TOKYO: After more than a century, the story of the arrival of baseball in Japan is about to be revised.

Nobuhisa Ito, 60, a historian of the Nippon Professional Baseball Organization, or NPB, has been researching a new theory about the exact year when baseball was introduced to Japan.

The long-accepted idea was that teacher Horace Wilson from the United States taught baseball to his students, at a school that was a forerunner to the University of Tokyo, in 1872.

Ito, however, thinks that US military members are likely to have taught baseball to Japanese soldiers a year before Wilson showed it to his students.

In 2017, Ito discovered a letter from a former player of early adult baseball to the NPB, which was received about a half century before.

Ito was surprised, because the letter said that US sailors had a baseball game with Japanese in the early part of the Meiji period (1868-1912) in a foreign settlement in Osaka, western Japan.

After interviewing people involved, Ito presented his study in April this year at an academic conference at the US National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown in the state of New York.

By researching sailing journals and other documents of the time, Ito confirmed that the US cruiser Colorado anchored in Kobe, western Japan, in January 1871 and that its captain and sailors visited the army garrison of Osaka, which was inside Osaka Castle.

He identified the exact location of the game as the Kawaguchi settlement at Osaka’s marine gateway at that time and concluded that the first Japanese to play baseball were soldiers of the Osaka garrison, who guarded the settlement.

The historian cannot hide his excitement not only about the earlier origins of Japanese baseball but also about the fact that soldiers of the Osaka garrison used to be feudal samurai warriors.

“Samurai were the first Japanese to play baseball, and Japan’s national baseball team is nicknamed ‘Samurai Japan.’ I feel some kind of connection between them,” Ito said.

Ito plans to continue his research, looking for bereaved family members of the Colorado crew.

JIJI Press