ABSTRACT
This chapter examines baseball's early history when the metaphorical amalgamation of baseball and American virtues began. Baseball in US-Japanese relations has attained many of the key attributes of a shared font of soft power. The first notable instance in which the deployment of this soft power resource intersected with hard power calculations by the governments took place in the fall of 1908. As the diplomatic and military relationship between the two governments underwent a series of cooling, souring, and inflaming through this period, baseball could not help being sucked into a maelstrom of hard power considerations. Baseball's amazingly swift postwar reinstatement was also a product of astute lobbying and political entrepreneurship by the holdovers from the prewar Japanese professional baseball league. In the case of the Philippines, the first locals to adopt baseball were laborers on the US Army bases, and the sport became a favorite pastime of Filipino children in public schools established under US colonial rule.
