1 The Formation of First Professional Baseball Team in Japan Yusuke Suzumura Introduction Since it was first played in the 1870s, baseball has become a de facto national sport for Japan. This paper investigates the expansion of the sport, and the shift from amateur to professional baseball, with a focus on Japan’s first professional baseball team, the Nihon Athletic Association (日 本運動協会, henceforth NAA, est. 1920). It considers the social and cultural context of the professionalisation of baseball in Japan during what was the golden age of a college baseball, and investigates the influence of early American baseball techniques on Japanese players, and how this served to cultivate a professional practice. Moreover, it considers the place of the professional baseball player within the newly expanded categories of occupation in Japan at this time. In order to contextualise this development, this study begins with an examination of the pre-history of the NAA. A Prehistory of the NAA: Japan’s first professional baseball team The NAA was founded in December 1920 by Hashido Shin ( 橋戸信, 1879-1936), Oshikawa Kiyoshi (押川清, 1881-1944), and Kono Atsushi (河野安通志, 1884-1946). All of these men were star players of the Waseda University Baseball Club, which was established in 1901 by Abe Iaso (安部磯雄, 1865-1949), a professor of Waseda University and a Christian socialist. Abe later entered the House of Representatives and assumed the role as Chair of the Socialist Masses Party (Shakai Taishuto, 社会大衆党), and he was well-known as the father of college baseball for his contribution to this field (1) . In many ways, Hashido, Oshikawa and Kono were students of Abe in baseball. Baseball was imported to Japan from the USA in 1872, and rapidly became a popular sport for high school and junior high school students under the old education system. At the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s baseball scene was dominated by student baseball teams from Waseda University and Keio University. In other words, only amateur —not professional— baseball was played. Indeed, playing professional baseball and earning a sufficient wage to live on was beyond the imagination of Japanese players. As such, only a few people, such as Kobayashi Ichizo (小林一 三, 1873-1957), dared to envisage a professional baseball league in Japan. In 1916, Kobayashi made an arrangement with Kono and Ichioka Tadao (市岡忠男, 1891-1964) —all stalwarts of the Waseda University Baseball Club— about the possibility of creating a professional baseball team. They envisioned a “Dentestu League” in which all teams would be governed by railway companies (2) . Despite this dream, Kobayashi did not build a professional team, and the birth of the first professional baseball team was not until the birth of the NAA in 1920. We may ask why Hashido, Oshikawa, and Kono dared to establish a professional baseball team during the golden age of amateur baseball. A few researchers and critics (3) have considered this, with many observations focused on the ideological or economical side of the NAA’s establishment. While these points of view are relevant, I argue that ideology and economy are not the only conditions that are worth investigating with regard to the formation of the NAA. In this paper, I propose three alternative perspectives: first, the relationship that the three key players Hashido,