Remembering Japanese Baseball

Remembering Japanese Baseball PDF Author: Fitts, Robert K.
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809389735
Category : Baseball
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description

Remembering Japanese Baseball

Remembering Japanese Baseball PDF Author: Fitts, Robert K.
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809389735
Category : Baseball
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description


Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer

Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer PDF Author: Bill Staples, Jr.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786485248
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
While the story of the Negro Leagues has been well documented, few baseball fans know about the Japanese American Nisei Leagues, or of their most influential figure, Kenichi Zenimura (1900-1968). A talented player who excelled at all nine positions, Zenimura was also a respected manager and would become the Japanese American community's baseball ambassador. He worked tirelessly to promote the game at home and abroad, leading goodwill trips to Asia, helping to negotiate tours of Japan by Negro League All-Stars and Babe Ruth, and establishing a 32-team league behind the barbed wire of Arizona's Gila River Internment Camp during World War II. This first biography of the "Father of Japanese-American Baseball" delivers a thorough and fascinating account of Zenimura's life.

Baseball Saved Us

Baseball Saved Us PDF Author: Ken Mochizuki
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
ISBN: 1430129824
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
"Author Ken Mochizuki reads his award-winning book. There is some soft background music, and a few gentle sound effects, but the power of the words need little embellishment...This treasure of a book is well-treated in this format." - School Library Journal

Making Japan's National Game

Making Japan's National Game PDF Author: Blair Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781531015312
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Wally Yonamine

Wally Yonamine PDF Author: Robert K. Fitts
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803213816
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Wally Yonamine was both the first Japanese American to play for an NFL franchise and the first American to play professional baseball in Japan after World War II. This is the unlikely story of how a shy young man from the sugar plantations of Maui overcame prejudice to integrate two professional sports in two countries. ø In 1951 the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants chose Yonamine as the first American to play in Japan during the Allied occupation. He entered Japanese baseball when mistrust of Americans was high?and higher still for Japanese Americans whose parents had left the country a generation earlier. Without speaking the language, he helped introduce a hustling style of base running, shaking up the game for both Japanese players and fans. Along the way, Yonamine endured insults, dodged rocks thrown by fans, initiated riots, and was threatened by yakuza (the Japanese mafia). He also won batting titles, was named the 1957 MVP, coached and managed for twenty-five years, and was honored by the emperor of Japan. Overcoming bigotry and hardship on and off the field, Yonamine became a true national hero and a member of Japan?s Baseball Hall of Fame.

Japanese Baseball and Other Stories

Japanese Baseball and Other Stories PDF Author: W. P. Kinsella
Publisher: Saskatoon : Thistledown Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Kinsella weaves his characters into the thrill of the game, be it in Japan, Central America, Canada or the U.S., with a variety of comic, tragic, and mystical results. This collection captures the dazzling wit, compelling insight, and obsession with baseball that have made Kinsella more popular than a ballpark frank.

Issei Baseball

Issei Baseball PDF Author: Robert K. Fitts
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496220870
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Baseball has been called America's true melting pot, a game that unites us as a people. Issei Baseball is the story of the pioneers of Japanese American baseball, Harry Saisho, Ken Kitsuse, Tom Uyeda, Tozan Masko, Kiichi Suzuki, and others--young men who came to the United States to start a new life but found bigotry and discrimination. In 1905 they formed a baseball club in Los Angeles and began playing local amateur teams. Inspired by the Waseda University baseball team's 1905 visit to the West Coast, they became the first Japanese professional baseball club on either side of the Pacific and barnstormed across the American Midwest in 1906 and 1911. Tens of thousands came to see "how the minions of the Mikado played the national pastime." As they played, the Japanese earned the respect of their opponents and fans, breaking down racial stereotypes. Baseball became a bridge between the two cultures, bringing Japanese and Americans together through the shared love of the game. Issei Baseball focuses on the small group of men who formed the first professional and semiprofessional Japanese baseball clubs. These players' story tells the history of early Japanese American baseball, including the placement of Saisho, Kitsuse, and their families in relocation camps during World War II and the Japanese immigrant experience.

Transpacific Field of Dreams

Transpacific Field of Dreams PDF Author: Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807882666
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Baseball has joined America and Japan, even in times of strife, for over 150 years. After the "opening" of Japan by Commodore Perry, Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu explains, baseball was introduced there by American employees of the Japanese government tasked with bringing Western knowledge and technology to the country, and Japanese students in the United States soon became avid players. In the early twentieth century, visiting Japanese warships fielded teams that played against American teams, and a Negro League team arranged tours to Japan. By the 1930s, professional baseball was organized in Japan where it continued to be played during and after World War II; it was even played in Japanese American internment camps in the United States during the war. From early on, Guthrie-Shimizu argues, baseball carried American values to Japan, and by the mid-twentieth century, the sport had become emblematic of Japan's modernization and of America's growing influence in the Pacific world. Guthrie-Shimizu contends that baseball provides unique insight into U.S.-Japanese relations during times of war and peace and, in fact, is central to understanding postwar reconciliation. In telling this often surprising history, Transpacific Field of Dreams shines a light on globalization's unlikely, and at times accidental, participants.

Samurai Shortstop

Samurai Shortstop PDF Author: Alan M. Gratz
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780142410998
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Tokyo, 1890. Toyo is caught up in the competitive world of boarding school, and must prove himself to make the team in a new sport called besuboru. But he grieves for his uncle, a samurai who sacrificed himself for his beliefs, at a time when most of Japan is eager to shed ancient traditions. It's only when his father decides to teach him the way of the samurai that Toyo grows to better understand his uncle and father. And to his surprise, the warrior training guides him to excel at baseball, a sport his father despises as yet another modern Western menace. Toyo searches desperately for a way to prove there is a place for his family's samurai values in modern Japan. Baseball might just be the answer, but will his father ever accept a Western game that stands for everything he despises?

The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers

The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers PDF Author: William W. Kelly
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520971140
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Baseball has been Japan's most popular sport for over a century. The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers analyzes Japanese baseball ethnographically by focusing on a single professional team, the Hanshin Tigers. For over fifty years, the Tigers have been the one of the country’s most watched and talked-about professional baseball teams, second only to their powerful rivals, the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants. Despite a largely losing record, perennial frustration, and infighting among players, the Tigers remain overwhelming sentimental favorites in many parts of the country. This book analyzes the Hanshin Tiger phenomenon, and offers an account of why it has long been so compelling and instructive. Author William Kelly argues that the Tigers represent what he calls a sportsworld —a collective product of the actions of players, coaching staff, management, media, and millions of passionate fans. The team has come to symbolize a powerful counter-narrative to idealized notions of Japanese workplace relations. The Tigers are savored as a melodramatic representation of real corporate life, rife with rivalries and office politics familiar to every Japanese worker. And playing in a historic stadium on the edge of Osaka, they carry the hopes and frustrations of Japan’s second city against the all-powerful capital.