Beginning in 1853 with Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan and the forced opening of the insular nation to foreign trade and influence, many forward-looking Japanese desired to gain equal footing with the Western powers. Liberal intellectuals, including Fukuzawa Yukichi, believed in the inevitability and value of “progress” toward a state of “civilization” (1). It was a primary goal of Japan in the early Meiji period to assert its cultural equality with the Western nations, many of which had taken advantage of Japan’s apparent lack of development to impose “unequal treaties” on the nation. One visible sign of a modern, developed nation, as it turned out, came to be the prevalence of organized sports. Donald Roden writes: “While sport was gaining recognition as a symbol of national strength and elitist pretension in late nineteenth-century England and America, the absence of sport in any foreign land could be interpreted, conversely, as a sure signal of cultural weakness and even racial inferiority” (2). Japanese leaders hoped to leverage the rapid development of baseball in the nation to assert cultural similarity and equality with Western nations. The Western nations had indicated that they would not revise the unequal treaties until Japan modernized sufficiently, and baseball emerged as a form of diplomacy in this regard. The development of the Western sport was capable of influencing foreign views of Japan and convincing Westerners that Japan was well on the path to modernization: “Baseball, like other sports, appears to have been the beneficiary of a surge in nationalistic sentiment aroused by the campaign to revise the ‘unequal’ treaties and to protect Japanese interests in Korea” (3).

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As schools began to develop reputable baseball clubs in the 1890s, the club of the First Higher School of Tokyo (better known as Ichikō) emerged as the most formidable. In fact, the club boasted a near-perfect record in intercollegiate competition until 1904 (4). At the same time, Americans at the Yokohama Athletic Club formed a baseball club and hosted numerous games, but all Japanese were forbidden to enter their baseball park. Starting in 1891, the Ichikō team reached out many times to the Yokohama Club, challenging it to an “international match” (kokusai shiai) (5). The response from Yokohama was negative for five years, for “to engage the Ichikō baseball team on the athletic field was to admit that the students were, in effect, cultural equals” (6). Ultimately, the Yokohama club accepted the challenge and arranged a game with the Ichikō students in May 1896. It would be the first-ever official baseball game between Japanese and American teams, and its outcome had the potential to shape the image of Japan in the international eye.

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The result of the game was conclusive: the Ichikō team completely dominated its Yokohama counterpart, winning 29-4. Such a blowout was a significant victory for the Japanese people in their struggle for international equality, as they displayed superiority over Americans in a very Western competition. Baseball served as an instrument for the rectification of the Japanese national image on the international stage: “What excited [the Japanese] . . . was the possibility that excellence in America's ‘national game,’ demonstrated in competition with American teams, would compel Westerners to reconsider fictitious stereotypes about the unmanly Japanese” (7). The members of the Yokohama team, their pride wounded by being defeated at their “national pastime,” challenged the Ichikō club to two subsequent games, which they lost 32-9 and 22-6. From 1896 to 1904, the Ichikō club faced off against American teams over a dozen times and lost only one of those contests (8).

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The success of the Ichikō team garnered national attention and recognition, as the Japanese banded together behind the young men who embodied national pride and modern excellence. There existed a firm belief that the humiliating legacy of the unequal settlements with Western powers could never be fully erased without some form of retribution, and baseball was ideally suited for the task. For the Japanese populace, “Winning a game against a proud foreign team produced all of the glory of a military victory with few of the risks” (9). Several years later, in the mid-1900s, there emerged a US-Japanese baseball fraternity, even during a time of fraught relations between the two countries due to the humiliating terms of the Portsmouth Treaty brokered by President Teddy Roosevelt (10). Japan's enthusiastic acceptance of baseball gave Americans the feeling of having a special relationship with the Japanese. Americans felt that Japan was "fertile soil" for American values, and as a result, their perception of the nation inched closer to one of mutual respect and equality (11). Baseball had succeeded as a national game, inspiring greater equality between Japan and the United States and reminding the world of the modern sophistication and excellence of the Japanese people.