Banzai Babe Ruth
Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In November 1934 as the United States and Japan drifted toward war, a team of American League all-stars that included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, future secret agent Moe Berg, and Connie Mack barnstormed across the Land of the Rising Sun. Hundreds of thousands of fans, many waving Japanese and American flags, welcomed the team with shouts of “Banzai! Banzai, Babe Ruth!” The all-stars stayed for a month, playing 18 games, spawning professional baseball in Japan, and spreading goodwill.
Politicians on both sides of the Pacific hoped that the amity generated by the tour—and the two nations’ shared love of the game—could help heal their growing political differences. But the Babe and baseball could not overcome Japan’s growing nationalism, as a bloody coup d’état by young army officers and an assassination attempt by the ultranationalist War Gods Society jeopardized the tour’s success. A tale of international intrigue, espionage, attempted murder, and, of course, baseball, Banzai Babe Ruth is the first detailed account of the doomed attempt to reconcile the United States and Japan through the 1934 All American baseball tour. Robert K. Fitts provides a wonderful story about baseball, nationalism, and American and Japanese cultural history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Formerly trained as an archeologist, Fitts (Remembering Japanese Baseball) turns his discerning eye as a historian on the waning months of 1934 in his new book, as America and Japan marched toward conflict, with a star-studded tour of U.S. baseball pros the only hope to avert a crisis. Wonderfully researched and brought to life in lively prose, he recalls political tensions between the two nations and the rise of Nipponese ultranationalist sentiment; The tour, the brainchild by Shigenori Ikeda, father of Japan's eugenics movement, is concocted to foster goodwill, entertainment for the diehard local fans, and a distraction from a restless military bent on a power grab. The hastily gathered team included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Moe Berg, and Connie Mack on a barnstorming month-long trek through this baseball-crazy land in packed stadiums and crowded venues, the players unaware of the dark anti-Western forces on simmer there. Fitts, a master at depicting all of the key elements in prewar Japanese social and political life, gives the reader valuable insights into the influential moderates trying to hold the line against the army, as well as the American ballplayers taking a victory lap in front of adoring foreign fans. This book is a powerful snapshot of men from two contrasting cultures attempting to stop a slide into aggression.
