Origins of Baseball in Japan

I'm not sure whether this involves the very origins of the Japanese game, but I found it to be interesting nonetheless.

One of the 2002 All Star games was held at Botchan Stadium in Matsuyama. At that time, a man known as Koki Tadaoka (1867-1902) who hailed from Matsuyama was inducted into the Japanese baseball Hall of Fame.

The story told on television was to the effect that Tadaoka, a poet among other things, was one of the pioneers of yakyu. Most importantly, they said, he helped to spread the game among the people. If I remember correctly, they said that this guy first coined the term "yakyu."

Many of his poems were about baseball, and the prose was always signed "Nobooru" (a take on the common boys' name Noboru) using the kanji characters for "yakyu". The first character (which means field or meadow), "ya," can also be read "no"; the second character, "kyu," means ball, the Japanese pronunciation of which is "booru." Therefore yakyu=nobooru=Noboru (a popular name for boys, as I mentioned earlier).

The TV stories went into a lot more detail, and I've forgotten most of it, but there appears to be a good amount of information available in Japanese on the net.

That was such a great story, I spent my lunch hour looking for some of those references on the Net. A quick Google search (in Japanese) revealed quite a few links. From the first page, there were three that really stood out:

- News of the cerimony on the JPBPA site
- A human special story on Tadaoka from Mainichi Interactive
- A documentary on Ahime-ken on TBS with a segment featuring Tadaoka.

And like I said, there are many more (all in Japanese). If any of you students out there are interested in learning Japanese, and love baseball, these could make for some interesting self-lessons in Kanji and culture.

Thanks Torakichi-san for that great story.

I realize that this is an old thread, but I just need to add this.

I believe that the person referred to in the above post is Masaoka Shiki (正岡 子規) the famous haiku poet, not Tadaoka Koki. I think that there was a mistake in translating his name into English. His pen name was Masaoka Noboru (正岡 升).

Gentlemen:

An article written by Akio Nikaido in the Mainichi Shimbun on May 7, 2000, cited a claim by private baseball historian named Masanori Hirota that the first baseball game was played September 30, 1871 -- between foreign residents living in Yokohama and the crew of the U.S. battleship Colorado.

Hope this helps.

Bob Whiting