When Hidezo ‘H’ Nishikawa (西川英三, Nishikawa Hidezo) stepped out onto a London baseball pitch on 30 May 1937 to play his first game for the Corinthians [1], he became the first Japanese-born baseball player to play in a major league baseball game in England. However, this was far from the first time that British and Japanese players had faced each other on the diamond. This article attempts to tell the story of Nichiei Yakyū (日英野球)—early Japan–England baseball.

The first recorded encounter between British and Japanese baseball players was the storied game between the expatriate Yokohama Cricket & Athletic Club (YC&AC) and the local [Tokyo] First Higher School (第一高等学校)—known by the abbreviated form of its name in Japanese, ‘Ichiko’ (一高)—that took place in Yokohama on 23 May 1896. Ichiko won 29–4. The YC&AC team included two British players, including the cricketer K F Crawford [2].

The 1890s was also the period when baseball had its first brief flowering in the UK [3]. One of the places it took root was Middlesbrough.

It was in the 1890s that Middlesbrough became a port of call for vessels of the Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kiasho (日本郵船株式会社, NYK) shipping line, which led to a small Japanese community, consisting mostly of merchant seamen, becoming established in the city [5]. We know that baseball games took place between members of the community and between members of the community and teams drawn from the crews of NYK ships in port. Although the earliest recorded games were in the 1920s [6], it is hard to believe they did not occur earlier. We do not know of any local participation in these games—excepting the children of the seamen and their English wives—but we have photographic proof of locals at least watching the games [7].

It can also be speculated that the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) sailors who travelled to Newcastle Upon Tyne in this period to crew the cruisers and battleships newly built in Armstrong’s Elswick Shipyard for the IJN [8] played baseball in their leisure time. However, this is not recorded. We do know that IJN and Royal Navy sailors competed in sporting events at HMS Excellent, the naval training base in Portsmouth, in July 1907, but, alas, the only one of the day’s contests named in the press was the tug-of-war—which the Royal Navy contingent lost [9].

There is, however, a documented Nichiei Yakyū connection with the earliest report that we have of the crews of NYK ships playing baseball. This is also the earliest report we have of British and Japanese nationals playing baseball together outside of Japan—although, in circumstances that none of the players would have wished. In the early years of the NYK line’s existence, its ships had British (often Scottish) officers. On 15 June 1904, at the height of the Russo-Japanese War, the NYK liner, the Sado Maru, which had been requisitioned by the Japanese government as a transport, was torpedoed and sunk by the Imperial Russian Navy cruiser Rurik. Amongst the twenty-four survivors pulled from the water and taken into captivity by the Russians were the ship’s four British officers, Captain Anderson, Chief Officer Dring, Chief Engineer Kerr, and First Engineer Carmichael. The men were eventually released a year later as part of a prisoner exchange, but while being held in Vladivostok in the early period of their captivity, they and their Japanese fellow prisoners had ‘played baseball in the prison yard from six to nine every evening’ [10]. As an aside, this may also be the earliest report of a game of baseball being played in Russia.

It is also in this very early period that we see the first Japanese business communities putting down roots in the major ports of the British Empire—Hong Kong, Straits Settlement (Singapore), and Bombay (Mumbai). As early as 1908, the Japanese community in Hong Kong was playing baseball against its compatriots in Canton (Guangdong) in an ‘interport’ series modelled on the games that took place between the expatriate Yokohama and Kobe baseball clubs in Japan. Hong Kong had hosted its earliest baseball game—between cricketers and sailors from the US Navy ship, the Ossipee—as early as 1886 and had its first dedicated baseball club by 1901 [11]. In 1926, a baseball team formed of members of the Japanese community in Bombay (Mumbai) lost to a team from the American community in the city [12]. However, the greatest flowering of Japanese baseball in the British Empire and its Dominions was to take place amongst the sizeable Japanese community in British Columbia, Canada. Alas, that story lies outside the scope of this work, belonging, as it does, to the history of baseball in Canada [13].

