The question I’ve been trying to answer since I first became familiar with Japanese baseball in 1984 is how this game became the way it is. It’s an enormous puzzle, and this is one part: How did Japanese baseball become militarized and regimented?

I long suspected that Japan’s first post-feudal leaders, keen to curb democracy and annoyed by the site of college students, the nation’s future elites taking part in drunken riots over baseball might have spurred it to co-opt the sport the way it had other movements whose interested conflicted with the government. But the answer has proved more elusive than that.

Once more, I am indebted to Kochi University Professor of sports history Tetsuya Nakamura for confirming and shaping my understanding of trends in Japanese baseball.

Any mistakes here or over-generalizations here are mine alone.

“Ketsubatto”

This expression “ketsubatto” means being hit in the rear end with a baseball bat, and is widely known among the Japanese public as a common feature of schoolboy baseball.

To look at it now, Japanese amateur baseball is a top-down Social Darwinist nightmare where physical punishment and seniority-based hazing and intimidation is normalized as “part of the game.”

Continue reading Baseball’s age of brutality →