Over at Far Outliers, Joel has been on a veritable Asian baseball tear, including this little beauty on Koreans in the Japanese league. A tidbit:
In The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, Robert Whiting wrote about the roles foreign players from the United States and Korea played in Japanese baseball. “The American is not the only ‘outsider’ in Japanese baseball, he’s just the most visible,” Whiting observed. “Koreans also fall into the same category. But while the American is merely resented, the Korean is often looked down upon.” Whiting claimed many Koreans born and raised in Japan played baseball because the game offered a way up and through Japan’s strict social hierarchy. Even so, the escape route was only open to those Koreans who suppressed their heritage by assuming Japanese names and trying to pass for natives. Most did it so well that even their Japanese fans were duped. A favorite activity in Japanese ballparks to this day is “Korean spotting”–trying to figure what players, if any, are second-generation Koreans. Whiting quotes another knowledgeable writer who calculated there were so many Korean players in Japan “if you removed them all there wouldn’t be any more Japanese baseball.”
5 Comments
Wow the honor of a first post:)
China still made progress on this issue because before many textbooks and websites in China acknowledged Korea’s claim. Now China succeeded in erasing Korea’s claim inside China and in some other countries. This will be a longstanding issue and in the short term China will slowly push other countries to accept that Korea does not have a claim while never directly pushing its claim. Once Korea’s claim isn’t recognized by a majority of the player countries expect China to press its own claim. Korea needs to be active in making sure other countries don’t forget that Korea does have a claim.
What? The Chinese are now claiming baseball? The other “player countries” had better band together and protect baseball’s integrity! Okay, there are differences between Japanese baseball, on the one hand, and Korean and American baseball, on the other, but these are minor compared to the threat from China.
This just isn’t cricket.
Jeffery Hodges
(Yes, I know the first comment wasn’t intended for this post, but …)
One thing that surprised me in the book on baseball in Asia (with the clever title Taking in a Game) is that China (well, the foreign concession in Shanghai) appears to have been the site of the earliest baseball games in Asia–in the 1870s–and that the game didn’t really die out until the Cultural Revolution began in the 1960s. I think that’s mentioned in an excerpt (scroll down).
*What? The Chinese are now claiming baseball?*
What? Don’t you know? China is the origin of human life on earth.
OOps my earlier comment was not meant for this post- but I wouldn’t be surprised if China claimed Baseball