To this early period also belongs the story of Britons in US service playing baseball in Japan. For example, Esssex-born Charles Ernest Marsh, the ‘fair-haired youth from Forest Gate’, and a stalwart of the London baseball scene from 1906 until at least 1917, learned his baseball while serving in the US Navy on board the armoured cruiser USS Brooklyn. We have documented games in which Marsh played during the Brooklyn’s extended visit to Australia in the summer of 1901, following its involvement in the Boxer incident in China in 1900; and in 1909 it was reported that Marsh had played in ‘the United States, China, and Japan’. The games in Japan were likely to have been during a port visit by the Brooklyn to Yokohama in 1900 or 1901—although it is not clear if the opposition included local Japanese teams, like Ichiko, or was restricted to ex-patriate teams and the crews of other US warships in harbour [14]. There are likely to be many more such examples yet to be found.

To return to the UK: the situation with the Japanese community in London is similar to that with the Middlesbrough community in that we know it existed and we know that its members played baseball, but the earliest we can positively date these games is to the 1920s.

The Japanese community in London was of a very different character to that in Middlesbrough. The Middlesbrough community was predominantly working class; in contrast, the London Japanese community had a high proportion of high-status individuals—diplomats, high-ranking employees of large Japanese companies, particularly banks, with London offices, and independent businessmen and businesswomen. Their favorite sports were golf and tennis [16].

Reynold’s Illustrated News, 15 June 1930. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

However, staff from Japanese companies based in London did come together to form the ‘London Japanese’ baseball team. Throughout the 1920s, the London Japanese team took part in the exhibition matches organized by the Anglo-American Baseball Association (AABA—despite the name, for much of its existence it was run by a Canadian, Charles Frederick Muirhead) designed to promote the playing of baseball in the UK [17]. This culminated in a five-game series in the summer of 1930 [18]. The match report for one of these games, which supplied the quote at the start of the section, is worth quoting in full here, not least because it includes a team list for the London Japanese team.

A report on another of this series of games gives us the names of more players: A Doi, Y Ohga, and H Hakano. It also gives us different renderings of some of these names—R Shimazaki rather than S Shimazaki, for example, and H Hashiguchi rather than T Hashiguchi. Remarkably, two of the London Japanese players—Shimazaki and Doi—turned out for the London Americans in a game against a US Naval Academy team at Wembley on 19 July 1930, while another Japanese player, not in the London Japanese team lists, “Hata”, played for the London Americans in a game against the crew of the USS Leviathan on 4 July 1930. Alas, trying to identify these players is extremely difficult, not least because of the conflict in initials in the reports. Candidates include Genichi Miyake, a trader for Mitsui, Ryuji Shimazaki, a clerk in the London office of the NYK Line, Tokujiro Tanaka, a manager in the London office of the NYK line, and journalist Kozaburo Koike [20]. Further afield, Japanese students at Cambridge University played for the Cambridge University baseball team that took part in the AABA-organised competitions; four students of Tokyo University were members of the Cambridge team in 1926, and we have the names of the three Japanese students who turned out for the team in 1927: Yamamoto, Sawada, and ‘Ikada’ (Ikeda?). It has to be said that the opposing teams, including a team from Oxford University, consisted largely of American or Canadian nationals (in the Oxford case, Rhodes scholars), either fellow expatriates, as in the case of the London American team, or teams from visiting US Navy (USN) warships. However, both Cambridge and Oxford also played games against teams formed of crews from the Japanese Mercantile Marine in this period [21].

The purpose of the AABA-organised competitions was to promote the game of baseball, and these games played at the Stamford Bridge and Loftus Road football grounds attracted sizeable crowds. The crowning moment of this chapter in the history of Nichiei Yakyū is perhaps the playing of two games by a visiting Meiji University (明治大学) team in the summer of 1929 against the London Americans and a team from the USN light cruiser USS Raleigh. Meiji won both games, beating the London Americans 26–0 and the USN team 6–5 [22]. Although the names of the Meiji players were not reported, we can acquire that information from incoming passenger lists [23].

Meiji University Baseball Team, London, 1930: Akagi Tadashi (20), Herai Makoto (20), Matsumoto Takizo (29), Masu Kaichi (21), Matsuki Kenjiro (22), Kano Harumi (22), Nakamura Mineo (25), Nakamura Kunio (24), Oku Shinichi (22), Sakurai Osamu (23), Sumida Takayoshi (23), Tanabe Takeo (23), Tezuka Sueo (24), Washio Jiro (22), Yasuda Yoshinobu (24), Yonezawa Kiyoshi (23), Zenimura Tatsumi (25); coach: Okada Gensaburo (33); tour leader: Otsuki Juji (41).

