Besoboru

“Baseball is perfect for us. If the Americans hadn’t invented it, we would have.” - Japanese writer, quoted in “Take Me Out to the Besoboru Game”

Baseball was introduced to Japan at the start of the Meiji Period (1867-1912) by Horace Wilson, a young American history and English teacher. As Japan struggled to emerge from three centuries of feudal isolationism, Wilson taught his students at Tokyo’s Kaisei Gakko the rudiments of his country’s national pastime.

The sport quickly caught the spirit of the Japanese people: by 1905, college baseball was Japan’s number one sport. Professional teams were instituted in 1935, and now every year twenty million fans faithfully troop out to the ballpark and cheer on the Yakult Swallows, the Taiyo Whales, the Nippon Ham Fighters, and the Hiroshima Carp, among others. Japan has been baseball crazy for over a hundred years.