A quick look around baseball today and it's not hard to see that Japan has taken to our national pastime in a big way. Even during World War II when the Japanese-Americans were put into internment camps, they played baseball. But the story goes back even farther, to a point just after the Civil War. Evidence for the beginning of the Japanese love affair with baseball places it around 1873 and points to one man, Horace Wilson, an American professor of English at Tokyo University.

In 2001 a delegation from Japan searched out Wilson's family farm in Maine to bring family members to Japan for a ceremony recognizing Wilson.

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