ABSTRACT
When Westerners arrived in late nineteenth-century Japan, they found a rich and varied ludic culture with more or less familiar sports (like archery) and exotically unfamiliar ones (like sumo wrestling). Westerners brought with them their own sports, which were added to the mix of indigenous pastimes. Diffusion of Western sports like athletics and baseball took two major forms. There was direct transmission from British and American educators to their students and from French and German military personnel to the men whom they trained. In this fashion, ballgames spread through private universities like Keiô, Waseda, and Doshisha while fencing and skiing became popular among army officers. There was also indirect transmission as Japan's modernizing elites began to emulate Westerners whom they observed at play.
