Kano (Umin Boya (馬志翔), Taiwan, 2014) (Released in Japan as 「KANO 1931海の向こうの甲子園」)
Sport is an aspect of education that seldom receives the attention it deserves, whether from policymakers, academics, or many teachers and parents. However, historically team sports have played a vital role in the socialisation of students, especially of boys. This is partly a matter of health and physical training, but also, crucially, of moral and military preparation. The Duke of Wellington, the British commander who defeated Napoleon, famously remarked that ‘The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’. At the height of the British Empire, in 1892, the poet Henry Newbolt published the poem ‘Vitae Lampada’ (‘The Torch of Life’), which features the famous line, ‘Play up, play up and play the game!’ This draws an explicit parallel between the ethos of the game of cricket and the spirit with which the British soldier was expected to confront perils in remote lands where ‘England’s far and Honour’s a name’.
I will have more to say about cricket in the next episode, when I discuss the Indian film, Lagaan, but this time I want to discuss the role of sport in socialising young men in another Asian empire - that of Japan. This sport is the American variant of cricket: baseball. Leaving aside the reasons why Japan came to adopt this sport in the first place, by the 1920s and 1930s baseball had come to assume an iconic status as the team sport for Japanese boys. By the same token, baseball training and the ethos of the sport were infused with core beliefs concerning the character and duties that defined Japanese manhood and the loyal imperial subject.
But the imperial subjects of the baseball team in Kano are not stereotypically ‘Japanese’, but multiculturally Taiwanese. This film, which is based on a true story, depicts the baseball team of the Chiayi School of Agriculture and Forestry, or Kagi Nourin Gakkou (嘉義農林学校) - ‘Kano’ for short. The Kano team reached the final of the Japanese high school baseball tournament - the Koshien - in 1931. The Koshien is still a big deal today in Japan, where it's broadcast every summer on national television. Back in the 1930s, commentary was broadcast over the radio, and the tournament included teams from across the Japanese Empire, including Taiwan, Korea and Dalien in Northeast China. ‘Kano’ were the first team from outside the main Japanese archipelago to get to the Koshien final.
This film is directed by the indigenous Taiwanese actor-director, Umin Boya, but produced and co-written by Wei Te-sheng. In a sense, it forms the third of a trilogy of films written or directed by Wei which deal with aspects of Japan’s colonial legacy in Taiwan. The first of those films, Cape Number 7 (海角七號), which came out in 2008, is the highest-grossing Taiwanese film of all time. That film epitomises the sepia-tinted nostalgia for the Japanese colonial era that has been a major theme of popular culture in post-Martial Law Taiwan. The second film in the trilogy, Seediq Bale (in which Umin Boya acted), is rather different: it tells the story of a bloody anti-Japanese rebellion by indigenous Taiwanese. In Kano, the nostalgic tone is once again more to the fore, but intermingled with other themes. Prominent amongst these is the ethos of baseball itself, and its association with a particular ideal of masculinity.
The film can be viewed online via the following link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8i98t5
Further reading:
Robert Whiting (1989/2009). You Gotta Have Wa. Knopf Doubleday.
Juyeon Bae (2023). ‘Mnemonic Politics around the Japanese Colonial Era in Post–Cold War Taiwan: Wei Te-sheng's Colonial Trilogy and Post–New Cinema’. positions 1 November 2023; 31 (4): 839–862. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10714285
