Baseball in Japan

Baseball was introduced to Japan in 1872 and is Japan's most popular sport. Seven million Japanese people play baseball, approximately 5% of the total population.

The first professional competitions emerged in the 1920s. The highest level of baseball in Japan is Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), which consists of two leagues, the Central League and the Pacific League, with six teams in each league. High school baseball has a particularly strong public profile and fan base, much like college football and college basketball in the United States; the Japanese High School Baseball Championship ("Summer Kōshien"), which takes place each August, is nationally televised and includes regional champions from each of Japan's 47 prefectures.

In Japanese, baseball is commonly called yakyū (野球), combining the characters for field and ball. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), the atmosphere of Japanese baseball games is less relaxed than in the United States, with fans regularly singing and dancing to team songs. In his 1977 book The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, American writer Robert Whiting wrote, "The Japanese view of life, stressing group identity, cooperation, hard work, respect for age, seniority and 'face' has permeated almost every aspect of the sport. Americans who come to play in Japan quickly realize that Baseball Samurai Style is different."

In Japan, Nippon Professional Baseball players such as Shohei Ohtani, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh are regarded as national stars, and their exceptional performances have boosted baseball's popularity in Japan. All of them received or were approached for the People's Honour Award (国民栄誉賞, Kokumin Eiyoshō) for their achievements and popularity.

Baseball was introduced into Japan in 1859 after the opening of the treaty ports, having been played alongside cricket by American and British expatriates in the foreign settlements until the 20th century. It was introduced as a school sport in 1872 by American Horace Wilson, an English professor at the Kaisei Academy in Tokyo. The first organized adult baseball team, the Shimbashi Athletic Club, was established in 1878.

The Japanese government appointed American oyatoi in order to start a state-inspired modernization process. This involved the education ministry, which made baseball accessible to children by integrating the sport into the physical education curriculum. Japanese students, who returned from studying in the United States captivated by the sport, took government positions. Clubs and private teams such as the Shinbashi Athletic Club, along with high school and college teams, commenced the baseball infrastructure.

At a match played in Yokohama in 1896, a team from Tokyo's Ichikō high school convincingly defeated a team of resident foreigners from the Yokohama Country & Athletic Club. The contemporary Japanese language press lauded the team as national heroes and news of this match greatly contributed to the popularity of baseball as a school sport. Tsuneo Matsudaira in his "Sports and Physical Training in Modern Japan" address to the Japan Society of the UK in London in 1907 related that after the victory, "the game spread, like a fire in a dry field, in summer, all over the country, and some months afterwards, even in children in primary schools in the country far away from Tōkyō were to be seen playing with bats and balls".

Professional baseball in Japan started in the 1920s, but it was not until the Greater Japan Tokyo Baseball Club (大日本東京野球クラブ, Dai-nippon Tōkyō Yakyū Kurabu), a team of all-stars established in 1934 by media mogul Matsutarō Shōriki, that the modern professional game found continued success—especially after Shōriki's club matched up against an American All-Star team that included Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig, and Charlie Gehringer. While prior Japanese all-star contingents had disbanded, Shōriki went pro with this group, playing in an independent league.