The Birth of a Bridge
A hundred years after an indigenous baseball team from eastern Taiwan set foot on Japanese soil, the game has evolved from a colonial pastime into a living bridge that links two societies. The story begins with the Noko team, a group of young athletes who left Hualien in 1923 and embarked on a tour of mainland Japan the following year, carrying with them the hopes of a community seeking recognition beyond the margins of empire.
Among the spectators of that early exchange was Kyoko Matsuda, a professor at Nanzan University, who has spent years tracing the team’s footsteps through archives and oral histories. Her research, alongside the 2014 Taiwanese film "KANO," brought the Noko team’s legacy into contemporary consciousness, illustrating how sport can become a canvas for expressing tension, aspiration and identity under colonial rule.
The impact of that pioneering tour rippled through the Japanese education system. Three members of the Noko squad were recruited by Heian Junior High School in Kyoto in 1926, where they joined a fledgling program that would later feed into the famous Kano side. That team, representing Chiayi Agricultural and Forestry Junior High School, made its debut at the summer Koshien tournament in 1931 and later became the subject of the aforementioned film, cementing its place in collective memory.
Historian Andrew D. Morris has argued that baseball in colonial Taiwan functioned as a cultural space where indigenous youths could voice dissent and imagine new futures. The Musha Incident of 1930, a protest against discriminatory policies, underscored the broader struggle for autonomy, and the sport provided a rare arena for public expression.
Today the lineage of those early players lives on in modern institutions. Chiayi University, the successor to the original Kano school, fields one of Taiwan’s strongest collegiate baseball teams, while alumni such as Li Wen‑hsun continue the trans‑Pacific exchange. Li, who studied at Meishu Gakuen Hitachi High School in Japan before joining the University of Tokyo’s baseball squad, dreams of playing professionally in Japan and using his platform to elevate Asian baseball on the world stage.
The enduring connection is not limited to the field. It extends to academia, where scholars from both sides of the strait collaborate on research, and to cultural institutions that preserve the shared history. As the sport celebrates its centennial milestone, the narrative of the Noko team and its descendants reminds us that a simple game can forge deep, lasting bonds across generations and borders.