Although a bit old by now, this is still the only English book-length treatment of the history of baseball in Asia. A number of anthologies, such as Baseball Without Borders or Diamonds Around the Globe, cover the development of baseball within the national borders of single countries, including most of those reviewed here, but none of them cover Asia as a region. Unfortunately, Reaves does not either. It seems he tires, but for whatever reason – demands of the publisher, requirements of his thesis adviser, or difficulty in conceptualizing the approach – he falls back on a country-by-country review. The manuscript began life as a PhD thesis in Philosophy, a field not known for engaging with sport. Those disinterested in or averse to discussions on the nature of existence, knowledge, or ethics need not worry; there is nothing of this in Reaves’ book (suggesting the University of Hong Kong has a rather broad conception of philosophy).
Taking in a Game opens promisingly with a 12-page timeline of Asian baseball history, suggesting Reaves might be presenting a story organized around themes woven in and out of time and place. The content page reveals otherwise, but before starting out on his tour of nations, Reaves addresses the outsize role of Japan. As the first Asian country to fight and win a war against a western imperialist power, Japan was in the early years of the 20th century regarded by many Asians as a model of development. Reaves cites Guttman’s theory of imitation as a possible explanation for the spread of baseball across Asia, the idea being that weaker, less-developed countries often admire and mimic many of the symbols and forms of the stronger and more well-developed. At least as regards baseball in Asia, imitation does not seem to have been sufficient for the long-term health of the game. Presently the institutional strength of baseball is greatest in those countries that experienced an extended Japanese occupation, notably Korea (35 years) and Taiwan (50 years).
Baseball was indisputably introduced to the region by American missionaries, sailors, and merchants, and while the form of the game has remained much the same as played elsewhere, the Japanese infused it with an ethos that might be considered East Asian (rather than specifically Japanese). Reaves describes this conception as one in which “the emphasis is on devotion to the game as an ideal, not recreation; a reverence for hierarchical relationships among coaches and players; a priority of team over self – playing for the name on the front of the jersey instead of the name on the back.” Baseball is in many respects engaged in as one might in martial arts, with all the forms of reverence and respect for which those are known, and as a means of not only learning how to develop one’s body, but also of cultivating character or virtue.
Reaves then launches his tour of Asian baseball history in China, presumably because the earliest records of the game in Asia are found here. As published English accounts of Chinese baseball are still somewhat rare, Taking in a Game is perhaps most valuable for the information collected in this chapter. I include a summary of Reaves' presentation with the caveat that his chapter on Taiwan contains disputable information. His sources on China may bear a second look.
He begins with an account of the Chinese education mission of 1872, a program through which Chinese youth were sent to the US to acquire “modern” education. The ostensible purpose was for these young men to acquire the knowledge and skills to aid in China’s development, as well as to fend off foreign economic, political, and military domination. To the chagrin of conservatives not interested in aping foreigners, many of these young men adapted too quickly, abandoning their national dress and hair styles and wasting time on the frivolous pursuit of baseball. The conservatives had the political clout to have the program cancelled in 1881, but a number of these young men went on to assume important government posts and to perhaps spread the game of baseball on their return to China.
There is even earlier reference to baseball in China, but less is known about it than the young scholar’s program. A book published in 1936 in edition of only 1001 copies by the American University Club of Shanghai contains a chapter on American missionary William Henry Boone. Through this description, written by a Princeton graduate presumably in residence in Shanghai, we learn of the existence of a Shanghai Baseball Club, of which Boone was a member. Corroborating evidence of the existence of this club comes from records of loans made by members of the foreign community to the baseball club for the construction and maintenance of a baseball field. Apart from this, though, little is said of baseball in 19th century expat accounts of life in China, suggesting its less than widespread appeal to Chinese or foreigners.
Shanghai was China’s expatriate hub and the center of Chinese baseball life. In the early years of the 20th century, a number of clubs were formed, including those at St John’s University and the YMCA, which played what is considered the first all-Chinese game in 1905. An eight-club league based in the city is mentioned in a press report of 1912, the same year a US magazine, Leslie’s Weekly, published a feature on the growth of baseball in China. A year later baseball leagues were reported operating in five other provinces, in 1914 baseball was added to the second National Sports Games in Beijing, and in 1915 China’s team finished second in the pan-Asian Far Eastern Games. A number of US barnstorming tours included China in their Asian itineraries, and the later prewar years were dominated by the Shanghai Pandas, a team put together by a young man who learned baseball while studying in Japan. Liang Fuch survived the war and the revolution, during which time baseball is reported to have been played among Chinese soldiers, and went on to teach the game to the Liberation Army, winners of the National Games of 1956. Three years later over thirty teams were fielded for the first New China Baseball Tournament, but with the launch of the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution, baseball again fell into decline. It was revived in the mid-70’s, a period of opening and rapprochement, with the construction of a stadium and a series of contests between Chinese and Japanese teams. Reaves’ account is too early for the 2002 founding of the Chinese Baseball League, which continues to operate today as a two division, ten-team league.
