JAPAN: Banzai for Beisu-Boru

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 players—the first U.S. all-star major league team to visit Japan since 1934—had 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, Manager Frank (“Lefty”) O’Doul asked the parade to be canceled: “I’d hate to see people hurt in this thing.” Hanging out of windows, peering from rooftops, clinging precariously from lampposts, surging in the streets were 400,000 Japanese, almost twice as many as saw Douglas MacArthur off in April.

Eager as Dodger fans, people began lining up, fortified with fish, rice and camp stools, outside the great, grey Korakuen Stadium 30 hours before the first game against the Yomiuri Giants, the all-Japan champions. The Americans won, 7 to 0 but the Japanese didn’t seem to mind. “The Americans will obviously continue the winning,” explained one earnest, bespectacled university student, “because of the legs and arms which are longer.”