Eric Galt at a Clinical Psychologist

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle pp. 52-53:

FOR SOME TIME since his arrival in Los Angeles, Eric Galt had been paying visits to a clinical psychologist named Dr. Mark O. Freeman. Their first appointment was on the late afternoon of Monday, November 27, 1967, and Galt, sharply dressed as usual, walked into Freeman’s Beverly Hills office at around five o’clock. Dr. Freeman wrote in his daybook that his new patient hoped to “overcome his shyness, gain social confidence, and learn self-hypnosis so he could relax, sleep and remember things better.”

They began to talk, and Dr. Freeman got a sense of the man. Galt naïvely seemed to believe that hypnosis was a form of communication expressed directly eye to eye, through some mysterious medium of thought rays. “He had the old power idea of hypnotism,” Freeman said. “He actually thought you could go around looking people in the eye and hypnotize them and make them do whatever you wanted them to do.”

Galt placed great value on the touted health benefits of hypnosis—and especially hoped to learn how to put himself under. All told, he met with Dr. Freeman on six occasions, throughout the months of November and December 1967. Dr. Freeman later said that Galt “made a favorable impression” on him. The sessions were productive, he thought, and the two men got along well.

“He was a good pupil,” Freeman said. “This fellow really wanted to improve his mind. He had a bent for reading. He didn’t fight hypnosis. I’d show him how to go under, and pretty soon he’d be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him a lot of positive feelings of competence.” While Freeman said that Galt confessed to no “deep dark secrets,” he did note that in at least one of their sessions together, Galt disclosed a “deep antipathy to negroes.”

Then, for reasons not known, Galt severed his relationship with Freeman, saying only that the psychologist “didn’t know nothing about hypnosis.” He canceled his last appointment with Freeman, telling him that his brother had found a job for him as a merchant seaman in New Orleans. Freeman never heard from Eric S. Galt again.

Polish Realia: Beer Styles

From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Pils Pilsner
Nasz Pils to pełne, jasne piwo dolnej fermentacji w stylu niemieckich pilznerów. Posiada barwę złota i wspaniałą białą pianę, a warzone jest ze słodu jasnego jęczmiennego. W smaku czyste, orzeżwiające, z wraźną szlachetną goryczką i zapachem szyszek chmielowych. Polecane do zimnych przekąsek, dań z drobiu i ryb. Alk. 5% obj. [< objętościowo]
Our Pils is a full-bodied, light bottom-fermented beer in the style of German pilsners. It has a golden color and a wonderful white foam, and is brewed from light barley malt. The taste is clean, refreshing, with a slight noble bitterness and the smell of hop flowers. Recommended for cold snacks, poultry and fish dishes. Alc. 5% vol.

Pszeniczne Wheat 
Pszeniczne to orzeźwiające piwo w stylu weizen. Warzone jest ze słodu pszenicznego (60%) i jęczmiennego jasnego. Piwo to charakteryzuje się słomkową barwą i puszystą białą pianką. W smaku wyczuwa się pszenicę jak również aromat bananowo goździkowy. Poleca się szczególnie do dan serwowanych z sosem śmietanowym, delikatnej wieprzowiny i placków ziemniaczanych. Alk. 5,1% obj.
Wheat is a refreshing weizen-style beer. It is brewed from wheat malt (60%) and light barley. This beer is characterized by a straw color and fluffy white foam. The taste is wheat with banana and clove aroma. It is especially recommended for dishes served with sour cream sauce, tender pork and potato pancakes. Alc. 5.1% vol.

Bursztynowe Amber
Bursztynowe to piwo dolnej fermentacji. Produkowane jest z udziałem słodu jasnego jęczmiennego i ciemnych słodówkarmelowych. Barwa jest adekwatna do nazwy, a smak to mieszające się nuty słodowo - karmelowe oraz wyczuwalna goryczka. Poleca się je szczególnie do potraw z grilla i dań ze schabu. Alk. 5,7 obj.
Amber is a bottom-fermented beer. It is produced with light barley malt and dark caramel malts. The color lives up to its name, and the taste is mixed malt and caramel notes and noticeable bitterness. They are especially recommended for grilled dishes and pork loin dishes. Alc. 5.7 vol.

Polish Realia: Beer Types

From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Koźlak Bock
Nasz Koźlak jest mocnym, ciemnym piwem o słodkim zapachu przypominającym ciasto z owocami. Wyczuwa się również woń karmelu, fig is suszonych śliwek. Ma rozgrzewający charakter, a na podniebieniu pozostawia pełny słodowy smak z przebijającymi się nutami toffi i wyraźną goryczką. Poleca cię go m.in. [< między innymi 'inter alia' ] do żeberek i delikatnej wołowiny. Alk. 7,5% obj. [< objętościowo]
Our Koźlak is a strong, dark beer with a sweet smell reminiscent of fruit cake. You can also smell caramel, figs and prunes. It has a warming character, and leaves a full malty taste on the palate with pungent [not 'punctual'!] notes of toffee and a distinct bitterness. It is recommended for ribs and tender beef, among others. Alc. 7.5% vol.

APA American Pale Ale
Piwo górnej fermentacji w stylu American Pale Ale. W smaku wyrazista, zbalansowana gorycz z wyczuwalnym aromatem chmieli Amerykańskich. Piwo polecane do pikantnych i słonych dań. Alk. 5,0% obj.
Top fermented beer in the style of American Pale Ale. The taste is distinctive, balanced bitterness with a noticeable aroma of American hops. The beer is recommended for spicy and salty dishes. Alc. 5.0% vol.

Czarny Koń (lub inne piwo sezonowe)
Black Horse (or other seasonal beer)
Mocne, ciemne piwo w stylu ALE. W smaku i aromacie wyczuwalna jest słodowa słodycz z nutami karmelu. Znaczny dodatek słodów ciemnych nadaje piwu również aromat i smak ciemnej czekolady oraz kawy. Piwo długo leżakowane. Piwo poleca się m.in. do golonek i żeberek. Alk. 9.2% obj.
Strong, dark beer in the style of ALE. In the taste and aroma, there is a malty sweetness with notes of caramel. A significant addition of dark malts also gives the beer the aroma and taste of dark chocolate and coffee. Long aged beer. The beer is recommended for pork knuckles and ribs, among others. Alc. 9.2% vol.

