As Joe DiMaggio stepped from the plane at Tokyo's Haneda Airport, a full-throated roar rose from the waiting crowd. "Banzai DiMaggio," they shouted. Joe and 16 other playersthe first U.S. all-star major league team to visit Japan since 1934had come to make a good-will tour of Japan, in which they will play 15 games of beisu-boru against Japan's best teams.
In open cars the ballplayers rode up Tokyo's Broadway, the Ginza. But after the motorcade, lit by magnesium flares, nudged its way through four blocks of jammed, yelling fans, who ignored restraining cops and pressed right up to the cars,...