Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers

by Robert K Fitts

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.

 

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction

344 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2020

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was much more than I thought it would be. I had heard it about on the great This Week in Baseball History podcast and figured it was right up my ally. It's not only about Japan and baseball but also a history on how the US (yet again) treated minorities horribly and were absolute bigots in newspaper accounts.

It was fun to read accounts of events from the early 20th Century even though all of the participants are long dead and there really isn't a lot of information out there. Amazing research went into this, a true labor of love. Not your typical baseball history book as there are no box scores, just detailed (as as he could gather) accounts of games, trips and the people involved.

Funny, back then, baseball was America's game and, wow, did Americans take offense when anyone else tried to play it (why and what was the point...idiots). But now it's football. Yet baseball has remained the most popular sport in Japan over the past century. This book is how it all started.

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the early days of the 20th century, a group of young immigrants formed the first professional and semi-professional Japanese baseball teams on either side of the Pacific. But for more than a century, the story of these trailblazers had been lost to history. Robert K. Fitts joins us to explain how he unearthed the fascinating tale of Harry Saisho, Ken Kitsuse, Tom Uyeda and others who made baseball an integral part of the Japanese-American experience.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was well researched and the topic is interesting, but I didn't find the final product to be particularly compelling. I think the issue lies in the lack of any first-person stories about the players' time on or off the diamond. I have to assume none of the players were much at letter writing and either didn't pass down many stories or the author is suspicious of how such stories are known to change over time. Regardless, the result is a book that lacks enough humanity and ends up only a few notches better than a dry recitation of facts.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It would seem a daunting task to publish a book on such a broad subject about the rise in popularity of Japanese baseball--or more specifically, baseball among Japanese immigrants--but Rob Fitts seems both willing to accept limitations and create a story that's both human and incredibly detailed. Likely there are so many more characters like Harry Saisho, Ken Kitsuse, Tom Uyeda, Tozan Masko, and the rest, who brought and sustained baseball in these small ethnic communities, but the ones he does bring to light gives the reader a feel for what it was like to be Japanese, as well as a ballplayer, a century ago -- the prejudice and resistance from white communities, the language barriers, the lack of proper equipment and training, etc. So I think the decision to be representative, rather than comprehensive was probably the right one.

What also struck me about this book was this wasn't your typical "triumph against all odds" story, either. I knew little about Japanese baseball in the early 20th century, save for the cultural exchanges between American teams and Japanese college teams, and I expected to see some sort of sense of satisfaction as the book comes to a close. But I didn't get that. The truth is, many of the players he writes about weren't very good; you have to laugh after a while that they were often so bad they had to bring in non-Japanese "ringers" to pitch and to catch (and possibly play other positions) just to stay competitive with local amateur squads. There were some flashes of brilliance, but for the most part, a lot of these players and teams and tours were mediocre/break-even at best, failures at worst. Which is partially what made their stories so interesting. Here were a bunch of guys who loved baseball so much, they were willing to put it all on the line just to be able to play full-time, for better or for worse. Also a mark of good research was his ability to separate the legend from the truth. So many marketing materials were based on puffing or outright lies, and the newspapers often reprinted them coupled with their own inaccuracies, and I can't imagine the amount of time it took for him to sift through and question every one of them and figure out what was really going on. And again, these weren't celebrities where that information would have been readily available -- so to be able to look beyond the local coverage where all the primary sources are long dead and find the real story is admirable.

There were a couple parts -- particularly some of the tours -- where he got a little too bogged down in mundane chronology, and while it certainly made sense to throw in a chapter about World War II, it seemed a little out of place in light of the rest of the book, but that could just be me being nitpicky.