Note to Readers by Hampton Sides

From Hellhound On His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt In American History, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2010), Kindle ed.

I was just a kid when it happened—six years old, living in a rambling brick house on Cherry Road close by the Southern Railway. My father worked for the Memphis law firm that represented King when he came to town on behalf of the garbage workers, and I remember my dad rushing home that night, pouring a screwdriver or three, and talking with alarm about what had happened and what it meant for the city and the nation and the world. I remember the curfew, the wail of sirens, a line of soldiers with fixed bayonets. I remember seeing tanks for the first time. Mainly, I recall the fear in the adult voices coming over the radio and television—the undertow of panic, as it seemed to everyone that our city was ripping apart.

Four days after the assassination, Coretta Scott King arrived in Memphis, wearing her widow’s veil, and led the peaceful march her husband could not lead. For several miles, tens of thousands of mourners threaded through the somber downtown streets to city hall. Enveloped in the beautiful sadness, no one breathed a word. There was no shouting or picketing, not even a song. The only sound was leather on pavement.

All writers sooner or later go back to the place where they came from. With this book, I wanted to go back to the pivotal moment in the place where I came from. In April 1968, a killer rode into a city I know and love. He set himself up with a high-powered rifle a few blocks from the Mississippi River and took aim at history. The shock waves still emanate from room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, and continue to register across the globe. The Lorraine has become an international shrine, visited by the likes of the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela and the boys from U2—a holy place. People come from all over the world to stand on the balcony where King stood, squinting in the humidity, surveying the sight lines of fate. They try to imagine what really happened, and what larger plots might have been stirring in the shadows.

The first writer I ever met, the great Memphis historian Shelby Foote, once said of his Civil War trilogy that he had “employed the novelist’s methods without his license,” and that’s a good rule of thumb for what I’ve attempted here. Though I’ve tried to make the narrative as fluidly readable as possible, this is a work of nonfiction. Every scene is supported by the historical record. Every physical and atmospheric detail arises from factual evidence. And every conversation is reconstructed from documents. I’ve consulted congressional testimony, newspaper accounts, oral histories, memoirs, court proceedings, autopsy reports, archival news footage, crime scene photographs, and official reports filed by the Memphis authorities, the FBI, the U.S. Justice Department, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Scotland Yard. Along the way, I’ve conducted scores of personal interviews and traveled tens of thousands of miles—from Puerto Vallarta to London, from St. Louis to Lisbon. Readers who are curious about how I constructed the narrative will find my sources cited in copious detail in the notes and bibliography.

As for King’s assassin, I’ve let his story speak for itself. Whether witlessly, incidentally, or on purpose, he left behind a massive body of evidence. Much of my account of his worldwide travels comes from his own words. The rest comes from the record. Many questions remain about his motives, his sources of money, and how much help he may have had. But the killer left his fingerprints, both literal and figurative, over everything.

HAMPTON SIDES, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

Evolution of Polish Viticulture

My latest compilation of stories from Culture.pl includes an interview about the history of Polish viticulture. Here are some excerpts:

Monika Kucia: Poland isn’t historically a winemaking country, but we do have a short history of winemaking dating back centuries. When were grapes first cultivated on our territories? 

Wojciech Bońkowski: In the Middle Ages, viticulture was quite developed in our country, also because the climate in our part of Europe was warmer back then. Wine was mainly needed for religious purposes, the celebration of mass, so it was grown on a limited, very small scale. Cultivation collapsed due to the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of cooling in the North Atlantic when average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere dropped by about 1°C. Around the 17th century, Poland began importing large quantities of wine from, among other places, Hungary and Ukraine. After World War II, Lubusz Voivodeship, including Zielona Góra ['Grünberg'], was incorporated into Poland. Before 1939, Zielona Góra was the largest wine-producing region in Germany and specialized in sparkling wines. We took over these vineyards, but they, too, were closed down by the 1960s because the Polish communist authorities promoted the production of fruit wines, not grape wines.

MK: What is fruit wine?

WB: Fruit wine is a cheap alcoholic beverage made from widely available fruit, in Poland primarily from apples. Hence the Polish term ‘jabol’ [slang term for low-quality, wine-like alcoholic fruit beverage derived from the word for ‘apple’, jabłko, trans.]. This kind of wine is much cheaper to produce than wine made from the fermentation of grape must. Fruit wine production was possible in Poland on a large scale thanks to the orchard industry. The Polish People’s Republic saw a decline in wine culture, which had been quite developed in interwar Poland, among the elite of course. The common folk, if we may use that term, drank other alcoholic beverages. This is, of course, a result of our geographical location. We have a different social situation today; changes are affecting the whole of society, and wine has definitely become very popular. Studies show that nearly 50% of Poles declare at least occasional wine consumption.

...

MK: How did it all begin?

WB: Winemaking was first revived in the Podkarpackie ['Subcarpathian']  region thanks to the efforts of Roman Myśliwiec ['Hunter'], who founded a nursery where he propagated vines and supported the establishment of small vineyards and the production of wine in a style we affectionately call ‘allotment garden wine’. Some had 1,000, others 2,000 square meters of vineyard. Back then, no one had a hectare. These were amateur production attempts. 

...

MK: Where did the winemakers get their seedlings?

WB: Partly from Myśliwiec, but of course, seedlings can be easily purchased in wine-producing countries. We have Czechia and Slovakia just across the border. That’s not a problem, just a cost. And these were investors, businessmen who had money they’d made in other industries.

MK: And what about Jutrzenka in the Podkarpackie region?

