6 ideas
In East Asia baseball spread in two waves: first through American teachers, missionaries and soldiers, then through Japanese colonial schools and administrators in Korea and Taiwan. Colonized peoples therefore often received the game as a Japanese institution rather than an American one, so its political meaning depended on who handed it over.
Where a sport first lands, such as elite schools, mission stations or army camps, shapes who plays it, what values attach to it and whether it survives. Baseball rooted deeply where schools and national institutions adopted it, and stayed shallow where it arrived mainly with occupying soldiers.
In 1896 players from Tokyo's First Higher School, Ichiko, beat the foreigners of the Yokohama Country Athletic Club decisively, and the wins were celebrated across Japan as national vindication. Beating Westerners at their own game turned an imported pastime into a vehicle for Japanese national pride.
Japan did not simply copy American baseball. It recast the game around discipline, endless practice, self-sacrifice and group harmony, framing it in martial and spiritual terms. Once the imported form was reinterpreted in native terms, the sport stopped reading as foreign and could be reexported as Japanese.
Under Japanese rule, Taiwanese teams such as Kano, a mixed squad of Japanese, Han Chinese and Aboriginal players, reached the Koshien national final in 1931. Decades later Taiwan's youth teams dominated the Little League World Series, turning a colonizer's game into an emblem of Taiwanese national identity.
Baseball's weak hold in China and its decline in the Philippines show that exposure alone does not make a sport stick. When the carriers leave and no schools, leagues or state patronage take over, as with China's returning students or the Philippines' shift toward basketball, the game gives way to rivals or politics.