Pre-war Tokyo Big6 Baseball League Tickets

2022/07/11

In preparation for the exhibition "Keio Baseball and Modern Japan" (running until August 13) currently being held at the Keio History Museum, I explored various materials conveying the heated battles at Meiji Jingu Stadium. Though modest, ticket stubs are quite profound.

① is one of the oldest tickets held by the Keio University Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Archives. It only says "Autumn 1930 Baseball Game Admission Ticket" and "Big6 Baseball League." First, the matchup. Looking at the "AWKB" at the top, the central "WK" stands for Waseda and Keio, meaning the Waseda-Keio rivalry. The leading "A" stands for Autumn (Spring is "S"). The final "B" was a mystery, but in a recently discovered video, I found an explanation of the tickets posted on a bulletin board in Mita, revealing that this indicates "Game 1, Outfield Seats." Therefore, it is identified as the Keio student cheering section in the first-base side outfield (at that time, it was not fixed to the third-base side) on October 18, 1930.

② is "Autumn 1933," "Keio vs. Waseda, Game 3," "First-base Side Infield." Those who recognize this are true baseball aficionados. This is the Keio cheering section from October 22, 1933, the day the famous "Apple Incident" occurred. The word "Six" is missing, and it says "Tokyo University Baseball League," but this is not a typo. In 1932, the "Tokyo Big6 Baseball League" changed its name to this after the Waseda University Baseball Club withdrew from the league, advocating for the "purification" of baseball. Waseda returned soon after, but this remained the official name. Since the University of Tokyo was "Tokyo Imperial University" at the time, there was no conflict, and its abbreviation was "T.U.B.B.L. (Tokyo University Base Ball League)."

③ says "Autumn 1942," "Keio vs. Waseda," "October 24 (Sat)," "Outfield." This has the stamp of the Waseda Baseball Club, so it is the first-base side. There is no mention of which game number it is because baseball was suppressed as an "enemy sport," and league matches were restricted to a single-game format (only one game per matchup) at the time. The following spring, the league was forced to disband by the Ministry of Education. This is a ticket for the "Last Waseda-Keio rivalry" in official league play (the famous "Last Waseda-Keio rivalry" held as a send-off for student soldiers was an unofficial match in October of the following year).

Even small scraps of paper that are often quickly discarded tell a great deal of history. Will convenience store tickets from the COVID era also become materials that reflect the times? Thinking so, I plan to add them to the collection.

(Takeyuki Tokura, Deputy Director of the Fukuzawa Yukichi Memorial Keio History Museum)