Reddit mentions of Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia (Jerry Malloy Prize)

I was curious as to what the hell I was thinking about, so I did some reading.

The NPB was founded in 1950, but the league was just the JBL (founded in 1936) expanded and reorganized under a different structure. So it's kinda like how GM was technically founded in 2009 but really has a longer history.

Looking at some book excerpts, I still don't think we can credit Americanization. For example, from Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan:

"As the general lack of interest in Japan's first professional team suggests, it was amateur baseball and especially the college leagues and the annual middle-school tournaments that fueled what had become by the 1920s a national obsession with baseball. Even after the successful establishment of a professional league in the late 1930s, amateur baseball and its players remained the primary focus of baseball-related media coverage up through the end of World War II. Throughout the period, newspapers continued to play a central role in the promotion of amateur and later professional baseball, but they were not the only media outlets covering the new national sport, which was quickly surpassing sumo in terms of both coverage and popularity. The 1910s and 1920 saw the emergence of several baseball specialty magazines, as well as baseball-related films. Beginning with the 1927 radio broadcast of the Asahi middle-school tournament at Koshien Stadium, radio coverage of baseball games also became common. Baseball specialty magazines such as Yakyukai, which was first published in 1911, regularly featured photos and fan sections in addition to numerous articles on games, teams, and individual players. Mainstream journals such as Chuo koron and Bungei shunju also gave regular coverage to baseball and its stars."

And from "Taking in a Game: A History of Baseball in Asia":

"The 1931 tour had been a jaw-dropping experience for the U.S. professionals. They played before sellout crowds everywhere. Gates to the ballparks were opened at 6 am for 3 pm games, and fans were standing in line long before dawn. Promoters boasted that people traveled as far as a hundred miles (160 kilometers) to get tickets, and campfires that lit up the Japanese farmland gave credence to the claims. As [Fred] Lieb wrote afterward: 'Unless one has been in Japan, it is difficult to appreciate the tremendous enthusiasm for baseball in the island.' In all, 450,000 Japanese paid to see the barnstorming Americans play in November 1931. That was more fans in a month than seven of the sixteen Major League teams drew during the entire 1931 season. The U.S. professionals pulled more people through the gates in seventeen games in Japan than the Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Browns combined drew in 155 home games that year."

This book actually has an interesting explanation for why baseball became popular in Japan but not in other places. Western team sports evolved roughly into their current forms when the British Empire was still incredibly powerful, so sports like cricket and soccer spread to wherever the British happened to be influential. Japan, however, was not as friendly with the British as they were with America, and so baseball took root.

And this book claims that baseball has been the most popular sport in Japan for over a century, and that the popularity of baseball after World War II is due to the advent of night games and television.

Given all of this - and granted it's a cursory reading - I can't conclude that the Americanization of Japan after World War II is what led to its popularity, because it was already popular before the war.
Regardless, I thank you for giving me a rathole to dive into this weekend.

And this book looks nuts.