Baseball Discussion and Its Meaning in Japan during the U.S. Occupation of Japan

Baseball was introduced to Japan though the prestigious school, First High School (Ichiko), and gained a syndrome-like popularity in Prewar Japan as a student sport that is a combination of success-oriented ideology and nationalism. The overly heated popularity of baseball in Japan caused resistance such as the argument about the toxicity of baseball and the call for the eradication of baseball. Afterwards, the movement to use sports as the guidance of public thought led to the promulgation of the Baseball Ordinance(Yakyu Toseirei) in 1932. During the war, baseball was restricted for the reason that it is the public sport of the U.S. Japan’s opponent during the war, and it eventually stopped to be played. After Japan’s loss in the war, baseball in Japan was born again in about 100 days under the new banner of ‘Japan with Sports’. This was the effect of the awareness that baseball of the U.S. was a pure sport that can be used to educate the principle of democracy, the influence of GHQ’s initial policy against Japan in areas of politics, economy, military, and culture. During the process, there was a claim such as ‘Yakyu Democracy’ of Suzuki Sotaro, which emphasizes that the democratization of baseball to regain the original features of baseball that were ‘distorted’ by national control is the precondition of establishing the new ‘Japan with Sports’. In addition, the fact that the supreme commander, MacArthur, threw the first ball and the crown prince participated as a spectator in the away match of San Francisco Seals(1949), a minor league team, that was held in Japan in the cooperation between the governments of the U.S. and Japan was the result of conducting ‘democratization of Japan’ faithfully. In this sense, the away game of San Francisco Seals was the biggest political event that promoted Japan’s ‘democratization’ that was planned during the occupation of the U.S.