Erin

The Japanese American Baseball League (1903)

Baseball has become iconic of American culture, almost as iconic as American style football. I feel that baseball is a good representation of all the sports Americans appreciate, and in turn reflects the concepts and foundations underlying the U.S. as a whole. I feel that appreciating a sport is the best way to appreciate the culture in the country practicing it, and that is exactly what the Japanese intended to do when founding the Japanese American Baseball League.

Baseball was adopted by Japan during the Meiji era in an attempt to bridge the two cultures together. The Japanese understood that baseball was the perfect embodiment of East versus West in the sense that it provided the values such as harmony, perseverance and self restraint that the Japanese tried to follow while still representing the American spirit (Nikkei heritage). Because of this, the Japanese were able to set themselves apart from other immigrants migrating, demonstrating their appreciation for American culture and their capacity to assimilate. Starting the Japanese Baseball League was their way of exhibiting patriotism to not only their home country, but their host country as well hoping to establish a mutual sense of connection and respect among their white counterparts.

However, it seems that the shared enjoyment of this sport made no difference in how the Japanese were treated. They were still faced with hostility, proving a very common misconception of immigrants and assimilation. I have been taught over and over again in Asian studies classes that the dominant society, namely the whites, was hostile towards the immigrants’ inability to assimilate. The model minority myth is actually based on this idea that the attempt to assimilate into the dominant culture would actually change the attitudes toward immigrants. We see in the instance of Japanese baseball that this is clearly not the case. As mentioned before, the Japanese took up baseball as a way to link the two cultures together, hoping to create mutual friendliness between America and Japan. However, because of the disregard for their attempts to assimilate, the Japanese American Baseball league is actually disproving the notion that assimilation equals acceptance.

It has been argued that the Chinese were not accepted because of their lack of willingness to adopt American culture. In actuality, it seems that it isn’t assimilation that Americans want, but rather elimination. The baseball league proves to me that there is nothing that immigrants can do to be accepted. The bringing of new cultures to create a more diverse environment is not appreciated and Americans wanted to keep American purely white.