGAN. King, Abernathy, Lee, and Lawson locked arms in the front, and began walking, as police helicopters whirred overhead. They left Clayborn Temple and slogged along Hernando Street for a few blocks, jerking and halting, trying to find the right pace. Then they turned left onto Beale, the avenue of the blues, and marched west, in the direction of the Mississippi River.

In the rear, no one bothered to form orderly lines. The kids were jostling and shoving, sending forward wave after wave of people stumbling and stepping on heels. “Make the crowds stop pushing!” King yelled. “We’re going to be trampled!”

Soon they passed W. C. Handy Park, named for the prosperous bandleader and composer who first wrote down the blues and shaped the form into an internationally recognized genre. As it happened, this very day was the tenth anniversary of W. C. Handy’s death, and someone had laid a wreath beside the bronze statue of the beaming bluesman standing with his trumpet at the ready.

But this Beale was a faded version of the street that the Father of the Blues had known; had he been alive to see it now, he would have despaired at its mirthless state. In Handy’s heyday, it was the Main Street of Negro America, a place of deep soul and world-class foolishness, of zoot suits and chitlin joints, of hoodoos and fortune-tellers, with jug bands playing on every corner. The street smelled of tamales and pulled pork and pot liquor and lard. Day and night, Beale throbbed with so much authentic and sometimes violent vitality that, as Handy put it in one of his famous songs, “business never closes ’til somebody gets killed.”

For more than a century, blacks from across the Mississippi Delta came to Beale to experience their first taste of city life. Workers came from the levee-building camps, from the lumber and turpentine camps, from the cotton fields and the steamboat lines. The only confirmed studio photograph of Robert Johnson was taken on Beale—a ghostly image of the long-fingered bluesman posing in a fedora and pin-striped suit with his well-worn guitar. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King came here to play some of their first city gigs. The South’s first black millionaire, Robert Church, made his real estate fortune on Beale. Black doctors, black photographers, black dentists, black insurance companies, black mortuaries, black newspapers, hotels and restaurants “for coloreds only,” African-American parades as a counterpart to the all-white Cotton Carnival—Beale was a place where the concept of “separate but equal” had one of its more spirited and convincing runs.

“If you were black for one Saturday night on Beale, you’d never want to be white again,” the Stax Records legend Rufus Thomas once quipped.

By the spring of 1968, however, most of the great clubs and theaters—the Daisy, the Palace, the Monarch, P. Wee’s Saloon, Club Handy—were boarded up or gone altogether. Though there were still reputable businesses closer to Main, much of Beale had become a drab drag of busted concrete and liquor stores and pawnshops, populated by winos and petty thieves. As King tramped west on Beale, past Handy’s statue, separate was most assuredly not equal. The blues was on its sickbed, it was said—a moribund music, an era dead and gone. Now a column of proud but anxious men carried signs in the direction of city hall, headed for an uncertain future.

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Filed under economics, education, migration, music, nationalism, U.S.

by | 21 April 2026 · 12:23 am

Memphis ‘Walking Buzzards’, 1968

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 75-77:

FEBRUARY 1, 1968, was a rainy day, the skies leaden and dull. On Colonial Road in East Memphis, the spindly dogwood branches clawed at the cold air. A loud orange sanitation truck, crammed full with the day’s refuse, grumbled down the street, past the ranch-style houses, past the fake chalets and pseudo Tudors, where the prim yards of dormant grass were marred only by truant magnolia leaves, brown and lusterless, clattering in the wind.

At the wheel of the big truck was a man named Willie Crain, the crew chief. Two workers rode in the back, taking shelter in the maw of its compacting mechanism to escape the pecking rain. They were Robert Walker, twenty-nine, and Echol Cole, thirty-five, two men who were new to sanitation work, toiling at the bottom of the department’s pay scale, still learning the ropes. They made less than a hundred dollars a week, and because the city regarded them as “unclassified laborers,” they had no benefits, no pension, no overtime, no grievance procedure, no insurance, no uniforms, and, especially noteworthy on this day, no raincoats.

The “tub-toters” of the Public Works Department were little better off than sharecroppers in the Delta, which is where they and their families originally hailed from. In some ways they still lived the lives of field hands; in effect, the plantation had moved to the city. They wore threadbare hand-me-downs left on the curbs by well-meaning families. They grew accustomed to home owners who called them “boy.” They mastered a kind of shuffling gait, neither fast nor slow, neither proud nor servile, a gait that drew no attention to itself. All week long, they quietly haunted the neighborhoods of Memphis, faceless and uncomplaining, a caste of untouchables. They called themselves the walking buzzards.