The following two chapters are ostensibly about Japan, but the cast of characters is largely North American. Chapter Four covers the barnstorming prewar years in which any number of US teams toured Japan to play against the locals. The chapter is uneven in its coverage, but that may be because sources favor one story over another. Reaves includes an extended account of the tour of the all-female Philadelphia Bobbies, for example, but only a meager one-sentence mention of the tour of the Royal Giants, late 1920s Negro League champions. Chapter Five covers the postwar years and some of the political maneuvering by the Occupation government to revive and promote baseball. Reaves argues that the prewar tours were influential in cementing baseball’s place in Japanese culture, implying that in their absence baseball may have withered. He argues, as well, that baseball was central to Japan’s development and opening to the world as a vehicle for expressing Japanese values in a way that allowed measurement against outsiders. Beating the Americans at baseball, in other words, was more than an exercise in superior baseball skills, but superior human values. Would something so valuable, into which so many had invested so much, simply have withered in the absence of a parade of US teams? The postwar period suggests that Japanese were happy to continue the game on their own terms in their own leagues and without any need for regular competition against outsiders. A further theme developed across these two chapters is the hope of American promoters – raised, and then lost – that a shared passion for baseball might help Japan and America find ways to interact and peacefully settle disputes.
Reaves opens his chapter on the Philippines with an extended introduction featuring a somewhat minor character, a Colonel in the US Army who before being stationed to the Philippines worked for the Agricultural Department in the Arctic, where he participated in the Whaleman’s Pennant of 1894. Reaves’ retelling is presumably cribbed from the Colonel's own published account in Harper’s magazine and, while certainly amusing, has no real reason for appearing in a chapter on baseball in the Philippines apart from Funston being stationed in that country at one point in his career (during which he presumably played a game or two of baseball on those islands). The game arrived in the Philippines much as it had elsewhere, as the pastime of US soldiers and merchants, from whom the locals learned and disseminated the game amongst themselves. Reaves claims the first Filipino players were workers on US military bases, who benefited from being able to regularly observe games, to receive coaching from experienced players, and to have access to equipment such as bats, gloves, and balls. While Reaves notes a preference for light skin among the upper classes’ reticence to engage with the game, the reasons for baseball’s wild spread are not entirely clear. Reaves cites a Filipino writer on the theatrical nature of Filipino culture and the role of baseball in providing a stage for enacting rural drama. He cites another writer on the spread of sport at this time as correlative to the growth of competition between localities. Baseball was perhaps useful in shaping local and regional identities, particularly in contrast to the new foreign occupiers.
The game grew to be hugely popular. Filipino teams were the only serious contenders to Japan, winning five of six Far Eastern baseball titles from 1915 to 1925. Barnstorming North American teams regularly included the Philippines in the Asian tours, and a Filipino team even toured the US in 1913. But today anyone with a passing knowledge of Filipino culture knows the country’s most popular game is basketball. Unlike Taiwan and Korea, where baseball survived and reemerged following World War II, in the Philippines it fairly withered. Reaves suggests several overlapping factors, including rapid postwar urbanization and the lack of space for playing baseball. (That the game continues to thrive in many Latin American cities suggests overcrowding is at best a mitigating circumstance.) Of greater importance to Reaves is the loss of US military bases, which in effect functioned as a minor league system producing much of the island’s best talent. Bases offered the opportunity to play regularly, to receive expert guidance, and to have access to equipment. When the Americans left, there was no institution to step in to fill that role. As Filipino allegiance switched from one American game to another, Reaves argues that it is difficult to posit a move to basketball as being caused by anti-colonial sentiment, and may in fact be evidence of a continuing imitation effect. (Antolihao develops this idea further in a 2012 paper, suggesting basketball’s rise to prominence had much to do with its early adoption and association with Filipino college students, who became national models of imitation. Concomitantly, baseball was considered by many Filipinos a rural pastime, perhaps associated with the panoply of rural deficiencies, such as poverty and illiteracy.) Reaves concludes that in the end basketball is less expensive and easier to play than baseball.
