When did baseball begin in Japan? Its date of birth seems to have been pushed back yet again.
It was long thought that baseball was introduced in Japan in 1872 by American professor Horace Wilson, who taught it to his students at Kaisei Academy in Arakawa, Tokyo.
Then last year, Nippon Professional Baseball historian Nobuhisa Ito discovered that sailors on the USS Colorado may have played baseball with some locals in Osaka in January 1871.
But baseball may have actually been first enjoyed on the island nation in the 1860s.
Rob Fitts, a historian and author about the history of Japanese baseball, recently posted about an article he received titled “Shades of the Past: The Introduction of Baseball into Japan.” It was written in 1976 by Harold S. Williams, an Australian who lived in Kobe, Japan, for nearly 70 years until his death in 1987.
There was one sentence in Williams’ article that stuck out to Fitts: “in Kobe, on 4th August, 1869, about eighteen months after the port was opened, The Hiogo News reported: … one evening last week we saw as many as 7 or 8 men playing cricket and a still larger number playing baseball.”
That means baseball would have started in Japan in July 1869, seven years before the National League was founded.
Fitts and his colleagues found that original Hiogo News article, which detailed how the northeast corner of a settlement called the Kobe Concession could be used as a practice ground for baseball and cricket. He also found an 1870 map of the Kobe Concession that displays the approximate location of the ground used for baseball in July 1869.
However, the exact date of the game or the identities of those who played will probably never be known.