The National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, will install an exhibit in July 2025 called “Yakyu-Baseball: The Transpacific Exchange of the Game” that will focus on the historical exchanges through baseball between the United States and Japan. The Hall of Fame president, Josh Rawitch, spoke with the World Baseball Network about the exhibit’s history, content, and focus.
“When the earliest Americans went to Japan and started teaching the game, it started to spread quite quickly, and it has become a part of Japanese culture in the same way that it is here for many, many years,” Rawitch said. “ And any time you reach a level of generational interest in something, that’s when you get what we have in the US and what Japan has, and so it’s the sort of thing that is passed down from parents to kids in Japan the same way it is here.”
The rich history of baseball in Japan originated with Americans teaching them the game over 100 years ago, and Japan has continued to give back with the success of its league, the NPB, and the talented players it has produced, such as Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, Shohei Ohtani, and many more.
The exhibit covers four aspects of Japanese and United States baseball: Japanese teams touring in America, American teams touring in Japan, U.S.-born players playing in Japan, and Japan-born players playing in the U.S. Rawitch said that the idea of creating this exhibit had been discussed for several years. Specifically, “at least two to three years it’s been in discussions and really the last probably six months to a year that we have really been developing the exhibit.”
He mentioned journalists Rob Fitts and Brad Leftin, Head of the World Baseball Classic Jim Small, and United States Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emmanuel as helpful hands in creating this project.
While Rawitch made it clear that he does not have all of the specific details, he was able to share a few specific details about what the exhibit will consist of. Of course, Shohei Ohtani will be a part of the exhibit and has been “very, very generous with the artifacts he’s loaned,” according to Rawitch. “You could literally almost head to toe put together a mannequin of Shohei Ohtani if you wanted to,” he said. The exhibit will cover more than 1,800 square feet, consisting of interactive parts, artifacts, and informative pieces. Rawitch also confirmed that the exhibit will be bilingual, ensuring that Japanese fans can enjoy the Yakyu-Baseball experience.
One player key to the history of Japanese and American baseball is Masanori Murakami, the first Japanese player to ever play in the MLB. When asked what it means for Murakami to be honored in two countries now, Rawitch stated, “I think that in a lot of ways, when we got to Japan, there were some people who really think of (Hideo) Nomo as the first because there was such a large gap and Murikamisan played before a lot of people were alive and realized that there was a Japanese player in the sixties but I think its been really cool to see him in the spotlight again. He had a chance to not only be a part of our news conference in Tokyo, but he came out to the US and was part of a game at the Giants ballpark earlier this year where they highlighted him and talked about his history…” Murakami pitched in parts of two seasons for the San Francisco Giants in 1964 and 1965 before returning to Japan and will now be honored as one of the first exchanges between Japanese and American baseball.
This exhibit comes on the heels of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s work in showcasing the history of the Negro Leagues with exhibits such as ‘The Souls of the Game,” which debuted in recent years. There were many Negro League Tours that took place in Japan, including many in the 1920s and 1930’s. As historians of the game, Rawitch and the Hall of Fame, “…have actually been in touch with a couple people who are kind of the experts on that time period and on those tours…I feel fairly certain that those tours will be represented in some sort of way, whether it’s through artifacts, photographs, or documents, as there has been some really great research done on that, and it’s a huge part of the story we are trying to tell.”
The main message that Rawitch wants fans to take away from the exhibit is the exchange between Japanese and American baseball cultures. “This isn’t just simply about what goes on on the field, but all of the ways that baseball has led to two countries creating friendships, exchanging ideas, and cultural shifts that have happened. All of those are the sorts of things that we want people to take away. That includes the history that goes back to WWII and all the challenges that existed, all the way up to the internment camps of the United States, and up to modern times where you see nearly every day more and more players coming over from Japan, playing here and vice versa so at its core what it comes down to is the word exchange…”
As International baseball continues to grow, this exhibit will continue to showcase the United States and Japan working together with the love of baseball in mind.
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WBN MLB: https://worldbaseball.com/league/mlb/
WBN NPB: https://worldbaseball.com/league/japan/
Photo Credit: National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum President Josh Rawitch reacts during the Hall of Fame Black Baseball Initiative Announcement Press Conference at Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center on Tuesday, December 5, 2023 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Mary DeCicco/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