WB: That was a variety created by Myśliwiec, a typical hybrid. The problem with hybrids was that most of them were of very poor quality. The early ones, such as Bianca and Sibera, were so-called second-generation hybrids that reeked of cabbage and IXI laundry powder; they had no merits.

MK: So why were they cultivated?

WB: Hybrids are developed for two purposes: either to ripen early and be suitable for a cold climate, which was their main function in Poland; or to be more disease resistant. At the time, it seemed that we in Poland couldn’t grow Chardonnay or any other viniferavariety, that the grapes wouldn’t be ripe enough to make wine. This turned out to be untrue. It gets a little warmer every year, which helps. Meanwhile, the discussion about hybrids is currently gaining momentum worldwide. On the one hand, we have the pressure of significantly reducing the use of chemicals in agriculture; after all, winemaking is responsible for a significant portion of soil contamination – in France, for example. There are stories about a winemaker spraying fifteen times, but if he’s planted a hybrid, spraying twice would be enough.

MK: So hybrids aren’t ‘inferior’?

WB: At first, I was skeptical about hybrids. Not from a cultivation perspective, as I don’t know anything about it, or at least I don’t have practical experience, but from the perspective of the market and the quality of these wines. Fourth-generation hybrids, such as Johanniter and Solaris, are varietals that are no longer easy to distinguish in a comparative tasting; they are simply very good. Johanniter and Riesling can be very similar, so the quality argument is no longer relevant.

MK: And can one grow noble red wine varietals in Poland?

WB: In Poland, for example, we have a lot of Pinot Noir; this varietal has recently produced surprisingly good wines in many places around the world, such as Czechia and Canada, which have similar climatic conditions to Poland. It used to be said that this was a difficult grape variety which only performed well in Burgundy, but that’s not true. That’s the great thing about wine – we’re constantly being self-verified. Yesterday, it seemed that only Italian wines were sexy, but today, wines from Greece and Croatia are considered sexy. It’s constantly changing.

Japanese Little League and Yakuza

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 130-132:

There remained one sticking point to this collaboration: Yomiuri’s special interest in Kansai Little League coverage. There were some in the Little League community who wished for Yomiuri to not only continue coverage but increase its involvement. Musashino Little League’s Mitsuyasu in particular lobbied for Yomiuri kingpin Shōriki Tōru to lead Little League Japan, and bemoaned Fuji-Sankei’s involvement. But Mitsui’s long-term plan was to work with Fuji-Sankei, and Fuji-Sankei did not want to get involved in a media struggle for coverage rights in the Kansai. When Fuji-Sankei president Shikauchi insisted on full nationwide rights, Mizukami told Hoshino he should make the trip down to Yomiuri’s Osaka offices to negotiate their withdrawal, allowing Mitsui and Sankei to handle Little League nationwide. Hoshino packed his bag for what he thought would be an overnight trip. He ended up spending almost a week there.

One might think that Hoshino would have to spend most of his time and energy convincing Yomiuri to defer to Fuji Sankei, but that decision was not fully Yomiuri’s to make. Before he even approached Yomiuri, Hoshino first had to engage certain underworld elements. At the height of their influence in the 1960s, Japan’s idiosyncratic yakuza gangster world had its origins in two broad arenas with significant overlap: bakutō (gambling) and tekiya (carnie). The tekiya traditionally made their money by organizing and operating quasi-legal protection rackets for street and carnival sales stalls. One profitable variant in the post–World War II years were corporate-level extortionists known as sōkaiya who specialized in disrupting the annual stockholder meetings unless their demands were met. Japan’s yakuza are known for their haughty profession of right-wing or ultra-nationalist postures. One imagines that making the rounds of corporations on behalf of a youth sports team about to represent Japan in an international competition presented an appealing opportunity for them. Although surely not a major money maker, yakuza had apparently made a racket of skimming a healthy portion of funds solicited from businesses in support of Little League. If Fuji Sankei and Mitsui Bussan were going to take over sponsorship of Little League in the Kansai, their support systems would have to be brought aboveboard and questionable connections with the criminal underworld would have to be severed. But in the murky world of accommodations of convenience and unspoken but implicit understandings, an unexpected departure from the cozy tekiya fundraising arrangement would have ripple effects.

In short, Hoshino knew that Yomiuri could not act pre-emptively without the understanding and consent of its associates. To do otherwise would incur the ire of yakuza and expose their organization to irritating and embarrassing harassment that was the yakuza métier. It would be a question of saving face. One thinks of the lampooning scene in comic filmmaker Itami Jūzō’s 1988 A Taxing Woman’s Return in which a local gangster boss intimidates office staff and citizens at a local tax office, all based on the absurdly reverse assertion that he was himself being harassed.16 If Yomiuri had dropped Little League sponsorship without first consulting and gaining the yakuza padrone’s acquiescence, then their whole organization would have been subjected to the charge of insulting or undercutting the yakuza’s pride.

So, Hoshino went to talk with the tekiya boss first, traveling as instructed to a desolate train station in the less-populated areas in the middle of rice paddies between Osaka and Kyoto. On his retelling, Hoshino joked that he felt like he was being kidnapped when several henchmen sauntered around him and then spirited him away in a four-door coupe to the gangster boss’s home, where he ended up staying as a nervous house guest for three or four days. It was a harrowing week, and he had to approach, as he put it, “many scary people” to extricate Little League from this legally questionable fundraising system. Hoshino’s negotiating strategy was simple: ingratiate himself with the boss and then appeal to his ego by asking for his help to convince Yomiuri to allow Mitsui and Sankei to control national coverage. After three or four days of negotiation, while being a not fully willing house guest, Hoshino succeeded. At that point, the tekiya boss took the lead in visiting the Osaka Yomiuri offices, with Hoshino in tow, to “advise” Yomiuri that Fuji Sankei and Mitsui were, so to speak, taking over the Kansai Little League franchise.

