Baseball in Hiroshima

Last night I watched the HBO documentary about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The movie is worth watching for many important reasons. But one unimportant scene caught my attention in relationship to this blog. One of the survivors is pictured enjoying a professional baseball game, laughing and cheering just the way Americans do when watching Major League Baseball.

I do not know if spectator sports were popular in Japan prior to WWII, but the image of the Japanese ballpark was so similar to what you see in American ballparks, I felt that this form of spectatorship was a "gift" of America to Japan. The Japanese survivor seemed to be having so much fun passively watching extraordinary athletes play the game.

In the context of the movie--about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people--the issue of spectator sport addiction is nothing. But the documentary did remind me that the draw of watching is probably universal.