The truck Walker and Cole rode in—a fumy, clanking behemoth known as a wiener barrel—was an antiquated model that the Department of Public Works had introduced ten years earlier. It had an enormous hydraulic ram activated by a button on the outside of the vehicle. Though the city was in the process of phasing it out of the fleet, six wiener barrels still worked the Memphis streets. These trucks were known to be dangerous, even lethal: in 1964, two garbage workers were killed when a defective compactor caused a truck to flip over. The faulty trucks were one of a host of reasons the Memphis sanitation workers had been trying to organize a union and—if necessary—go on strike.

Having completed their rounds, Crain, Walker, and Cole were happy to be heading toward the dump on Shelby Drive—and then, finally, home. They were cold and footsore, as they usually were by day’s end, from lugging heavy tubs across suburban lawns for ten hours straight. The idea of wheeled bins had apparently not occurred to the Memphis Sanitation Department. Nor were home owners in those days expected to meet the collection crews halfway by hauling their own crap to the curb. So, like all walking buzzards across the city, Walker and Cole had to march up the long driveways to back doors and carports, clicking privacy gates and entering backyards—sometimes to the snarl of dogs. There they transferred the people’s garbage to their tubs while also collecting tree cuttings, piles of leaves, dead animals, discarded clothes, busted furniture, or anything else the residents wanted taken away.

Now, as Crain, Cole, and Walker headed for the dump, their clothes were drenched in rain and encrusted with the juice that had dripped from the tubs all day. It was the usual slop of their profession—bacon drippings, clotted milk, chicken blood, souring gravies from the kitchens of East Memphis mingled with the tannic swill from old leaves. Plastic bags were not yet widely in use—no Ziploc or Hefty, no drawstrings or cinch ties to keep the sloshy messes contained. So the ooze accumulated on their clothes like a malodorous rime, and the city provided no showers or laundry for sanitation workers to clean themselves up at the end of the day. The men grew somewhat inured to it, but when they got home, they usually stripped down at the door: their wives couldn’t stand the stench.

Walker and Cole died horrible deaths.

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by | 10 April 2026 · 12:32 am

Japanese Little League and Yakuza

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 130-132:

There remained one sticking point to this collaboration: Yomiuri’s special interest in Kansai Little League coverage. There were some in the Little League community who wished for Yomiuri to not only continue coverage but increase its involvement. Musashino Little League’s Mitsuyasu in particular lobbied for Yomiuri kingpin Shōriki Tōru to lead Little League Japan, and bemoaned Fuji-Sankei’s involvement. But Mitsui’s long-term plan was to work with Fuji-Sankei, and Fuji-Sankei did not want to get involved in a media struggle for coverage rights in the Kansai. When Fuji-Sankei president Shikauchi insisted on full nationwide rights, Mizukami told Hoshino he should make the trip down to Yomiuri’s Osaka offices to negotiate their withdrawal, allowing Mitsui and Sankei to handle Little League nationwide. Hoshino packed his bag for what he thought would be an overnight trip. He ended up spending almost a week there.

One might think that Hoshino would have to spend most of his time and energy convincing Yomiuri to defer to Fuji Sankei, but that decision was not fully Yomiuri’s to make. Before he even approached Yomiuri, Hoshino first had to engage certain underworld elements. At the height of their influence in the 1960s, Japan’s idiosyncratic yakuza gangster world had its origins in two broad arenas with significant overlap: bakutō (gambling) and tekiya (carnie). The tekiya traditionally made their money by organizing and operating quasi-legal protection rackets for street and carnival sales stalls. One profitable variant in the post–World War II years were corporate-level extortionists known as sōkaiya who specialized in disrupting the annual stockholder meetings unless their demands were met. Japan’s yakuza are known for their haughty profession of right-wing or ultra-nationalist postures. One imagines that making the rounds of corporations on behalf of a youth sports team about to represent Japan in an international competition presented an appealing opportunity for them. Although surely not a major money maker, yakuza had apparently made a racket of skimming a healthy portion of funds solicited from businesses in support of Little League. If Fuji Sankei and Mitsui Bussan were going to take over sponsorship of Little League in the Kansai, their support systems would have to be brought aboveboard and questionable connections with the criminal underworld would have to be severed. But in the murky world of accommodations of convenience and unspoken but implicit understandings, an unexpected departure from the cozy tekiya fundraising arrangement would have ripple effects.

