12 - Cricket in Late Edo and Meiji Japan

Summary

INTRODUCTION

A CRICKET MATCH, played in 1863 in ‘curious circumstances’ in Yokohama is the first documented game of cricket in Japan. It is also the first recorded game in Japan involving a major western team sport.

The 1863 cricket match was played between a Yokohama team captained by a Scotsman, James Campbell Fraser, and a Royal Navy XI from the warships in the harbour including the flagship HMS Euryalus. The 16 April 1908 issue of the magazine Cricket has a lengthy account of the game. According to the article ‘a filled-in swamp at the back, but inside the settlement, furnished a mud cricket ground’. The article has lots of background but no scorecard and no information about the actual game except that the Navy gave Yokohama ‘a jolly good licking’.

Photographs of the two 1863 teams show that there was no shortage of cricket bats. Most of the bats were probably supplied by the cricket-loving naval officers, who would have found it much easier to bring their cricket equipment with them to the Far East than any businessman or traveller.

No date is given but Fraser refers to ‘a certain day’, which may well have been 25 June 1863. This was the date proclaimed in an order in the name of the shogun for the killing of foreigners who had not left the country before then. The expression ‘curious circumstances’ refers to the fact that marines guarded the ground and that the players carried guns. Fraser wrote that ‘they played with their revolvers on, ready for any emergency. It was a most novel sensation for the wicket keeper, as he carried his revolver backwards and forwards from wicket to wicket and placed it behind the stumps. Fortunately, no attack took place either on that day or afterwards.’

Tension was very high in Yokohama in 1863 and had been so since the murder of Charles Lenox Richardson a few miles outside of Yokohama while riding with friends in September 1862. The British government had demanded compensation for the attack on its citizens both from the Shogun and from the daimyo of the Satsuma fief whose samurai was responsible for the attack.