By the time we get to the chapter on Korea, the value of a region-wide history focusing on trends, rather than nationalities, is obvious. Once more, the narrative begins with US missionaries and merchants introducing baseball into another Asian outpost. This is followed by a second wave of baseball-loving imperialists, the Japanese, who over the course of a forty-year occupation imprint their brand of ball on the Koreans. Among the more interesting wrinkles in the Korean story is a parallel with Cuba, which was introduced to baseball by students returning to the island after studies in the US. While missionary sponsored contests are the first documented in Korea, the turning point in baseball becoming a Korean game, according to Reaves, is the formation in 1909 of a team composed of university students home for the holidays from studies in Japan that thrashed a number of foreign missionary teams. In this way, baseball became in Korea what it had become in other places around the world, a means for contesting peaceably with occupiers. The remainder of the chapter feels like a mixed bag. The predominate theme is the heavy influence of politics in Korean baseball, but given how the game has been politically exploited elsewhere, even in the US, it seems a matter of small degree to claim Korea as an outsized example. Reaves also touches on violence in Korean culture and its manifestation in baseball, but the treatment is superficial and no explanation is provided to explain why this might be so. One final theme developed in this chapter that could be treated more broadly and in-depth is the reluctance to commercialize the game for fear of sullying its purity. Korea didn’t have a professional league until 1981, but the Japanese had the same debate in the 1930s when it established its own league. Taiwan does the same in the 1990s. Here we see clearly across countries and across time how East Asian societies value the game as something ennobling, as an endeavor meant to hone values beyond the ability to hit or throw a ball.
Unlike other countries of East Asia, baseball was introduced to Taiwan not by US merchants or missionaries, but by the Japanese, who controlled the island for fifty years between 1895 to 1945. Much the same themes are present here as in Korea (the game’s introduction by foreigners, the popularity of youth baseball, the game as a vehicle for instilling values, the late arrival of a professional league, manipulation of the game for political ends), though one major difference impacting Taiwan’s development as a baseball nation (that Reaves doesn’t much explore) is the island’s more diverse ethnic mix, including Polynesian aborigines, prerevolutionary Chinese, and the anticommunist forces of the postwar period. While baseball survived WWII and the departure of Japan, it appears to have been largely a people’s game until the late 1960s when a rural youth club played what was believed to be Japan’s Little League champions. (According to Taiwanese scholar Yu, the team was in fact an all-star youth squad, not the championship team, but the myth of the locals defeating world champions has persisted – perhaps in part to scholars such as Reaves). The Red Dragons’ victory over the former colonial master touched off mass enthusiasm for the game, leading to Taiwan’s regional and world domination of youth baseball, with Taiwanese teams capturing ten Little League championships in the fourteen years from 1969 to 1982. Reaves reports on the suspicions of Little League officials about Taiwan’s bending of the rules regarding recruitment of teams (namely, older players taken from all parts of the island, rather than from single school districts), but accepts the League’s conclusions that no improprieties were discovered. (For more on how the Taiwanese in fact manipulated the rules, see Yu’s Playing in Isolation.) Professional baseball came to the islands in the early 1990s and got off to a roaring start before being beset by the gambling interests of organized crime. It has since recovered and a number of Taiwanese players play now in Japan and the US professional leagues.
The concluding chapter is somewhat embarrassing, beginning with this impossible assertion:
Surely, baseball has a soul. Nothing so beautiful exist without a soul. Surely, too, the soul of Asian baseball lives in Japan.
And closing with a florid flourish:
The soul of Asian baseball lives in Japan--and in Korea, the Philippines, China, and Taiwan. It lives everywhere with anyone who ever loved the smell of leather and sweat or felt a heart beat to the rhythm of a hot wooden bat, everyone who ever marveled at the majesty of a cream-colored ball streaking through new-mown grass or arcing against a painfully blue sky.
With nothing much of substance in between.
If you’re new to the topic, skip Taking in a Game and start with Whiting’s two seminal titles on Japan (Chrysanthemum and the Bat, and You Gotta Have Wa) , both referenced and lauded by Reaves. (There is a third published after Reaves' book, also worth checking out -- The Samurai Way of Baseball.) Whiting covers all the main themes in an engaging and entertaining style that provides a solid grounding in Japanese baseball, after which further explorations in separate texts on baseball in other Asian countries (of which there are still few) can be made.
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