ROBERT WHITING

Contributing writer

Ah, Koshien.

The 100th National High School Baseball Tournament gets underway on Sunday at historic Koshien Stadium near Kobe. Organized by the Japan High School Baseball Federation in association with the prestigious Asahi Shimbun, the tourney is the largest sporting event in Japan, on par with the World Series and the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament in the United States, in terms of popularity. Forty-nine teams from around the country will vie for the national championship in a single-elimination competition lasting two weeks. Crowds of up to 50,000 fans per day will attend, while each and every game will be telecast live, nationwide, by NHK to an audience of millions.

Visitors to Japan might wonder why a schoolboy tourney draws so much attention, overshadowing everything including MLB and NPB games and those of any other sport.

For one thing, it is a highly symbolic event for the Japanese as it takes place during Obon holidays, the Buddhist festival of paying respect to departed souls, a time when cities empty out and workers take leave to return to familial hometowns and to visit and honor ancestral graves. With the massive postwar shift of the Japanese population from rural to urban industrial areas, the Koshien tourney became one of the few remaining ways Japanese have of displaying regional loyalties. Each Koshien entry has won intensely contested regional and sub-regional tournaments in a specific prefecture, territory or metropolis of the country.

For another, it is the closest thing Japan has to a national festival. Banner-waving supporters are bused in from all over the country, sporting colorful happi coats festooned with regional badges, while bringing with them samples of local cuisine. As former Number Magazine editor Masahiro Okazaki once put it, “Koshien is a ‘universal Japanese experience.’ ”

Still another reason for the tournament’s popularity lies in the long history of amateur baseball in Japan, which dates all the way to the late 19th century, beginning decades before Japan’s first professional league was established in 1936.

Baseball was introduced to Japan in 1872, by an American professor of English named Horace Wilson at Kaisei Gakko, a precursor to the University of Tokyo, invited to Japan along with dozens of other engineers and scholars from around the world by the Meiji government, to help the nation modernize after two-and-a-half centuries of feudal isolation.

The Japanese liked baseball because it was their first group sport. Most athletics in the pre-Meiji era were individual undertakings like kendo, jujitsu and sumo. It gave Japanese a chance to exercise their famed group proclivities on an athletic field. As with the rice-planting culture, everyone had a position, everyone had a role. At the same time, the Japanese also found the one-on-one battle between pitcher and batter similar in psychology to sumo and the martial arts. The Ministry of Education deemed the imported sport good for the national character and encouraged the game to be played on the high school and college level.

Baseball became the national sport in Japan in 1896 after a team from First Higher School of Tokyo (also known as Ichiko), an elite prep school for students aged 18-22 headed for Japan’s prestigious Imperial University, soundly defeated a team of Americans from the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club, in the first formal games ever played between Japan and U.S. squads.

Their victories were headline news all across Japan. As one Japanese historian later wrote, “Foreigners could not hope to understand the emotional impact of this victory but it helped Japan, struggling towards modernization after centuries of isolation, overcome a tremendous inferiority complex it felt toward the more industrially advanced West.”

Pitcher Kotaro Moriyama threw a shutout against the Yokohama team and inspired a saying: “To be hit by Moriyama’s fastball is an honor exceeded only by being crushed under the wheels of the Imperial carriage.”

Equally important was the way the Ichiko squad had won. Most of the players had come from samurai families and, unlike at other schools, they applied the principles of the martial arts — endless training, development of spirit, self-sacrifice — to their game. They practiced every single day of the year, in the rain or snow or extreme heat. During school vacations they went to intensive baseball camps. Team captain Jitsuzo Aoi swung the bat 1,000 times a night in the team dormitory. The Ichiko regimen was known as Bloody Urine, for it was said (with some hyperbole) that the players practiced so hard they urinated blood at the end of the day.