Mitsui Bussan and Fuji Sankei became official sponsors for both the 1970 All-Japan and Far East tournaments held at the Higashi Fuchū grounds, and Sankei gave the tournament good coverage in its media network. Hoshino arranged for the players to be billeted in U.S. military barracks and fed at the commissary at nearby Fuchu Air Station, a communications hub for U.S. military in the Far East. Hoshino himself bunked there during the two weeks prior while making tournament arrangements, and then as chaperone for the players during the tournaments that featured teams from the Marshall Islands and Taiwan.

Taiwan's Little League Fans

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 112-114:

Taiwan’s Chinese Baseball Association, in association with Lions Club International, had also invited Yoshikura to bring a Kansai Renmei team to Taiwan for a series of five exhibition games that August. Both nanshiki [rubber baseball] and hardball baseball were popular pastimes in Taiwan, a legacy of the island’s prewar years as a Japanese colony. In preparation for an event loaded with patriotic interest, Taiwanese leaders arranged for the Hongye and Chuiyang teams, the winner and runner-up in Taiwan’s 20th Annual Provincial Children’s Cup in May, to train for as long as a month at a military base. The Kansai team, rostered from seven of the Kansai Renmei teams, defeated Chuiyang 1–0 in the first matchup. But they lost to the powerhouse Hongye “Maple Leaf” team 7–0 in front of 20,000 in Taipei Stadium and a live television audience. They lost again to a national Taiwanese all-star team the next day, 5–1, and again to Hongye the day after, 5–2. Kansai saved some face by winning the final game against a provincial all-star team from Jiayi.

The large numbers viewing this series of games in person or on television illustrated and spurred Taiwanese enthusiasm for the international Little League competition that soon far exceeded interest in Little League baseball at this point in Japan. It also presaged the popular interest in Hongye and Taiwan’s dominance of the Little League World Series for the next twenty years. A staggering two-thirds of the island’s population watched a middle-of-the-night broadcast of the island nation’s Little League championship game in 1971.

The Kansai squad’s 1968 visit became a Taiwanese national phenomenon, symbolic of several interconnected and competing ethnic and national tensions characteristic of the island community, which historians of Taiwan baseball agree was a “defining moment in the history of Taiwan nationalism.” For one thing, the ruling Nationalist KMT/GMD, the former mainland government that had been pushed into exile on the island, had not promoted baseball at all since it had not been played in China. Baseball was, ironically enough from an American perspective, intimately tied to Taiwan’s colonial era as subaltern in Japan’s empire, an inconvenient fact the Nationalist press avoided. Yet a vibrant baseball culture continued, even at the elementary school level. The fact that the Hongye school was from a mountainous Bunun Aborigine district in the southeastern Taitung Province added an ethnic dimension to the story, so the team’s success against the Japanese suggested the possibility of a native Taiwan free of Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT/GMD mainland rule. As elaborated by Andrew Morris, David Harney, and others, the official Republic of China government attempted rather to coopt Hongye’s success in an anti-communist agenda affirming the Nationalist government rule by celebrating a capitalist work ethic in the face of their impoverished background.

The ideological import for the Japanese was rather straightforward in comparison to the situation for their hosts, for whom nationalist and ethnic pride competed in overlapping discourses between mainland Chinese and island Taiwanese identities. The Taiwanese hosts to the Kansai delegation rather celebrated the historic connection. At the official ceremony, for example, one Taiwan parent who had played at Kōshien in the prewar imperial era recited a poem on the “way of baseball” spirit by the recently deceased Kondō Hyōtarō, a fabulously successful baseball coach who took his multi-ethnic Jiayi team to Kōshien four times in the early 1930s. And at least one member of the Kansai delegation reconnected with acquaintances from the prewar colonial years.

As discussed in chapter 4, the 1967 West Tokyo Little League success in the American-sponsored Little League venue affirmed the older Japanese Little League leadership’s nationalist desire for approbation of Japan’s remarkable postwar recovery. The warm reception for the August 1968 Kansai Renmei delegation allowed a measure of nostalgia for Japan’s imperial era, despite the team’s modest performance against the former colony’s teams. In Japanese recollections of the trip, Hongye’s hardscrabble origins are conveyed by images of barefoot players. And it is suggestive that such recollections mention the delegation’s gifting of their hardball equipment as an act of noblesse oblige befitting, viewed from traditional East Asian notions of imperial governance, the beneficence of a former colonial ruler.

Japan's Baseball Crazy Wakayama

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 100-102:

Wakayama is a provincial city 50 miles south of Osaka. Where Nanba, one of Osaka’s main commercial hubs, is the northern terminus of the Nankai main line that follows the eastern shore of Osaka Bay, Wakayama is an hour south at the other end of the line. The region has a rich provincial heritage on the periphery of the main power centers in Japanese history. A city located at the edge of waters between the Osaka Bay and the Pacific Ocean, Wakayama straddles the mouth of the River Kii, a waterway with its source in the mountainous Kii Peninsula. At the beginning of the Ashikaga shogunate in the fourteenth-century “Nambokuchō” era of competing imperial courts (1336–1392), Emperor Godaigo’s southern line ensconced itself near its source in the mountainous Kii Peninsula interior. During the two-and-a-half centuries of the relatively stable Tokugawa era (c. 1600–1868), Wakayama was held by one of the shogunal cadet houses that twice provided heirs to the main shogunal line. And in the sixteenth-century sengoku or “warring states” era of fragmented rule before the Tokugawa era, a major peasant mutual defense league known as the Saika Ikki resisted the great warlord Oda Nobunaga’s consolidation of power. Its headquarters was in a fortress near the present-day castle and today lends its name to a section of the city, an elementary school, and a youth baseball club important to the emergence of Wakayama Little League. Saika is also a common surname in Wakayama.

