Research: Japanese Ballers Parade, NY, 1911
Posted by Rob Ketcherside in Articles![Japan (Waseda Ball Team) in N.Y. 4th of July Parade [1911 Jul. 4]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2277/2163697716_9c3cda2544.jpg "Japan (Waseda Ball Team) in N.Y. 4th of July Parade (LOC)")
Japan (Waseda Ball Team) in N.Y. 4th of July Parade (LOC), 1911
Library of Congress: LC-B2-2269-4
My first research and comments were on Japan-related photos of the Library of Congress.
LC already had the date, location, etc. My question was, what the heck was a Japanese baseball team doing in New York in 1911??
The New York Times mentioned several games in New York and Chicago around this time.
I found the official Waseda Baseball Team website’s history page, which says that this was their second tour of the US, and ended 17 victories, 36 losses, one cancellation. The trip lasted from March 28th until August 17th.
Digging around, I found that there were only a few (college) teams in Japan, so they often hosted international teams and traveled to play. I’d like to understand exactly how this counted as school credit … were they really learning English? Touring businesses and factories?
For background I read about baseball history on the National Diet Library site. I found that it was controversial in Japan at the time. The rivalry between Waseda and Keio universities led to vicious, open threats. In August when the Waseda team returned, an historic editorial was printed by Nitobe Inazo, comparing baseball’s deceit — the pitcher trying to trick the batter — to picking pockets. Inazo preferred the manliness and honesty of rugby. It took a while for baseball to clean up its image and become popular in Japan.
Rob Ketcherside has been contributing research pieces on the Internet since 1996, and has recently been doing independent research to add to the information available in photographs in The Commons. Originally published in the Flickr Commons group and on Rob’s blog, http://www.zombiezodiac.com/rob/.Tags: Library of Congress, research
January 6th, 2009 at 1:10 am
Terrific research!
Japan is so renowned as a baseball powerhouse that it is difficult to believe that the sport was ever considered “unmanly” within its borders.
January 6th, 2009 at 1:26 am
[...] indico: to proclaim, make publicly knowncommons: flickr.com/commons « Curious Photo Research: Japanese Ballers Parade, NY, 1911 [...]
January 7th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
[...] Shelley Bernstein, plus examples of members’ choices from the collections, group member research into an individual photograph, then and now subcuration, and cross-Commons mash-ups – just a [...]
January 7th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
striatic: I agree… you can be the one to tell Ichiro he’s not manly haha.
January 7th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Rob: yes .. and i wonder if anyone in new york at the time thought that that a japanese player like Hideki Matsui would have the potential to play for a team like the Yankees.
even though i don’t think the Yankees were officially named that in 1911.
January 8th, 2009 at 3:05 am
striatic: I wonder if Matsui has been in a parade in NY… maybe someone can convince someone to put him (and/or any other Japanese players with the Yankees and Mets) in the 4th of July parade in 2011??
January 8th, 2009 at 3:22 am
“100 years of japanese baseball in america”
that’d be great. : ]
January 9th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I am a former Waseda Kokusaibu student and send a lot of stuff over to the uniwatchblog.com website on Japanese baseball. In 1996, I met a Japanese sportswriter who also was a Waseda grad and he was doing a story on the 1905 Waseda team that came to the West Coast.
He gave me his complete list of columns on that team after he had published them. I even helped him for a couple of days in San Francisco and even seeing the Russo-Japanese War in the San Francisco papers of those days were interesting. We found some great team shots that were in the papers of the trip.
I have to say this is a surprising shot and great find.
Actually there are more than 100 years of Japanese baseball in America, which would have been 2005.
January 9th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
@Jeremy_Brahm: Thanks for that extra information! Was his story published as a book, or in a paper or magazine?
This photo is from the Bain News Service collection of the Library of Congress. As I’ve been digging for information about some of the photos, I’ve realized that most newspaper databases are text only – the searchable portion as well as the pdf or tiff output. I’m starting to wonder if there’s a way to find out which articles had photos associated with them. In the context of the Bain photos, it would be great just to know what papers they ran in, or if they never were picked up by a paper.
January 9th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Jeremy: i suppose it’d have to be 100 years of Japanese baseball in New york City then.
: ]
Rob: sounds like a very good research project. one thing that i find lacking with many uploads to The Commons is figuring out why they were initially created. taken for archives? books? personal use? newspaper publication?
if newspapers, what were the corresponding stories, and so on.
just a better idea of the *reason* the images were originally created.
April 21st, 2009 at 1:29 am
The articles that the sportswriter wrote were part of a series that he wrote in 1996 for publication in 1997 for the Nishi Nippon Shimbun. It was very successful and they asked him to update it for the 100th anniversary in 2005.
I have a copy of the original, including some of the photos of the 1905 Waseda team and their travels.