The second entry in my series about early Japanese and Japanese-American players on black teams concerns Isamu (or Isami) Tashiro, a University of Chicago graduate and dental student who played for the All-Nation Baseball Club of 1918, run by something called the Chicago Exhibition Company. (This club had nothing to do with J. L. Wilkinson’s All Nations Club, the forerunner of the Kansas City Monarchs.)
These All-Nations were definitely a semiprofessional club, as an article in Baseball magazine by “E. H.,” one of the managers (possibly the team’s catcher, E. P. Hanley), explains: “On account of existing war conditions,” he writes, “our original plans have undergone a considerable revision and our games are now limited to Saturday, Sunday and holiday contests.”
Aside from Tashiro, the All-Nations also featured four African Americans—team captain Stanley Beckwith (brother of John), infielder Ira Ward, and pitchers Palmer Kelley and Steven Dixon—as well as two Native Americans, outfielder J. Martinez and catcher White Bull, both veterans of the Nebraska Indians, and several white players.
Here is a brief account of a Chicago All Nations game in which Tashiro scored his team’s only run and was praised for both his hitting and fielding:
(Chicago Defender, May 11, 1918, p. 9)
Isami Tashiro was born on August 12, 1895, in Hakalau, Hawaii, to parents of Japanese descent who had themselves been born in Hawaii. Nineteen-eighteen was Tashiro’s only year in baseball, it would appear; he became a dentist as well as philanthropist, lecturer, and exponent of the Baha’i faith, and frequently gave talks on racial justice and tolerance. He died on December 13, 1983, in Chicago.
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