In the mid-1960s, Wakayama was a growing city that featured a major steel mill, a healthy agricultural and fisheries sector, and as important for our interests, a robust baseball community. Dr. Hotta Eiji, Doshisha University Chancellor and one-time president of the Japan High School Baseball Federation (known as Kōyaren), observed to the author that, although Wakayama City and its eponymous prefecture is not that large in terms of population, its residents have long been known for their fervent enthusiasm for high school baseball, and the prefecture boasts a number of perennially strong high school teams. A 1965 survey by the Wakayama Broadcasting Company found that over 90 percent of respondents considered themselves baseball fans, while only 2.5 percent maintained they had no interest. Wakayama Chū, Wakayama’s prewar prefectural middle school, was one of the inaugural teams to play in the summer Kōshien high school baseball tournament, Japan’s most popular sporting event that began in Osaka’s Toyonaka City in 1915. The school won the tournament in 1921 and 1922 (when it was played in Nishinomiya), after which they hosted the future Showa Emperor at his first baseball game at their newly built concrete stands later that year. Tōin High School, Wakayama Chū’s reincarnation after the postwar education reforms, has produced numerous players and accomplished managers in Tokyo’s premier university baseball league, the “Big Six.” One indicator of Wakayama’s enduring baseball fervor is that a group of 50 former high school players born in and around 1955, the age cohort that would have been Little League age in the late 1960s, meet annually to socialize, reminisce, and just talk baseball.

Wakayama has a vibrant nanshiki [rubber baseball] infrastructure with many elementary school-age teams formed along local social networks—school, shrine or temple, parental work relationships, and so on—that compete in summer tournaments sponsored both by the municipal youth sports promotion association as well as by local companies and volunteer organizations. Judging from common team names, contemporary reports in the local Wakayama newspaper, player recollections, later comments by league officials, and an analysis of Little League roster information with residency data from the city youth sports organization, it is clear that the 1966 and 1967 Little League teams were in fact all-star teams selected from the Wakayama Youth Baseball Association spring and summer nanshiki tournaments. Because the Japanese school year begins in April, what this means is that most of the players selected for the summer Little League tournament rosters were already in seventh grade playing for their junior high school nanshiki teams.

Hirota Hideo and Wakayama’s Youth Baseball Community

The major figure in Wakayama’s youth baseball community in this era was a fabric wholesaler by the name of Hirota Hideo. Like many baseball men in Japan in this era, he had played baseball in the prewar years, at Wakayama’s Ninoshima High School. He was a member of his local PTA, a board member on the Wakayama youth sports association, and a charismatic individual whose business and civic connections ranged far and wide. The Hirotas lived directly opposite the Saika Elementary School that their two daughters attended, and provided conveniently located home care for the infant children of the school’s young female teachers. In 1961, Hirota founded what became the strongest team in the Wakayama Shōnen Yakyū Renmei (Wakayama Youth Baseball Association). He was the manager of the club until 1969.

Like Dr. Sasa in Tanashi, Hirota was an important agent beyond baseball in creating the civic sports organizations that sprung up in response to the national government’s promotion of youth sports culture in the early to mid-1960s. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 1962, the Japan Sports Association (JASA)—Japan’s equivalent to that era’s Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) in the United States—founded an affiliate Junior association with the aim of promoting youth interest in sports in the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. With offices in the city’s Taiiku Kyōkai Physical Education Association, Wakayama’s Junior Sports Association’s founding charter mandated board representation from every youth sports association in the city as well as from elementary and junior high principals, the local Taiiku Kyōkai Athletic Association itself, and the administrative offices of the city’s Board of Education. In its 20th anniversary publication, the founding director Hisashi Shōzō credited “baseball’s Hirota” as one of two individuals who really helped him get the organization going in 1965, when it listed 20 sports associations as members.

The Nankai Hawks were my favorite baseball team during my high school years in Kobe during the 1960s. Their Japanese Hall-of-Fame pitcher and catcher combination, Tadashi Sugiura and Katsuya Nomura, were hard to beat.

Polish Realia: Blood Donations

 Zaznacz prawidłową odpowiedź: Prawda/Fałsz

Select the correct answer: True/False

1. Przed donacją trzeba znać swoją grupę krwi.
   Before the donation, one must know one’s blood group.
2. Przerwa między oddaniami krwi pełnej nie może być krótsza niż 8 tygodni.
   The interval between whole blood donations may not be shorter than 8 weeks.
3. Do przeszczepienia wątroby często potrzeba aż 20 jednostek krwi.
   For a liver transplant often require as many as 20 units of blood.
4. Jeden Biorca często potrzebuje pomocy kilku Dawców.
   One Recipient often needs the help of several Donors.
5. Dawca może przyjmować witaminy.
   The Donor can take vitamins.
6. Składniki krwi przechowuje się razem.
   Blood components are stored together.
7. Noworodkom podaje się krew tylko od dorosłych, którzy są nimi spokrewnieni.
   Newborns are given blood only from adults who are related to them.
8. Wegetarianie I weganie nie mogą oddawać krwi.
   Vegetarians and vegans may not donate blood.
9. Przeziębienie jest przeciwwskazaniem do oddania krwi lub jej składników.
   A cold is a contraindication to donating blood or its components.
10. Po donacji organizm Dawcy produkuje nadwyżki krwi.
    After donation, the Donor's body produces surplus blood.
11. Osoba leczona krwią nie może nigdy zostać Dawcą.
    A person treated with blood can never become a Donor.
12. Zaostrzona alergia jest przeciwwskazaniem czasowym dla Dawców.
    Exacerbated allergy is a temporary contraindication for Donors.
13. Po donacji organism uzupełnia braki w ciągu 3-4 dni.
    After donation, the body replenishes deficiencies within 3-4 days.