China Express and Telegraph, 7 July 1929. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

It is of interest to us here to note that, in the summer of 1929, the London Americans also played a game against the visiting Ranelagh Club of Paris, who played in a Paris-based league that included a team formed of players from the Japanese Embassy in Paris [24]. This begs the question of why did the Japanese Embassy in London not field a baseball team? The somewhat bizarre answer appears to be because they were too busy playing stoolball.

Stoolball, sometimes called an ancestor of baseball (and cricket and rounders), was a bat-and-ball sport that was popular, particularly amongst young women, in rural Sussex, where its heyday was the 18th Century. It received a 20th-century revival thanks to the efforts of William W Grantham, KC, a Sussex Justice of the Peace, who began to encourage the playing of the sport by convalescing soldiers while an officer in the First World War [26].

Grantham’s activities attracted high-level attention and by 1918, games were being played at Lord’s under the patronage of the Duke of Connaught and—critically for our story—the Japanese Ambassador to the Court of St James, Sutemi Chinda (珍田捨巳, Chinda Sutemi) [27]. Although the games in the immediate postwar period were between convalescing soldiers, Grantham began to put together civilian teams for charity matches as the years progressed, forming his own team, which featured both male and female players, the W.W. Grantham XI (the fact that stoolball could be played by mixed teams was one of the reasons for its appeal as an event at charity functions).

Ambassador Chinda continued to be a patron and, by 1920, a secretary at the Japanese embassy, Ken Asaoka, had started to play the game, turning out for a Middle Temple XI in a match against the Inner Temple XI in October 1920 [28]. By the following year, Chinda had moved on, replaced as Ambassador by Gonsuke Hayashi (林権助, Hayashi Gonsuke); however, the new envoy continued his predecessor’s support for stoolball, even playing in a game himself in April 1921 on a visit to Grantham in Sussex [29]. There would also be further direct involvement in the game of staff at the embassy—Miyazaki of the embassy staff, described as a ‘baseball player’, turned out for a game at Battersea Park in June 1923. The following May, Miyazaki played in a game at Lord’s in the same team as a ‘Miss Watanabe’—demonstrating that female members of the Japanese community had begun to get involved. Later that summer, Miyazaki captained a side in a match that included his wife (on the opposing team), a ‘Miss Tsumura’, a ‘Mrs Kawanisha’ (Kawanishi?), and six other Japanese participants: Hachisuka, Muira, Nakajima, Sawada, Shimada, and Wakamatsu [30]. All of this activity built up to the embassy fielding its own team in September 1927 in a game at Lord’s against Grantham’s XI [31].

Sussex Express, 30 November 1927. Image created by British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

The embassy team would continue to turn out for matches at Lord’s and Battersea Park, and travel down for training and exhibition games in Sussex, for at least the next eight years under the patronage of two further ambassadors, representing a major investment in time and human resources [32].

What are we to make of this entanglement with an obscure English precursor to baseball? As the patronage by a Royal Duke and playing of games at Lord’s makes plain, this was a sport that attracted the interests of the highest levels of the British establishment. While there is no reason to think that the interest of the Japanese embassy staff in the sport was not genuine, at the same time, one of the goals of the embassy was to engage with the British establishment, and fielding a stoolball team met this objective admirably. Something that, alas, fielding a baseball team did not.

While the AABA was organizing large-scale events like the Meiji University series and the Japanese embassy was playing stoolball, elsewhere in London, in the 1920s, amateur baseball teams formed of local players were testing their mettle against ‘groups of Japanese seamen berthed in the Royal Docks’ [33], underscoring once more, the significant role played by teams formed of crews from the ships of the Japanese Mercantile Marine, particularly, the NYK line, in helping English teams learn the finer points of the game. Arguably, the most impactful of these games took place in Liverpool in the early years of the following decade.

