Join us for a discussion and signing with baseball historian Robert Fitts, author of Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, & Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan.
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.
Robert K. Fitts graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and
received a PhD from Brown University. Originally trained as an
archeologist of colonial America, Fitts left that field to focus on his
passion, Japanese baseball. He is also the author of Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game and Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball (Nebraska, 2008).