In short, Hoshino knew that Yomiuri could not act pre-emptively without the understanding and consent of its associates. To do otherwise would incur the ire of yakuza and expose their organization to irritating and embarrassing harassment that was the yakuza métier. It would be a question of saving face. One thinks of the lampooning scene in comic filmmaker Itami Jūzō’s 1988 A Taxing Woman’s Return in which a local gangster boss intimidates office staff and citizens at a local tax office, all based on the absurdly reverse assertion that he was himself being harassed.16 If Yomiuri had dropped Little League sponsorship without first consulting and gaining the yakuza padrone’s acquiescence, then their whole organization would have been subjected to the charge of insulting or undercutting the yakuza’s pride.

So, Hoshino went to talk with the tekiya boss first, traveling as instructed to a desolate train station in the less-populated areas in the middle of rice paddies between Osaka and Kyoto. On his retelling, Hoshino joked that he felt like he was being kidnapped when several henchmen sauntered around him and then spirited him away in a four-door coupe to the gangster boss’s home, where he ended up staying as a nervous house guest for three or four days. It was a harrowing week, and he had to approach, as he put it, “many scary people” to extricate Little League from this legally questionable fundraising system. Hoshino’s negotiating strategy was simple: ingratiate himself with the boss and then appeal to his ego by asking for his help to convince Yomiuri to allow Mitsui and Sankei to control national coverage. After three or four days of negotiation, while being a not fully willing house guest, Hoshino succeeded. At that point, the tekiya boss took the lead in visiting the Osaka Yomiuri offices, with Hoshino in tow, to “advise” Yomiuri that Fuji Sankei and Mitsui were, so to speak, taking over the Kansai Little League franchise.

Mitsui Bussan and Fuji Sankei became official sponsors for both the 1970 All-Japan and Far East tournaments held at the Higashi Fuchū grounds, and Sankei gave the tournament good coverage in its media network. Hoshino arranged for the players to be billeted in U.S. military barracks and fed at the commissary at nearby Fuchu Air Station, a communications hub for U.S. military in the Far East. Hoshino himself bunked there during the two weeks prior while making tournament arrangements, and then as chaperone for the players during the tournaments that featured teams from the Marshall Islands and Taiwan.

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by | 1 April 2026 · 3:33 am

When Scots Profited in Poland

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 152-154:

But Poland was not always a victim nation. In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdom of Poland united with the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the ‘Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’, and for several centuries the Commonwealth dominated east-central Europe. It was a strange, ramshackle structure, in many ways archaic but in other ways curiously appealing to the political ideals of our own democracy. The Commonwealth, ruled by an elected king, was multi-ethnic and in general tolerant of differences. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Ruthenians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Armenians and Jews managed to live together, culturally distinct but united in loyalty to the Polish Crown. The diversity of faiths – Catholic Christian, Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Calvinist, Islamic and Judaic – caused no serious problems until the Counter-Reformation began to impose a dominant Catholic identity upon Poland.

And Poland became rich. From the fifteenth century on, the demand for Polish wheat to feed the rapidly-growing populations of the Netherlands, northern France and England began to make profits for Polish landowners. It was now that the Polish connection with Scotland began. From the early sixteenth century, carefully recruited groups of Scottish settlers sailed across the North Sea and the Baltic to Danzig (Gdańsk) and fanned out across the basin of the Vistula river. Along its tributaries, they founded small, tightly structured colonies which organised and financed the transport of grain down to the Baltic. Their numbers are disputed, but the Scots who joined these colonies over their two centuries of peak prosperity, most of them from the east and north-east coast of Scotland, must have been counted in the tens of thousands.

It was Scotland’s first planned stride into the outside world. And yet this episode was until recently almost completely forgotten by Scottish historians – although well remembered by the Poles. Scots enjoying the Crown’s protection became generals, bankers and even potentates – Alexander Chalmers from Dyce, near Aberdeen, was several times mayor of Warsaw. The traveller William Lithgow, from Lanark, who walked through Poland in the early seventeenth century, wrote that ‘for auspiciousness, I may rather tearme [Poland] to be a Mother or Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland who are yearly sent hither in great numbers . . . And certainely Polland may be tearmed in this kind to be the mother of our Commons and the first commencement of all our best Merchants’ wealth, or at least most part of them.’

But by the early eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was growing weaker. On either flank of Poland, new and hostile states were emerging. The duchy of Muscovy expanded to become Russia of the Tsars, consolidating central power over what is now European Russia and pushing eastwards to grasp the infinite wealth of Siberia. To the west, small and backward German princedoms along the Baltic coast now merged under the new and formidable kingdom of Prussia.

The Polish Commonwealth was really a ‘pre-modern’ state. Central authority was weak, regional diversity was wide and political influence lay in the hands of the nobility. The new Russia and Prussia, by contrast, represented a very different and ‘modern’ model of power. These were grimly centralised and authoritarian states, intolerant of ethnic or religious diversity and – above all – obsessed with the training and equipping of large professional armies.

