Coming Home: Portraying Japanese Baseball on the Silver Screen

Chapter 3 examines the long history of baseball films in Japan, a tradition nearly as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself. After a brief survey of the early history of cinema in Japan, a tradition whose history parallels that of the game of baseball chronologically, the study focuses on early shomingeki films and explores how baseball became an important marker of domesticity and middle class respectability in this genre of film in the 1930s. The chapter then examines several pivotal films in the postwar era, examining how baseball was used alternately to perpetuate a national hero in Suzuki Hideo’s Immortal Pitcher (1955) or to chart the corruption and greed surrounding professional baseball as in Kobayashi Masaki’s I Will Buy You (1956). In the 1960s and 1970s, as young filmmakers arose to challenge the dominance of the great postwar filmmakers and to produce often avant-garde and politically charged films that reflected an international challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood films, the baseball film was again adopted as a means to offer that challenge. Ōshima Nagisa’s Ceremonies, in a film that contests the very concept of the baseball film, uses baseball as a metaphor for the Japan’s abandonment of its citizens during the war. The recent splatter comedy baseball films of Yamaguchi Yūdai likewise play with the familiar tropes of Japanese baseball and of the baseball hero as antihero in problematizing the very concept of the baseball film.

Baseball and the Cultural Logic of American Individualism

The 1980s were tumultuous years for the sport that many Americans still call the “national game” or the “national pastime.” For major league baseball, it was a decade marked by increasingly hostile relations between labor and management, resulting in three strikes, including one that interrupted the 1981 season and lasted for fifty days, causing the season to be shortened and many of the year's records to be marked with an asterisk. In 1984, Peter Ueberroth, the man who miraculously made the Los Angeles Olympics turn a profit, was hired as Commissioner of Baseball, and he soon led the owners in a conspiracy to restrict the free-agent market in order to keep players' salaries down. There were a variety of lawsuits brought against major league baseball, not only because of the owners' collusive actions but also because of ostensible racial and gender-based discrimination. And there were scandals over the drug use, sexual misadventures, and gambling habits of prominent players and managers. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, owners' profits were up, players' salaries were up, and attendance at ball games was up. Baseball's prominence in the national imagination was further bolstered by the success of the film version of The Natural (1984), which put an end to the conventional Hollywood wisdom that baseball films are box-office poison and paved the way for a spate of baseball films toward the end of the 1980s, including Bull Durham (1988), Eight Men Out (1988), Stealing Home (1988), Major League (1989), and Field of Dreams (1989). The 1980s gave new meaning to Jacques Barzun's oft-quoted declaration that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.” In his book Take Time for Paradise, A. Bartlett Giamatti, who succeeded Ueberroth as Commissioner of Baseball, rephrased Barzun's insight with double-edged puns that captured the ambivalences of the decade. “I believe that thinking about baseball will tell us a lot about ourselves as a people,” he wrote: “Baseball is part of America's plot, part of America's mysterious, underlying design — the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life.”

Fielding Our Dreams: Rounding Third in Dyersville

While contemporary American sport films seem to be targeting the adolescent audience for a message of empowerment, a smaller group of sport films seems to have reached out to the adult audience with the “preposterous” claim that sport allows us opportunities for personal redemption. Through interviews conducted at the Dyersville, Iowa, site of Fields of Dreams, a critical examination of several contemporary adult baseball films, and analysis of the Pete Rose saga, I hope to show that the opportunity for personal redemption is not only possible but in fact is a primary function of all sport. When asked in Field of Dreams by Shoeless Joe Jackson, “Is this heaven?” Ray Kinsella responds, “No, it’s Iowa.” I maintain that the predominant mythos in contemporary sport is that, indeed, it is heaven.