Poprawne odpowiedzi: N T T T T N N N T N N T T
Correct answers: F T T T T F F F T F F T T

Polish Realia: Brewery Operating Steps

On the occasion of Śmigus-Dyngus:
From the illustrated placemat at Browar Pivovaria, in Radom, Poland.
Najlepsze Piwa z Radomia / Warzone na Miejscu
'Best beer from Radom / Brewed on Site'

Słód 'malt'
Mielenie Słodu / śrutownik 'grinding the malt' / 'grinder'
Zacieranie / kadż zaciera + woda 'rubbing / mash tun + water'
Filtracja / kadż filtracyjna 'filtration / filtration vat'
Gotowanie / kocioł warzelny + chmiel 'cooking / boiling kettle + hops'
Schładzanie Brzeczki / wymiennik ciepła 'cooling the wort / heat exchanger'
Fermentacja / tank fermentacyjny + drożdże 'fermentation / fermentation tank + yeast'
Leżakowanie / tank leżakowy 'aging / aging tanks'
Butelka 'bottle' or Keg 'keg'

Polish Exiles Trapped Abroad

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 174-178:

The Polish troops in Scotland, Italy and Normandy, like Poles all over the world, watched in agony as Warsaw fought and died. But there was little they could do. Some long-range aircraft, Polish, British and South African, managed to reach Warsaw from airfields in Italy, but they suffered terrible losses and the supplies and ammunition they dropped often fell into German hands. Predictably, Stalin refused to let the Allies use airfields in Soviet-held territory until it was too late. The British, for their part, refused to let the London Poles fly the Parachute Brigade to Warsaw.

From the military point of view, that would have been suicidal madness. But there was political reluctance too. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the Soviet Union was carrying the main burden of a war now approaching its climax. They were determined not to let ‘Polish problems’ disturb their partnership with Stalin.

After the collapse of the rising, the Home Army in the rest of Poland began to disintegrate. A few groups retreated into the forests and carried on a hopeless guerrilla war against the new Communist authorities. Within a few years, anyone who had fought in the Home Army fell under suspicion as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, and thousands were imprisoned. The parachute couriers from Scotland were hunted down by Soviet military intelligence, and some – caught with their radios tuned to the Polish government in London – were tried and shot as ‘imperialist spies’. The true story of the Warsaw Rising, and the main role in the resistance played by the non-Communist Home Army, became forbidden topics.

From trenches in Italy, or from camps in Lowland Scotland, Wojtek’s friends watched this process in deepening despair. Although they did not know it, their country had already been abandoned by Britain and America. At the Teheran summit in late 1943, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that Poland should remain under Soviet occupation when it was liberated and that the new eastern frontier established by the Soviet invasion in 1939, leaving the cities of Lwów and Wilno (Vilnius) in Soviet hands, should become permanent. As compensation, Poland would be given the eastern provinces of Germany. The whole country would be shifted 150 miles to the west.

The Yalta conference in February 1945 did little more than publicly confirm these decisions. Postwar Europe would be divided into ‘spheres of influence’ – with Poland left in the Soviet sphere. Roosevelt and Churchill eagerly accepted Stalin’s assurance that there would be free elections in Poland.

It didn’t escape the soldiers’ notice that Poland was invited to neither of these meetings, nor to the Big Three Potsdam Conference after the Nazi surrender. It was behind closed doors that the ‘Victor Powers’ had dictated Poland’s political future.

General Sikorski had died in a plane crash at Gibraltar in 1943. His successor as prime minister in the London government was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a peasant politician who tried desperately but vainly to save what he could from the Yalta settlement. But the Communist-led Committee of National Liberation had now become the provisional government of Poland. In July 1945, a few months after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Britain and the United States withdrew recognition from the London government-in-exile and transferred it to the Communist-led regime in Warsaw.

At first, the new regime pretended to be an alliance of ‘progressive forces’ and Mikołajczyk felt able to join a coalition government in Warsaw. But the Communists controlled the security police and within two years the opposition was being crushed by violence and threats. The promised free elections produced crudely faked results. Late in 1947, Mikołajczyk fled Poland, hidden in the back of an American diplomatic car. The Communist monopoly of power soon became complete.

By now, Poland was being ruled by state terror. Veterans of the AK were still being rounded up and imprisoned. The Home Army commanders were kidnapped, taken to Moscow and tried on incredible charges such as ‘collaborating with the Nazis’. Returning soldiers who had served in the Polish armies under British command were treated as suspected traitors and saboteurs.

The Polish troops in the West, by now demobilised and living in temporary camps scattered over England and Scotland, knew what was going on. The postwar British government hoped that they would go back to Poland, but – in a rare act of guilt-driven generosity – promised to care for them if they preferred to stay.

It was a miserable choice that they all faced. Most of them longed to go home and help rebuild their beloved, shattered land. But there they would be rewarded by persecution, by the sadness of life under foreign tyranny. On the other hand, what future could they have in a land whose language they hardly spoke, where they lacked friends, where their skills beyond manual labour and soldiering seemed to count for nothing?

But for the men who lived with Wojtek in the camp at Winfield, the choice was a little easier. Before they came across that bear cub in the Persian hills, they had seen the real face of Soviet Communism and had experienced on their own bodies its brutality, its callous indifference to human suffering, its hunger and its lies. If Poland were to become like that, it would no longer be a country they could live in. These were the men who had travelled the third path, and they knew only too well what they were being offered.

The third path, like the first, began on 17 September 1939, in south-eastern Poland. But this path led eastwards, into the depths of the Soviet Union. A part of the defeated Polish army was able to escape over the border into Romania and Hungary. But some 200,000 others were captured by the Soviet invaders and became prisoners of war. Some 15,000 of them, mostly officers, were moved into three prison camps in Russia and Ukraine: Kozielsk, Starobielsk and Ostaszków.

All over the regions which had been Poland’s eastern provinces, Poles in responsible jobs – teachers, judges, police chiefs, mayors, editors – were arrested and imprisoned. Under directions from Moscow, the local Communist Parties in what was now Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine filled the posts with their own Belorussian or Ukrainian supporters.

But this turned out to be only the first act in an immense programme designed to obliterate Polish identity for ever in this part of eastern Europe. In February 1940, the Soviet authorities began the first mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population. Troops from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB, as the political security force) herded Polish families to railway stations and crammed them into unheated cattle wagons. From there, the trains set forth on journeys which could last many weeks, and which the old, the youngest children and the sick often did not survive, until the prisoners were dumped in Arctic labour camps, at railheads near Siberian mines or on the empty steppes of Kazakhstan.