Culturally, the Polish Commonwealth considered itself more civilised than its big neighbours, whom Poles regarded as primitive. In return, the despots of Prussia and Russia loathed the relative freedom of Polish society, regarding it as a threat to their own strictly controlled systems of government. In addition, both had historical reasons to resent Poland. On the Prussian side, the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in the fifteenth century, frustrating their drive to conquer the whole Baltic region. The Russians had suffered repeated Polish invasions and political interference in earlier centuries, in the times of Muscovy’s weakness, and saw Poland as a deadly rival for control over Ukraine and Russia’s western borderlands.

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Filed under religion, migration, Russia, nationalism, Britain, economics, Germany, Poland, Austria

by | 31 March 2026 · 12:32 am

Food Rationing in Scotland, 1945

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 61-62:

In Scotland the food allowance each person had to get by on at that time included the following: 2 ounces of bacon or ham, a finger of cheese (1.5 ounces), 7 ounces of butter or margarine, 2 ounces of cooking fats, 8 ounces of sugar, 2 ounces of tea (about 20 teabags), 4 ounces of sweets and 1 shilling’s-worth (5p) of meat. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Except this wasn’t a day’s ration – it was for one full week. Except for the bacon. That was two weeks’ allowance. Other staples such as bread, bananas and even potatoes (throughout 1947) were also rationed. As for fresh eggs, you could have one a fortnight – if you could lay your hands on one. Most urban families made do with the vile-tasting powdered version for the skimpy amounts of baking they could eke out of their precious rations of flour and sugar. On the plus side, people were allowed three pints of milk a week.

In fact, milk was just about the only commodity with which the Attlee government was generous; as part of its drive to maintain the nutritional health of the country’s children, in 1946 free school milk was introduced for all pupils up to the age of 18. This was later reduced to primary schools only. A quarter of a century later, free school milk was finally phased out by Margaret Thatcher. She was dubbed Thatcher the Milk Snatcher by her political opponents.

Those of us of a certain age well remember the crates of one-third-of-a-pint bottles which had to be humped in from the playground into the classrooms. For some unfathomable reason, once indoors, the crates always seemed to be stacked next to the school radiators, ensuring the milk was lukewarm by the time it was dispensed. It is one of life’s ironies that, despite food shortages and rationing, the children of postwar Scotland were better fed than many of their modern counterparts. That, in large part, was down to the free milk ration and free school meals (about half the UK’s pupils qualified for them), plus daily doses of free cod liver oil and concentrated orange juice which mothers determinedly rammed down the throats of protesting offspring.

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Filed under Britain, economics, education, food

by | 18 March 2026 · 7:40 am

Making a Model Sports Town, 1960

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle p. 44:

In 1960, the Ministry of Education designated Tanashi a “model sports town” for excellence in “shakai taiiku,” a phrase perhaps best translated as public recreational athletics. The education authorities became involved because, as the Tanashi mayor noted years later, physical education was considered a component of the social studies curriculum (shakai kyōiku). Along the same lines, the local newspaper would later refer to Little League as a form of “extracurricular education” (kagai kyōiku). A nominal matching subsidy accompanied the “model town” designation wherein the town took on a mandate to form a special association to promote sports. Dr. Sasa was a logical choice for president of the Tanashi City Taiiku Kyōkai Physical Education Association, which became an umbrella organization akin to what in an American context would be called a city recreation commission. This quasi-official advisory group was closely affiliated with the Tanashi City Education Department but run by local business and community leaders. It oversaw the activities of pre-existing sporting groups and promoted new ones. As of 1961, this recreation commission oversaw sports groups in nanshiki [soft rubber] baseball, kendo, judo, swimming, archery, track and field, and tennis. The new Little League was formed in 1962 under the commission’s purview with Sasa as the inaugural president and the pre-existing nanshiki league’s directors kept as the new league’s board.

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by | 17 March 2026 · 6:54 am

Early Little League Sponsors in Japan

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).

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by | 16 March 2026 · 2:07 am

Little League Startups in Japan

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 6-8:

The book’s narrative structure is chronological. Chapter 1, “On Base: Little League’s First Days in Japan,” explores the introduction of Little League for the families of military personnel attached to U.S. bases to the west of Tokyo in the Kantō Plain from 1954. Little League was argued to be a wholesome, distinctively American activity especially suitable for the families living away from the home country, and a method to discipline the bodies and character of youth. Several base leagues across the archipelago experimented on their own initiative with inviting local Japanese communities to field teams in their leagues, but these experiments ended when these bases reverted to Japanese control after the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) in 1960.

