Sayonara Home Run!

Sayonara Home Run!

The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card

John Gall/Gary Engel

Forward by Steven Heller

Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2006

Our indefatigable efforts to dissect baseball from a numerical standpoint have had a tendency to overshadow another necessary elements in our understanding of the game’s significance. One such element would be the history of the game’s images and how what they signify has either changed or remained constant.

This is an area that remains underrepresented in the current glut of materials published about baseball, but there are pockets of hope out there. One such is the superbly designed and rendered Sayonara Home Run!, which manages to sketch out a tacit cultural history of post-war Japan as it systematically examines the art/artifacts associated with its baseball leagues from the mid 1930s, when the first professional leagues began, through the late 1960s, when the first serious incursion of American players (the gaijin) began to change the particularities of Japanese baseball.

This slow-but-steady cultural shift is nicely outlined by authors Gall and Engel as they take us on a breathtaking beautiful tour of Japanese baseball cards. What’s noteworthy about this, though, is that it’s presented indirectly—permitting the changes in imagery and production techniques speak loudest. The progression of baseball imagery and cultural change proves to be “highly correlated” (as some us like to say about other matters pertaining to the game), and the spare, graceful accompanying text does not try to overstate this, permitting the reader to arrive at this conclusion from the accumulated weight of the visual evidence.

The heart of the book—and the crowning peak of Japanese baseball card art—is the menko sequence. Used in the traditional Japanese children’s game, the cards predated baseball and featured samurai and military imagery; but after WW II, these intensely colored cards were quickly appropriated into the visual lexicon of Japanese baseball. Menko proved to be exceptionally versatile, and its combination of ancient block printing techniques and pulp/newspaper coloring gives it a rich, almost delirious edge. Some of the most fascinating examples of menko in the volume actually delineate the sequence from samurai to militarism to baseball (as shown in the panel excerpted from the book).

The most spectacular example of menko, however, is clearly the full-sized player masks which first began to appear in the late 40s/early 50s. While similar items had appeared in the USA (mostly in the form of motion picture promotions), they pale in comparison due to the inspired combination of subject matter and highly saturated coloring that literally explodes from the menko mask image.

From this peak, of course, the slow decline of Japanese baseball imagery is inevitable, especially when it begins to display a Western influence. By 1967, the Japanese baseball card begins to look almost indistinguishable in design from their recent American counterparts. It is at that point that the authors, with a not-undetectable note of sadness, bid sayonara to the unique glories of Japanese baseball imagery.

What remains is a classic set of unadulterated images, unique in their synthesis of artistic and cultural influences. The confluence of East and West, as Steven Heller perceptively notes in his foreword, is still on an equal footing in the classic Japanese baseball card, and it’s this tension, this unlikely blending, that ultimately provides these images with their timeless, lasting edge. One hundred years from now, this will not have changed, even if almost everything else has.