Japan's iconic cheer squads? You can thank college football

Two thousand fans piled into their seats at Stanford University's baseball stadium in Palo Alto, filling the grandstands and setting an attendance record before Tokyo's Waseda University took on their American hosts on April 29, 1905. The atmosphere was electric, with nearly 500 Japanese fans packing an entire section of bleachers and waving banners emblazoned with the school's initials "W.U." upon them. "They rose and cheered" as the team, dressed in crisp white uniforms with maroon block lettering reading WASEDA on their chests, arrived on the field. They did so again when "Captain Yoshida scored in the second inning."

Today, when you watch a Japanese baseball game, the crowd roars all game long, led by the ōendan, or "cheering squad." There is music with the pounding of taiko drums and festive blasts from trumpets and horns. There are coordinated cheers and chants for teams and individual players, the fan groups trading off each half-inning, letting home and away fans each get in on the action. It has become as fundamental to Japanese baseball games as hot dogs and Cracker Jack are to Major League Baseball contests.

But on this day in Palo Alto, the crowd was oddly silent. It wasn't for a lack of passion or drama, though: It was because the student newspaper, The Daily Palo Alto, had asked the fans not to cheer the day before. Why? Because that was the custom for Japanese sporting events at the time.

"In Japan, no demonstration of any nature is made at an athletic contest: Cheering or rooting is unknown," the paper wrote. "Under the circumstances, the rooting and other noises that accompany an American game might seriously affect the play of the visitors from across the Pacific, and it would be well to confine ourselves to the conventional cheer or handclap."

The crowd was relatively quiet, of course, save for one thing: The playing of marching band music. The University of Notre Dame was the first to have their marching band play at a college football game in 1887 and by this time, the tradition had become well established in the sport. It was here, at these games, that the Japanese ballplayers got to hear it for the first time, too.

"Nearly 1,000 Japanese came from San Francisco by special train to watch," said Shin Hashido, one of the Waseda University ballplayers and a future member of Japan's baseball Hall of Fame. "Americans from the neighborhood also arrived, and I think there were about 2,000 spectators. A musical band organized by the students played an enjoyable performance to enliven the atmosphere."

There may not have been music and songs at Japanese ball games before, but by the time this trip was over and the Waseda players returned home, that would no longer be the case.

The genesis for this game -- one of the first international, intercollegiate games in baseball's history -- started over a decade prior. In 1894, Waseda's baseball manager, Isoo Abe -- who had graduated from Connecticut's Trinity College -- was in England when he saw an intercollegiate contest between Yale and Oxford's track and field teams. He was inspired by what he saw: Competition and collaboration between dueling colleges and nations out on the sporting field. He wanted to bring a Japanese team to America one day.

Later, after accepting an offer to join Waseda University as the chair of sociology and ethics, he took his idea to Shigenobu ?kuma, Japan's Prime Minister in 1898 (he would return to the position in 1914) and founder of the college. ?kuma liked the idea, but thought the university wasn't ready yet.

"Before such a trip can be made," ?kuma said, "Waseda must have a team which should win the championship of Japan."

Though baseball had found its footing in Japan over 20 years prior when American schoolteacher Horace Wilson began teaching the game, Waseda did not yet have a baseball team. That would change when Abe -- later known as "the father of Japanese baseball" -- put together a ball club in 1901. Three years later, Waseda had "wrested the championship" from Keio University and were deemed ready to make the journey to America.

Though Waseda lost its two games against Stanford, 9-1 and 3-1, before embarking on a West Coast tour with contests against other colleges like Oregon, Washington, and the University of Southern California, there was plenty gained from the cross-cultural trip. Baseball may have been taught in Japan for two decades, but there were still stark differences between the two countries and their approach to the sport. For instance, at this time, Japanese ballplayers didn't wear cleats, instead running in traditional Japanese socks. Nor did their pitchers use a wind-up, instead throwing from the stretch at all times.

"A lot of stuff they brought back to Japan, such as the wind-up, breaking balls, spiked shoes, sliding skills by baserunners and base coaches, the squeeze play, how to practice hitting and fielding, all that stuff," Nobby Ito, the official historian for the NPB, told MLB.com over Zoom.

That was an express purpose of the trip, too.

"It took four long years to develop our team, but I believe that it has been worth the trouble and that the experience of this trip alone will amply repay us," Abe said. "We are not here to win games, but to learn to play baseball as it is played in America. And it is not in baseball only that this trip should be a help to our men. It will broad their views and help them to a better understanding of the world and I expect they will gain from it far more than they put into it."

Though these games helped forever change Japan's on-field approach to baseball, it was what this group found while hearing America's college football marching bands, who came out to at least some of Waseda's contests, which would transform the fan experience. It was those games and the festive atmosphere, complete with drums, horns, and hundreds of students lending their voices to fight songs, that inspired the players to bring the idea back to Japan.

"In addition to the on-the-field, playing techniques, they experienced group cheering methods, which they brought back to Japan," Ito said. "That group cheering style started first at the Tokyo Big Six college baseball league and then spread widely around the country."

First, the songs and cheers took over the bleachers and stands at college baseball games before it was adopted by fans attending high school games. Finally, after the start of Japanese professional baseball in 1936, it was adopted there, too.

Though the styles would evolve, with cheer songs for individual players emerging over the past few decades, when you hear one like the iconic and incredibly catchy song for slugger Munetaka Murakami, you can see its origins. There are the thunderous drums and bright, punchy horns and hundreds of fans singing in unison -- just like in college football -- only now the music has changed as it has been interpreted by a different culture and country over the past 120 years.

The cheers, now a part of the very fabric of Japan's most popular sport, eventually spreading to Korea and beyond, are highly organized. The groups spend the winter practicing together and writing new songs for players. There are guides available for fans, and some teams, like the Hiroshima Carp, even have coordinated songs and movements, with alternating fans standing up and sitting as they sing.

"The fact that you can create a sense of unity and oneness in the ballpark [is my favorite part]," Kentaro Kawai, chairman of the “Kanto Swallow Army," and member of the Samurai Japan ōendan said through interpreter Kai Kurosu.

Maybe there was no cheering at ballgames over a century ago, but now, it is a crucial part of the experience. Young Japanese fans think it's the norm, finding it surprising when they tune into an MLB game and don't hear coordinated cheers reverberating around the stadium.

"Ultimately it’s a hobby," Junjiro Maruyama, the club leader of the Yomiuri Giants Cheering Club and supervisor for the Samurai Japan cheer squad, said. "But for me personally, I pay closer attention to this than my actual job and put more thought and hard work into cheering than my real job."

Special thanks to Tim Noakes at Stanford University's Department of Special Collections and Nobby Ito, NPB's official historian, for research assistance.