Category Archives: education

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 100-102:

Wakayama is a provincial city 50 miles south of Osaka. Where Nanba, one of Osaka’s main commercial hubs, is the northern terminus of the Nankai main line that follows the eastern shore of Osaka Bay, Wakayama is an hour south at the other end of the line. The region has a rich provincial heritage on the periphery of the main power centers in Japanese history. A city located at the edge of waters between the Osaka Bay and the Pacific Ocean, Wakayama straddles the mouth of the River Kii, a waterway with its source in the mountainous Kii Peninsula. At the beginning of the Ashikaga shogunate in the fourteenth-century “Nambokuchō” era of competing imperial courts (1336–1392), Emperor Godaigo’s southern line ensconced itself near its source in the mountainous Kii Peninsula interior. During the two-and-a-half centuries of the relatively stable Tokugawa era (c. 1600–1868), Wakayama was held by one of the shogunal cadet houses that twice provided heirs to the main shogunal line. And in the sixteenth-century sengoku or “warring states” era of fragmented rule before the Tokugawa era, a major peasant mutual defense league known as the Saika Ikki resisted the great warlord Oda Nobunaga’s consolidation of power. Its headquarters was in a fortress near the present-day castle and today lends its name to a section of the city, an elementary school, and a youth baseball club important to the emergence of Wakayama Little League. Saika is also a common surname in Wakayama.

In the mid-1960s, Wakayama was a growing city that featured a major steel mill, a healthy agricultural and fisheries sector, and as important for our interests, a robust baseball community. Dr. Hotta Eiji, Doshisha University Chancellor and one-time president of the Japan High School Baseball Federation (known as Kōyaren), observed to the author that, although Wakayama City and its eponymous prefecture is not that large in terms of population, its residents have long been known for their fervent enthusiasm for high school baseball, and the prefecture boasts a number of perennially strong high school teams. A 1965 survey by the Wakayama Broadcasting Company found that over 90 percent of respondents considered themselves baseball fans, while only 2.5 percent maintained they had no interest. Wakayama Chū, Wakayama’s prewar prefectural middle school, was one of the inaugural teams to play in the summer Kōshien high school baseball tournament, Japan’s most popular sporting event that began in Osaka’s Toyonaka City in 1915. The school won the tournament in 1921 and 1922 (when it was played in Nishinomiya), after which they hosted the future Showa Emperor at his first baseball game at their newly built concrete stands later that year. Tōin High School, Wakayama Chū’s reincarnation after the postwar education reforms, has produced numerous players and accomplished managers in Tokyo’s premier university baseball league, the “Big Six.” One indicator of Wakayama’s enduring baseball fervor is that a group of 50 former high school players born in and around 1955, the age cohort that would have been Little League age in the late 1960s, meet annually to socialize, reminisce, and just talk baseball.

Wakayama has a vibrant nanshiki [rubber baseball] infrastructure with many elementary school-age teams formed along local social networks—school, shrine or temple, parental work relationships, and so on—that compete in summer tournaments sponsored both by the municipal youth sports promotion association as well as by local companies and volunteer organizations. Judging from common team names, contemporary reports in the local Wakayama newspaper, player recollections, later comments by league officials, and an analysis of Little League roster information with residency data from the city youth sports organization, it is clear that the 1966 and 1967 Little League teams were in fact all-star teams selected from the Wakayama Youth Baseball Association spring and summer nanshiki tournaments. Because the Japanese school year begins in April, what this means is that most of the players selected for the summer Little League tournament rosters were already in seventh grade playing for their junior high school nanshiki teams.

Hirota Hideo and Wakayama’s Youth Baseball Community

The major figure in Wakayama’s youth baseball community in this era was a fabric wholesaler by the name of Hirota Hideo. Like many baseball men in Japan in this era, he had played baseball in the prewar years, at Wakayama’s Ninoshima High School. He was a member of his local PTA, a board member on the Wakayama youth sports association, and a charismatic individual whose business and civic connections ranged far and wide. The Hirotas lived directly opposite the Saika Elementary School that their two daughters attended, and provided conveniently located home care for the infant children of the school’s young female teachers. In 1961, Hirota founded what became the strongest team in the Wakayama Shōnen Yakyū Renmei (Wakayama Youth Baseball Association). He was the manager of the club until 1969.

Like Dr. Sasa in Tanashi, Hirota was an important agent beyond baseball in creating the civic sports organizations that sprung up in response to the national government’s promotion of youth sports culture in the early to mid-1960s. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 1962, the Japan Sports Association (JASA)—Japan’s equivalent to that era’s Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) in the United States—founded an affiliate Junior association with the aim of promoting youth interest in sports in the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. With offices in the city’s Taiiku Kyōkai Physical Education Association, Wakayama’s Junior Sports Association’s founding charter mandated board representation from every youth sports association in the city as well as from elementary and junior high principals, the local Taiiku Kyōkai Athletic Association itself, and the administrative offices of the city’s Board of Education. In its 20th anniversary publication, the founding director Hisashi Shōzō credited “baseball’s Hirota” as one of two individuals who really helped him get the organization going in 1965, when it listed 20 sports associations as members.

The Nankai Hawks were my favorite baseball team during my high school years in Kobe during the 1960s. Their Japanese Hall-of-Fame pitcher and catcher combination, Tadashi Sugiura and Katsuya Nomura, were hard to beat.