Читать книгу A Gaijin's Guide to Japan: An alternative look at Japanese life, history and culture - Ben Stevens - Страница 8

In Japan, it’s popular. Real popular. Just like football in England, for many it’s more like a way of life. Amateur adult teams across the country meet up at some ungodly hour in the morning to practise before work. Two middle-aged women to whom I teach English, have previously requested to end a lesson early so that they could get back home to watch a particular game. Every high school has a number of young men whose dream is to be the next ‘Godzilla’—otherwise known as Hideki Matsui, the craggy-faced batter and pitcher, who now (following a nine-year spell with the Yomiuri Giants) plays for the New York Yankees.

It was an American, Horace Wilson—working in Japan as a Professor of English at what is now Tokyo University—who introduced the game of baseball to the Land of the Rising Sun. Sometime in 1872/73, he organised a team to play during the students’ lunch-break. Baseball’s popularity consequently spread like wildfire—and, for his efforts, Wilson was inducted into the ‘Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame’ in 2003, some seventy-six years after his death.