Samuel O. Regalado. Nikkei Baseball

Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka (Dice-K), and Yu Darvish are names familiar to fans of Major League Baseball; they are imported stars from the Japanese professional leagues. Less familiar are Frank Fukuda and Kenichi Zenimura or Japanese Americans Ryan Kurosaki, Lenn Sakata, and Don Wakamatsu. These lesser-known figures represent another historical trajectory: not of the importation of ballplayers from across the Pacific as part of the major leagues' global turn, but rather of the development of Japanese American or Nikkei baseball. Samuel O. Regalado, having previously written on the experience of Latino players in the major leagues, examines the understudied history of Japanese American baseball in his new book. The product of over a decade of research, Regalado's work explores the story of the Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants) who carried baseball as part of their national culture in their migration to the United States and shared the sport with the Nisei (second generation) and subsequent generations. The book's seven chapters analyze the meanings those of Japanese ancestry grafted onto baseball, specifically how some Issei envisioned the sport as a “bridge” between Japanese and American cultures and as a potential vehicle for assimilation or, at a minimum, social acceptance. The story that emerges is one of a pastime shared by Japanese and Americans and of how racialized ideas about difference worked to place those of Japanese ancestry on the wrong side of America's color line on and off the playing field from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth century.

Culture of the United States · Economic history · Immigration · League · Political science · Sociology · American Sports and Literature · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law