Whether visits by soccer players such as David Beckham in the 2000s, tours by pop groups (the Beatles) in the 1960s, or baseball stars such as Babe Ruth in the 1930s, Japan has always been a welcoming venue for Western celebrities. The use of popular culture, including sports, as a vehicle for “soft power” influence between nation-states has been increasingly recognized as worthy of detailed study in recent years. At the same time globalization scholarship, as with much academic scholarship, has gone through several distinctive phases in the past thirty years. The recognition that the global has to be local somewhere, which is exemplified throughout this book, has improved research into globalization and sports over that time because it has promoted detailed empirical case studies of sport in specific social and cultural contexts.

Transpacific Field of Dreams is a densely written and always interesting narrative historical account of the relationship between the United States and Japan between the modernization of the latter (in the 1870s) and the end of occupation by the former of the latter in the 1950s. What may make it seem unusual to those who are not familiar with scholarship in sports studies or sports history is that the relationship is interpreted through close scrutiny of the sport of baseball as played in Japan. It answers questions such as: why did baseball become a transnational pastime? and what does this reveal about US engagement abroad?

By doing this Guthrie-Shimizu is able to consider US (referred to throughout as “American” by Guthrie-Shimizu) power in a less American-centric manner (4) and avoid the sense of American world-historical centrality (5) than is perhaps usual in studies of international relations. She makes the case for understanding imperialism as a complex relation of power with both informal and formal guises (5).

For the sports scholar wishing to know more about the development of modern sports in Japan the book provides a detailed account of the origins of baseball in Meiji Japan (1868–1912) and the role of baseball in the establishment of both Japanese and US colonial power in Taiwan, Manchuria, and Korea, and Hawaii and the Philippines respectively. Chapters also focus on the development of baseball leagues—an early case of successful import substitution in Japan (82)—and the rise to prominence of the Mizuno brothers sporting-goods company in the 1920s and 1930s. Guthrie-Shimizu relates stories from the tours of both countries undertaken by major league teams and the development of what she calls “baseball diplomacy” (154).

Of particular interest to this reviewer are the details of the relations maintained between the United States and Japan during wartime in the 1940s. One response to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, for example, was to declare that the Japanese had not understood the spirit of the game of baseball. The decision by Japan to relinquish the right to stage the 1940 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, for example, was responded to by key players such as Avery Brundrage, president of the American Olympic Association (AOC) and Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). During the Pacific War (1941–1945) there were increasing moves to “Japanize” baseball by replacing all reference to foreign (Western) words and numbers. The sport became widely referred to as “yakyu” in Japan. In the United States at the same time ten internment camps for first- and second- generation American Japanese were established, and these camps included facilities to play the game. The book comes to a conclusion with the end of the SCAP occupation of Japan in 1945–1952, during which time the Crown Prince Akihito is shown using sports as a means to develop friendly relations with the United States (212–13). Interestingly, however, his first appearance at a sports event was at an east-west Japan soccer match a few months earlier (280n33).

The book contains 40 pages of notes and 16 pages of photographic illustrations that nicely capture some of the key moments in the relationship between US and Japanese baseball discussed within the body of the text, including the Ichiko school team that defeated American sailors in 1896, the Waseda University team of 1905, Keio and Waseda matches in 1907, the Major League All Stars tour of Japan in 1931 and 1934 that included Babe Ruth, the Japanese American baseball team at Manzanar Internment Camp in California in 1942, and Lefty O'Doul shaking hands with Crown Prince Akihito in October 1949 at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo.

Transpacific Field of Dreams is a valuable contribution to a small but growing literature and would be a useful addition to the reading lists for senior undergraduates and graduate students studying international relations in the Asia Pacific, East Asian history, and comparative sports studies.