More deportations followed in 1940, until by early 1941 something like 1.5 million Poles – Christians and Jews, Communists and Catholics – had been driven into exile. For the gulag empire, the life or death of these slave labourers was a matter of indifference. By the time that they were allowed to leave the camps, in the summer of 1941, between a third and a half of the deported Poles were dead from hunger, exposure, exhaustion and disease.

Poland's Underground State

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 170-173:

The couriers who reached London did not only bring despatches from the resistance. They were themselves direct witnesses to the appalling nature of the Nazi occupation. The messenger Jan Karski laid before British and American statesmen the full news of the Jewish genocide. Jan Nowak (Jeziorański) was sent out of burning Warsaw during the 1944 uprising to plead with the Allies for help. In the West, most people knew that the occupation was brutal, especially in its treatment of the Jews. But the governments of the democracies were slow, even reluctant, to believe the sheer scale and intensity of horror which the Polish messengers and the exile government revealed to them.

In German-occupied Poland, some 5.4 million people died in concentration camps or mass executions, 3 million of them Jews. That figure does not include casualties caused directly by war and, in all, Poland lost roughly a fifth of its pre-war population. Its industry and infrastructure were almost completely destroyed, while much of Poland’s cultural heritage was burned or looted. In 1944, the whole central city of Warsaw was blown up on Hitler’s orders and reduced to rubble.

After the 1939 invasion, the Nazis divided their half of Poland into two regions. The first consisted of territory in the west of the country which was simply absorbed into the Reich, the Polish population being driven out and replaced by German settlers. The second region was the ‘General Government’, a kind of colonial protectorate ruled from Kraków by the tyrannical Hans Frank. It was in the General Government that almost all the extermination camps were constructed for the Jewish Holocaust, the industrial murder of Europe’s Jews by gas. (Auschwitz lay just out[side] the General Government, in the Upper Silesian region absorbed by the Reich.)

In the General Government, the SS began a programme of selective genocide, designed to destroy the Polish elite and to prevent any national revival. Academics, creative intellectuals and the priesthood were targeted. A little later, the German authorities started to round up the first of 3.5 million men and women for slave labour in German war industries or agriculture. Villages which resisted were burned down; their men were shot, the women deported and the children either killed or kidnapped for ‘Germanisation’ in German families.

These conditions brought immense popular support for the resistance. But at first the AK concentrated on building up its strength and acquiring weapons, and it was not until 1942 that widespread attacks on the German occupiers began. The price for resistance, even for disobeying regulations, was usually death. In the cities, the Germans carried out random mass round-ups of ‘hostages’ who were lined up against walls and shot, their bodies left lying on the street as a warning against defiance or disobedience. Ghettos were set up in the towns, as a prelude to the Jewish genocide, and the penalty for hiding an escaped Jew was immediate execution for the rescuer and his or her whole family.

In spite of these risks, the underground state survived and proliferated. This was not a new idea. During and after the January rising of 1863, the insurgents had established a ‘parallel nation’ which preserved Polish identity through illegal publishing, education and even clandestine courts. The AK’s arms and explosives were captured from the Germans, and later parachuted in from the West. But the resistance was able to do little to help the Warsaw Ghetto Rising in April 1943, as Jewish fighters decided to die fighting rather than go passively to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

By the end of 1943, AK partisan units were in control of many districts of rural Poland, especially the forests and hills of the old eastern borderlands which now lay behind German lines. But once again, strategic problems emerged. In 1943, the plan of the government-in-exile and the AK command inside Poland had been to harry the Germans as they retreated and then to join the Soviet armies as they drove the Wehrmacht out of Poland. But early in 1944, as Soviet troops advanced across the pre-war Polish frontiers, it became clear that the Russians had no intention of restoring Polish authority in the regions they had seized in 1939.

Worse still, they treated the AK units which welcomed them as potential enemies. The Polish partisans were offered a choice between arrest and conscription into the Red Army. Places liberated by the Home Army were handed over to the People’s Army, the Communist partisans, and to their Committee for National Liberation (PKWN). This body had been set up in Moscow as the nucleus for a future Communist government of Poland.

Aiding the Polish Resistance

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 169-170:

The second path back to a free Poland lay through resistance within Poland itself. This meant almost exclusively resistance to the German occupation. The massive deportations of the Polish population from the eastern borderlands annexed by the Soviet Union made partisan warfare there almost impossible to organise. In any case, the Nazi invasion in June 1941 transformed the Soviet Union from enemy into ‘gallant ally’.

As the September campaign ended in 1939, Polish units – cavalry as well as infantry – were already taking to the forests and mountains. In cities and towns, centres of patriotic conspiracy sprang up. Poland had been defeated but had not surrendered, and there were to be almost no collaborators with the Nazi occupation. As the historian Norman Davies has put it, ‘there was never any Polish Quisling, for the simple reason that in Poland the Nazis never really tried to recruit one.’ Their long-term plan for the Poles was to enslave and ultimately to exterminate them, not to enlist them as allies. This gave the Poles a simple moral choice: to fight or to be obliterated.

By November 1939, Sikorski in France was in contact with many of these resistance groups, drawing them together into a coherent command structure answering to the government-in-exile. The movement eventually took the name of Armia Krajowa (Home Army) or ‘AK’ for short. After Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, a separate, militant but much smaller Communist resistance appeared, the ‘People’s Guard’ or ‘People’s Army’ (AL). But its relations with the AK were wary, and it took orders from the underground Communist leadership rather than from Sikorski’s government in London.

As German repression and deportations for forced labour grew more intense, the AK was joined by ‘peasant battalions’ raised from the countryside. By 1943, it had become the biggest resistance movement in the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe, eventually numbering over 400,000 men and women. But the AK itself was only the military wing of a complete underground state, equipped with a Delegatura representing the exile government, with ‘councils’ drawn from the main political parties, and with most of the apparatus of a normal country down to a chain of clandestine universities and a vigorous illegal press.