Chapter 2, “ ‘Mr. Sarge,’ the Red-Headed Giant: Bill Hatch and the Original Little League in Japan,” follows Airman William “Bill” Hatch’s pioneering creation in the summer of 1959 of the first extant Japanese Little League, Kunitachi, as noted above the first Japanese league to send a team to the World Series in 1962. Hatch and his wife Akiko’s efforts were celebrated by both the Japanese and U.S. governments as exemplars of Cold War cultural diplomacy, and were enthusiastically supported by local businesses as well as by U.S. military and American expat business and service organizations in Tokyo. The Hatches success in creating two local leagues set the foundation for Little League’s Far East Region Directors to proactively encourage Japanese participation in base leagues as well as form their own programs.

Chapter 3, “A League of Japan’s Own: The Early Innings,” explores the creation of a national Japanese Little League organization in 1964, and their successful efforts to overcome government institutional inertia that prevented Japan’s 1963 team from traveling to Williamsport. Restrictions on elementary school competition were a durable legacy of prewar bureaucratic management of baseball as a form of education, and of postwar reforms intended to counter elitism of any form in the interest of democratizing Japan. Despite a visit to Tokyo by Little League International President Peter J. McGovern, and growing popular enthusiasm for youth athletics in the year of the Tokyo Olympics, the Ministry of Education still demurred from granting an exemption in late summer 1964. But a resourceful Kondō Takeshi, a twenty-something trading company white-collar worker and future Japanese ambassador, found a work-around to this bureaucratic intransigence in what he called the democratic tactic of “constituency politics,” getting the Foreign Minister to issue passports anyway.

Chapter 4, “Fly Balls and Daring Plays: The Middle Innings,” follows itinerant Little League promoter Mitsuyasu Momotarō’s intentional creation of Little League in the four cities of Musashino, Koganei, Mitaka, and Chōfu in the western Tokyo suburbs in 1966 and 1967. Under the mentorship of elementary school teacher Kamei Ryō, Musashino City had the strongest of the four teams in what constituted the “West Tokyo” Little League that won Japan’s first World Series title in 1967. For unknown reasons, half of the West Tokyo team sent to Williamsport in 1967 consisted of players from the better organized and presumably better funded Kansai region of Japan, and Kamei was replaced by Chōfu construction company owner Hayashi Kazuo. Enthusiasm over West Tokyo’s success led to large numbers at tryouts for each of West Tokyo’s constituent teams, with each team expanding into their own leagues in 1969. Hayashi grew Chōfu’s program into the powerhouse league of the 1970s, becoming the face of Little League in Japan, even being inducted into Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame soon after his passing in the early 2010s. Mitsuyasu’s role was forgotten.

Chapter 5, “Mgr. Kōno Goes to Williamsport: A Provincial Coach and City Make Good,” describes Osaka entrepreneur Yoshikura Toshio’s organization of a vibrant Osaka-based Little League regional association, known as the Kansai Renmei, and the respective ways provincial city Wakayama fielded teams from 1966 through 1968. Wakayama, located on the other end of the Nankai Railway Line from Osaka, had its fair share of entrepreneurial energy characteristic of this era of high-growth Japan, and it had a rich history of baseball at both the high school and, in the form of nanshiki rubber baseball, the elementary school levels. An ad hoc all-star team chosen from that summer’s Wakayama City nanshiki tournament represented Japan in the 1966 Little League World Series. In 1968, an independently organized Wakayama Little League team practiced together every day from March through the summer to earn Japan’s second, consecutive, victory in the World Series. Based on extensive interviews with players, we learn how the team formed and trained intensively under their manager, Kōno Yoshio, who later gained fame for leading Wakayama Tōin High School’s team to the pinnacle of Japan high school baseball at the Kōshien tournament.

Chapter 6, “The Great Little Schism and Mitsui/Sankei Sponsorship: Two Youth Hardball Programs Instead of One,” explores the frustrations that Kansai Renmei founder Yoshikura experienced as he chafed under Little League rules he felt were overly simplified and not suited to Japanese realities, at the same time Mitsui Bussan trading company and the Sankei media group became long-term corporate sponsors. In 1970 Yoshikura decided to abandon Little League and form his own Boys League that became Little League Japan’s major competitor. Meanwhile, a young Mitsui employee in the Public Relations department was tasked with negotiating Kansai media rights from Sankei rival Yomiuri, but he found himself first having to negotiate Little League out of an unorthodox fundraising arrangement with the local underworld.

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by | 15 March 2026 · 7:28 am

Baseball Research in Occupied Japan

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.

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