When a Chiayi high school baseball team in colonized Taiwan was invited to Japan in 1931 to play in the annual Koshien all-Japan high school tournament, they reached the finals — and almost won. But they lost the final game, 4-0. A small museum in Chiayi serves today as an unofficial team ''shrine'' and one of the locations where a movie about the team is being filmed
By Danny E. Bloom
When Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖), the director of Cape No. 7 and Seediq Bale, heard of a Chiayi high school baseball team that “almost” won the all-Japan Koshien summer tournament in Kobe in 1931, he just knew he had to make a movie about it. So he wrote a script, signed on as producer, asked Umin Boya to direct it, raised a pile of money, hired a cast of Taiwanese actors and extras, and the film, currently in production in Chiayi and other cities, is set to be released in April of 2014.
While the movie will most likely romanticize the story a bit, as movie-makers often do when they try to recreate a slice of history, the real Kano story is both dark and deep, and to understand it all one needs first to read Andrew D. Morris's very good book on baseball in Taiwan titled ''
Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan'' and especially his captivating and well-researched chapter on the 1931 Kano team and what life was really like in the 1920s and 1930s for both the colonized Taiwanese and Aborigines, and the opppressor Japanese rulers.
LINK
See: Andrew D. Morris, Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan
University of California Press, 2010, -- 271 pages
The movie’s working title is “Kano,” the nickname of the old Chiayi Agricultural and Forestry Vocational High School, which no longer exists. The nickname comes from the first two English letters of the two Japanese words “Ka-gi No-rin,” with ‘Kagi’’ being the Japanese word for Chiayi and ‘’No-rin’’ being the Japanese term for agriculture and forestry.
“From time to time, Japanese tourists will stop here,” says Miss Yu (余佳蓁), a senior at National Chiayi University (NCYU), who works part-time as a secretary at the museum.
“Last summer, a Japanese reporter named Takeshi Yoshimura from the Sankei Shimbun newspaper came here to look around and ask us some questions about the movie, and three French tourists stopped by in August while visiting the city’s temples,” Yu says.
Earlier, a reporter from the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, Masato Fujishima also visited Chiayi to learn more about Kano's history during the Japanese Colonial Period in Taiwan (1895 to 1945). Interest in the KANO story remains high in Japan, as Dr Morris's book explains in the chapter on Kano.
While most people in Chiayi know about the team’s exploits in 1931, few are aware that just a few steps from the modern 15-story glass-paneled city hall there is an old one-story Japanese-era building, hidden behind a long cement wall, that serves as an informal Kano museum for the team.
The building, still sporting sweet-smelling tatami mats and sliding paper doors in the Japanese style, houses the offices of the Kano Alumni Association. Supported by the city and a local university, it has a volunteer staff and is open Monday to Friday for tourists, scholars and history buffs. It’s a quiet place now, but once the movie is released, it could get crowded.
Inside the wooden structure, built in the 1920s, there is a library with dozens of copies of the Kano Alumni Association annual magazine, still published in Chinese by National Chiayi University (MCYU), and hundreds of old black-and-white photographs of the 1931 baseball squad. Outside in the courtyard there’s even a statue of one of the original team’s players holding up a bat and seemingly still ready to play ball.
Tourism opportunity
The Chiayi city government sees an opportunity in the 2014 release of the Wei-produced movie, which is said to be a cross between a baseball drama and a love story. Yes, Wei wrote a young woman into the script, and she’ll be the love interest of one of the players. So with expectations high that the movie will attract tourists from across Taiwan and Japan in the future, the city government’s tourism department donated a nice chunk of change — NT$500,000 — to help fund the movie.
Nearby, National Chung Cheng University, just a 30-minute bus ride from Chiayi, is planning to set up a tourist attraction based on the movie, since some of the action scenes will be filmed at Chung Cheng University.
According to Angel Hsieh, a graduate student working on her master’s degree in marketing, the movie’s connection to Chiayi and Taiwan’s history during the Japanese Colonial Period (1895-1945) offers a “perfect storm” of public relations and tourism opportunities for all those involved in the movie’s production.
Location, location, location
Location shooting for the movie is going on now, in Chiayi, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung, according to film industry sources. Some sets will be built and many locals have been hired as extras to appear in various crowd scenes. Umin Boya, an Aboriginal actor in his 30s who was in the cast of Seediq Bale, is directing the movie from a script by Wei. The director, who played baseball as a teenager, told reporters earlier this year that he understands the emotions of ball players and is looking forward to the film’s release, not only in Taiwan, but in Japan and other countries in Asia.
Imperial Japan in those days had colonies in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria, and teams from those regions were invited to Koshien if they made the grade. But only the Kano team from Taiwan was invited to the all-Japan championships, and not just once, according to Masato Fujishima, a Japanese reporter for the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, but five times. However, it was only the 1931 team that played their hearts out all the way to the Koshien finals.
Stealing the show
According to Fujishima, the 1931 Kano team won the hearts of Japanese baseball fans, and even today, the story has not been forgotten among Japanese. So a feature movie about the team, set in the 1930s and adding a love story to the drama of the final game in Kobe on a hot summer day, should go over well in Japan, too.
