The Courier League
This chapter discusses the proliferation of baseball in Seattle—another point of entry for the Japanese coming to the Americas in the late nineteenth century. The Seattle Japanese community was very active in its athletic endeavors and incorporated baseball as a means to display the virtues of the second generation to those in Japan. Thus, boxer-turned-journalist James Sakamoto sought to unify this community into an athletic union—the Courier Athletic League—which drew its membership from a variety of institutions; such as Buddhist and Christian churches, YMCAs, and Japanese-language schools. Following the lead of the ambitious and patriotic Sakamoto, the new league officials constructed athletics around the notion that Courier League sports would be those distinctively “American.”