I happened across this discussion (from three years ago) of the first Japanese baseball player to play professionally in the United States. No, it wasn’t Hideo Nomo; nor was it Masanori Murakami, the San Francisco Giants’ reliever from the 1960s. We’re not talking first major league player, or even first minor leaguer; but first professional, period.
Apparently it was a man named Goro Mikami. To quote from one of the posts :
“He was from Kofu, Yamanashi, and played on a university team that toured the U.S. He liked his time in the U.S., and enrolled at a university in the U.S. where he could continue to play ball as well as study.”
This post goes on to note that his nickname in the U.S. was (ridiculously, but not surprisingly) “Jap Mikado.” Another post (by somebody else) says that he played 1914-15 for the “All-Nations” team, which they identify as the team that “eventually became the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro League.”
Just before I came across this thread I had seen, while looking for something else, a box score in the August 5, 1916, Chicago Defender for a game between the Bacharach Giants and the “All-Nations” club of New York City. Here it is:
There is Mikami, leading off and playing second, along with “Red Cloud” in right and “Hong Long” on the mound. This is a very early edition of the Bacharachs, by the way; in fact, 1916 was the year in which black Atlantic City businessmen brought the Duvall Giants of Jacksonville, Florida, north, and renamed them after Harry Bacharach, mayor of Atlantic City. (The game story refers to the team as the “Mayor’s Giants” and the “Mayor’s Pets.”)
After a little searching on ProQuest, I discovered that Mikami first came to the United States when Waseda University’s team toured in 1911. After graduating from Waseda, he came to the United States and enrolled at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He joined the baseball team and eventually became its captain. The Chicago Tribune actually printed a short feature article on him in 1915, complete with photo (they spell his last name “Mikanie” and “Mikanio”). He was supposed to be a member of the class of 1917 at Knox; his appearance with the All-Nations of New York in 1916 may mean that he left college to play baseball professionally.
Anyway, Bob Whiting (who has written several books on Japanese baseball) says in the thread about Mikami that the Japanese baseball historian Kazuo Sayama has a book in Japanese called “The Mystery of Japan Mikado” (1997). (Very little, if any, Japanese baseball scholarship has been translated into English, by the way.)
Mikami’s All Nations team was not the same as J. L. Wilkinson’s All Nations club. In fact, I know of three teams called “All Nations” at around the same time: Wilkinson’s, based at first in Iowa and later in Kansas City, which was the most famous, featuring John Donaldson, José Méndez, and Cristóbal Torriente; another one in Chicago around 1918, which featured Stanley Beckwith, brother of John; and Mikami’s team, based in New York. I don’t know of any formal connection between them; Wilkinson’s success with the formula probably just spawned imitators.
UPDATE 9/22/2007 Check out Goro Mikami’s draft card.
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