The movie will tell the story of a high school baseball team comprised of three ethnic groups — Japanese, Han Chinese and Aboriginal boys — and one tough Japanese coach.
The “Chiayi Norin Gakko’’ team took a boat from Keelung to Japan in the summer of 1931 and turned a lot of heads in Kobe.
By some kind of baseball miracle, the teenage boys from Taiwan surprised the experts in Imperial Japan and came in second. Their earlier run of good luck and the final game is now part of Taiwan lore, but for most people it’s a long forgotten story. Wei hopes to put a new spin on it.
While the Kano team is now history, its “never give up” attitude will be a big part of the movie, according to Umin Boya. And with an unofficial Kano museum and outdoor shrine still standing in the middle of Chiayi today, the building’s staff is getting ready for what might just be a big tourism boom when the film is finally released.
In fact, once the movie is released, the old wooden Kano building that once housed the principal of the high school and his family in the 1930s and now serves as an unofficial KANO might just need a new coat of paint and some new tatami mats to deal with the curious movie fans from Japan and Taiwan who will likely make a pilgrimmage to Chiayi to see the old house themselves.
But will the movie tell the true, real story about the KANO team? Well, even though Taiwan is not Hollywood, it's film directors and scriptwriters have been brought up on a diet of Hollywood movies, and they know how to tell a good, romantic story in bright technicolor, background music and all. The real KANO story is a bit more complicated that the movie will show, and that's okay, because a mere 90-minute movie cannot be all things to all viewers.
Jerome Soldani, a French anthropologist based in Canada at the current time, who is doing research on baseball in Taiwan and knows the country well, told this blog: "[If I was making an alternative movie], I think I'd rather tell the
story of the 1930s Kanō team through its rivalry with the other
senior high school baseball team in Chiayi, named Kagi (嘉義中學), wherehalf the students were Japanese and half were Taiwanese. But all the
players on the field were usually the Japanese guys, and they had the
support of many Han-Taiwanese fans in Chiayi. In fact, the ethnicity
of the players in the 1930s is not really as important as some observers
have said it was."
Michael Turton, writing in 2009, noted: "Baseball began, of course, in the Japanese colonial era. The game was already established in Japan by the 1890s, and was imported to Taiwan as early as 1897. By 1915 there were 15 all-Japanese teams on the island. In the early 1910s, however, locals were already being encouraged to participate. In the 1925 a team composed entirely of Amis went to Japan and gained great fame, winning 4 of 9 games against Japanese school teams. Then came the Chiayi years...."
EXCERPT from Andrew D. Morris's book on KANO in 1931, etc:
The most famous of all Taiwanese baseball traditions was that born at the Jiayi Agriculture and Forestry Institute (abbreviated Kanô) in the late 1920s. Under the guidance of Manager Kondô Hyôtarô, a former standout player who had toured the United States with his high school team, Kanô dominated Taiwan baseball in the decade before the Pacific War. What made the Kanô team special was its tri-ethnic composition; in 1931 its starting nine was made up of two Han Taiwanese, four Taiwan aborigines, and three Japanese players. Kanô won the Taiwan championship, earning the right to play in the hallowed Ko¯shien High School Baseball Tournament, held near Osaka, five times between 1931 and 193 . The best of these, the 1931 squad, was the first team ever to qualify for Ko¯shien with Taiwanese (aborigine or Han) players on its roster. Kanô placed second in the twenty-three-team tournament that year, their skills and intensity winning the hearts of the Japanese public, and remaining a popular nostalgic symbol even today in Japan. This team of Han, Aboriginal, and Japanese players “proved” to nationally minded Japanese the colonial myth of “assimilation” (dôka)—that both Han and aborigine Taiwanese were willing and able to take part alongside Japanese in the cultural rituals of the Japanese state. Of course, the irony is that the six Taiwanese players on the starting roster probably also saw their victories as a statement of Taiwanese (Han or aborigine) will and skill that could no longer be dismissed by the Japanese colonizing power.
UPDATE.November 25, 2012
Frank J. Liu · Kaohsiung Medical University Class of 1964 School of Medicine - writes:
Ah-Lou Liu, a doctor (苗栗市劉阿樓外科醫院院長劉阿樓) in Miaoli (苗栗), was one of the members of Kano baseball team. The late Dr. Liu attended KANO before he went to medical school to study medicine in Japan and returned to Taiwan after WWII ended.
He first trained in National Taiwan University Hospital as a surgeon and opened his medical practice in surgery in Miaoli, Taiwan in late the 1940s or the early 1950s. He was the first modern and prominent surgeon in Miaoli while I was a student at the local elementary School. My uncle (my mother's first younger brother) had stomach surgery performed by Dr. Liu in 1950. I still remember that my mother donated blood for my uncle because of his massive G.I. bleeding (胃出血) which required an emergency surgery. In my recollection, Dr. Liu was the catcher for the KANO baseball team.
# posted by DANIELBLOOM @ 9:35 PM
