Changed Japanese Baseball

Kyodo News, via Associated Press - Wally Yonamine, the manager of Chunichi Dragons in 1974, was swarmed after his team won the Central League championship. He was also a three-time batting champion in Japan.

 Wally Yonamine, who was the first American to play professional baseball in Japan after World War II, has often been compared to Jackie Robinson for “integrating” the Japanese game. When he made his debut for the Yomiuri Giants in 1951, Yonamine was reviled by fans and players alike, who resented his otherness, just as Robinson had been vilified four years earlier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. At a time when anti-American sentiment was rife in Japan — memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh — Yonamine endured catcalls and worse. Rocks and bottles were hurled at him from the stands. The Hawaiian-born son of Japanese parents, he was not only the enemy, he was a traitor.

 Remarkably, Yonamine was a pioneering athlete in two sports and in two countries. A speedy running back — 5 feet 9 inches and 180 pounds — he starred for a football team in the Army and, after his discharge, an amateur team in Hawaii, impressing professional scouts enough that he signed with the San Francisco 49ers of the All-America Football Conference, a post-World War II rival to the National Football League. (He never went to college, though he turned down at least one football scholarship, to Ohio State.) The 49ers, who joined the N.F.L. in 1950, say that Yonamine was the first Asian-American to play pro football.

Kaname Yonamine (his full name is pronounced KA-na-may YO-na-MEE-nay) was born on June 24, 1925, in Olowalu, a village on the island of Maui, where his father, an Okinawan, had moved to find work in the sugar cane fields and met his mother, whose family was from Hiroshima. (He adopted the nickname Wally in high school, and it eventually became his legal name.)