The games between Liverpool baseball teams and teams formed of crews from two ships of the NYK line belong to a period when there was a concerted effort by British baseball interests to take advantage of the existence of teams formed of the crews of ships of the Japanese Mercantile Marine (principally, as in Middlesbrough, NYK line ships) to promote the game in the UK. Those interests were John Moores, the Littlewoods Pools tycoon, and the National Baseball Association (NBA), which Moores funded and chaired. Moores and the NBA were intent on establishing professional baseball leagues based on the ‘American Code’ in the UK. As Liverpool was where Littlewoods had its headquarters, it was in this port city that the NBA sought to establish its first league [35].

There was already a baseball league based on the rival ‘English’ (AKA ‘Welsh’ or ‘British’) code operating in the city under the auspices of the English Baseball Association (EBA) in this period. Moores and the NBA set out to upstage the EBA by putting on exhibition matches between local teams and touring American teams, and, critically, for the story of Nichiei Yakyū, teams formed of crews from ships of the Japanese Mercantile Marine. The first of the latter—billed as the first ‘ever in Liverpool played under 100% American rules’—was played in the summer of 1933 and featured a team called the Liverpool Amateurs in a match against the crew of the Lima Maru, an NYK cargo–passenger liner that called at Liverpool on a regular basis. This was followed by a second game that same summer between the Amateurs and the crew of a second NYK cargo–passenger liner, the Toyooka Maru [36]. The Amateurs lost the first game 12–9 but won the second 16–10 [37]. There would be further annual games between Liverpool teams (at least one of which would be billed as ‘England’) and the crew of the Lima Maru in the next three years. All five of these games received considerable write-ups, including photographs of the Lima Maru players, in the local press [38]. There were even team lists.

By 1936, the NBA had professional leagues across the North-West and Yorkshire and had just launched a professional league in London. The NYK teams had fulfilled their purpose. However, there were other, external reasons, why, from this date, we see a tailing off of both reports of baseball games between local teams and NYK line teams and reports of stoolball games featuring the Japanese embassy.

The Empire of Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933 in protest at Western criticism of its seizure of Manchuria. That year also marked the start of a trade war between the Western Powers and Japan, particularly in the field of textiles [40], triggered by uncertainties brought on by the start of the Great Depression. Things came to a head with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in the summer of 1937 and came to a fever pitch with the Nanjing massacre later that year.

South London Observer, 30 July 1937. Image created by British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

This was the background to the arrival of Hidezo ‘H’ Nishikawa in Britain in the Spring of 1937. He had travelled to the UK for an extended stay with his brother and his family, but would soon decide to put his decade-long experience of playing baseball to use playing for first the Corinthians and then the Romford Wasps in the NBA’s London leagues. He would also play for an All-London team against a visiting US amateur team and, very briefly, play in the short-lived International Baseball League in the summer of 1938. His story, I tell elsewhere [41].

In the context of Nichiei Yakyū, Hidezo ‘H’ Nishikawa’s story is the culmination of the decades-long interaction between Japanese and UK players, when—however briefly—it shifted from the amateur to the professional, from Japanese teams aiding in the growth of the English game to a Japanese-born player becoming fully part of the English game. It would be fitting to end this article there, however, there is one last curious element of Nichiei Yakyū to explore. In Hidezo ‘H’ Nishikawa, we have a Japanese-born player playing in the English game in the 1930s. What about the reverse? Was there an English-born player playing in the Japanese game in this period?

‘Bailey’ was ‘J Bailey’, a pitcher for the Birmingham amateur team the Birmingham Pirates, a role he held from 1937 until at least 1940 [43]. Alas, that is as much as I have been able to find out about him to date. In regards to the statement that he played a lot of baseball in Japan and was picked to play against a touring American League team: By the 1920s, the touring US teams that played in Japan had long since shifted from playing against expatriate teams like the YC&C to playing against Japanese varsity, works, and semipro teams [44]. Are we to understand, then, from this description that Bailey played for a Japanese team? If true, this would also better fit the description ‘a lot of first-class baseball’ than playing for an expatriate team. However, there is no record that I can find of a ‘Bailey’ playing for a Japanese team in this period. Of course, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For now, the identity of ‘J Bailey’ and his exact role in the story of Nichiei Yakyū must remain a mystery. In that respect, the story is not over.

Acknowledgments: I would like to that Andrew Taylor of the Folkestone Baseball Chronicle for useful discussions and encouragment.

Jamie Barras, December 2024