Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895–1968 by John J. Harney

Reviewed by: Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895–1968 by John J. Harney Lee Kluck John J. Harney. Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895–1968. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 240 pp. Cloth, $50. Books about the role of baseball in identity building of a nation state are becoming more numerous as primary sources from the far reaches of the globe are proliferated through various mediums. Nowhere is this more rightly the case than when examining the role of baseball in the building of national identities in countries within the continent of Asia and the greater Pacific region. There are numerous titles outlining the role of baseball in Japanese society and a growing number of texts dealing with the role baseball played [End Page 148] in the American campaign to bring democracy to the far flung reaches of the greater Pacific region. Beyond that, there are various titles that attempt to outline the role of baseball in the building of a Taiwanese national identity. The most recent of these titles, Empire of Infields: Baseball in Taiwan and Cultural Identity, 1895–1968, by John J Harney, a professor of history and the director of the Asian Studies program at Centre College, is a groundbreaking text that looks to reframe the role of baseball in Taiwanese history. It certainly does that and will become an important text for those looking to examine baseball in a world-wide context. What makes Harney's work so valuable is that the author successfully shows that, unlike instances in numerous other countries and in the American Pacific territories, "there is little evidence of the colonial government's utilizing the sport to over 'Japanize' the local Taiwanese" (160). Nor did the indigenous population use baseball as a form of pseudo combat to prove that they were better than their Japanese rulers. Instead, Harney adroitly shows that the inclusion of baseball in the Japanese program was originally done by the Japanese not as a way to assimilate the Taiwanese into the Japanese way of life but as a way to help "young Japanese professionals moving to a new colony in the 1900s" maintain ties to the home islands (160). The game then became popular among the local population in a gradual fashion due to the fact that Japan provided the "framework and machinery" for this to occur (160). This included providing baseball tours of Taiwan by Japanese college teams, press coverage of the game by the Japanese controlled newspapers, the commercialization of the game in the colonies through the barnstorming of first Japanese and then colonial teams, and the growth of organized baseball tournaments. With all this support, Harney shows that baseball as it became played by the Taiwanese was Japanese in its roots and that these roots spread on the island, even after World War II, as a natural extension of the positive influence that Japan had developed on the Island of Taiwan among the indigenous population. All of these points are clearly made using primary source material found on the Island of Taiwan and a secondary source list that is robust and covers a wide range of topics. This includes but is not limited to, baseball, the spread of nationalism both in Asia and globally, the role of sports in that spread, and the study of Japanese colonial endeavors. Of particular note is the wonderful job Harney does of placing his work in the context of previous texts on baseball in Taiwan. One does not get the sense by reading this work that Harney set out to discredit the works of previous [End Page 149] scholars. However, he is quick to point out that the situation he describes, baseball growing through popular appeal that was fostered in conjunction with and not in opposition to, Japan, is a much different tact than his predecessors. To hammer home his point, Harney uses the conclusion to show that during the late Cold War and into the twenty-first century, the government of the Republic of China, with the help of scholars and purveyors of popular culture, have coopted the game and history of baseball in order to shape what they...

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