For the London government-in-exile, keeping in touch with the AK and its affiliates was difficult; dangerous but crucial. In Scotland, at training centres at Polmont and Largo or at the Polish ‘spy school’ in Glasgow, agents were trained as parachutists and radio operators and dropped back into Poland from long-range aircraft. Many were lost, but gradually regular and reliable radio communication between the Delegatura, the AK command and the London government was established. Even riskier was the return journey of couriers from Poland, sometimes smuggled on neutral ships through Scandinavia, sometimes – later in the war – picked up by Allied light aircraft from secret airstrips. (In July 1944, the AK used one of these flights to deliver to the British the working parts and guidance system of a prototype V-2 rocket, stolen from a Nazi missile range.)

Era of Polish Partitions & Rebellions

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 155-157:

But after the Second Partition, Poland’s last king – Stanisław August – and his advisers suddenly launched a dazzling programme of political and social reform, based on the principles of the American Revolution and the European Enlightenment. Poland set up the first ministry of education in Europe, and in 1791 adopted the Constitution of the Third of May, modernising the whole state structure and introducing a limited version of civil rights.

It was far too late. The Constitution enraged Catherine II, the Russian empress; she saw it as a deliberate provocation which would bring the democratic principles of the French Revolution up to her own borders. The armies tramped forward again, and the Third Partition of 1795 finally wiped what was left of Poland off the map. The eastern regions, later including Warsaw, went to Russia. The Prussian kings took what remained of western Poland, while the Habsburg Empire held southern Poland and the province of Galicia, including the city of Kraków.

There followed 123 years in which Poland did not officially exist. The three partitioning powers agreed that the very name should never be used again. Especially in the Russian area, there was a sustained effort to abolish Polish identity by suppressing the language, discriminating against the Catholic faith and criminalising those who tried to celebrate Poland’s rich culture or tell the truth about its history.

This policy was an almost total failure. Polish national identity retreated into a continuous national conspiracy against the foreign occupants, which preserved culture and tradition and often erupted into armed insurrections. The first of these took place in 1795, as the Third Partition closed over the country. Led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Wallace-like popular hero, peasant armies won early victories until they were overwhelmed by Russian numbers. A few years later, in 1812, Napoleon promised to restore Polish independence as he invaded Russia. Tens of thousands of Poles joined his armies, fighting not only in Russia but in Austria, Italy, Spain and even in Haiti. They shed their blood in vain, but the memory of Napoleonic reforms to Poland’s legal and administrative system was preserved, and revived when Poland regained its independence a century later.

In 1830, another insurrection – the November Uprising – broke out in Warsaw and rapidly spread. It took the Russians a year of hard fighting to defeat the rebels. Fierce repression followed, and almost the whole intellectual elite of Poland, most of whom had fought in or helped to organise the rising, went into exile in western Europe. The Great Emigration in effect made Paris the political capital of Poland for the next 80 years. And for the rest of the century Poland’s literary and musical culture – now reaching its dazzling zenith in the work of the poets Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and the composer Frédéric Chopin – was almost entirely created in France.

There were other, lesser, insurrections and a network of Polish patriotic conspiracies spread over Europe. But the next full-scale rebellion – the January Uprising – did not take place until 1863. Once again, the Poles fought in their streets and in their forests, and held out for over a year. Once again, the collapse of the rising was followed by hangings and police terror, and by the familiar sight of columns of chained men and women being marched away across the snow to Siberian captivity.

But the disaster of the January Uprising led to a change of mood in Poland. There was a feeling that the time for ‘romantic’, sacrificial rebellions was over. Instead, Poland should concentrate on patient, ‘positivist’ campaigns to build up the nation’s economic strength and modernise its social structures. In the Prussian partition, which after 1871 became part of a united German Empire, Polish farmers fought a long and successful struggle by legal and peaceful means to defend their land against Bismarck’s policy of German colonisation.

When Scots Profited in Poland

From the Epilogue by Neal Ascherson in Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 152-154:

But Poland was not always a victim nation. In the early Middle Ages, the Christian kingdom of Poland united with the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the ‘Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’, and for several centuries the Commonwealth dominated east-central Europe. It was a strange, ramshackle structure, in many ways archaic but in other ways curiously appealing to the political ideals of our own democracy. The Commonwealth, ruled by an elected king, was multi-ethnic and in general tolerant of differences. Ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Tatars, Ruthenians, Germans, Lithuanians, Belorussians, Armenians and Jews managed to live together, culturally distinct but united in loyalty to the Polish Crown. The diversity of faiths – Catholic Christian, Orthodox, Uniate, Lutheran and Calvinist, Islamic and Judaic – caused no serious problems until the Counter-Reformation began to impose a dominant Catholic identity upon Poland.

And Poland became rich. From the fifteenth century on, the demand for Polish wheat to feed the rapidly-growing populations of the Netherlands, northern France and England began to make profits for Polish landowners. It was now that the Polish connection with Scotland began. From the early sixteenth century, carefully recruited groups of Scottish settlers sailed across the North Sea and the Baltic to Danzig (Gdańsk) and fanned out across the basin of the Vistula river. Along its tributaries, they founded small, tightly structured colonies which organised and financed the transport of grain down to the Baltic. Their numbers are disputed, but the Scots who joined these colonies over their two centuries of peak prosperity, most of them from the east and north-east coast of Scotland, must have been counted in the tens of thousands.

It was Scotland’s first planned stride into the outside world. And yet this episode was until recently almost completely forgotten by Scottish historians – although well remembered by the Poles. Scots enjoying the Crown’s protection became generals, bankers and even potentates – Alexander Chalmers from Dyce, near Aberdeen, was several times mayor of Warsaw. The traveller William Lithgow, from Lanark, who walked through Poland in the early seventeenth century, wrote that ‘for auspiciousness, I may rather tearme [Poland] to be a Mother or Nurse, for the youth and younglings of Scotland who are yearly sent hither in great numbers . . . And certainely Polland may be tearmed in this kind to be the mother of our Commons and the first commencement of all our best Merchants’ wealth, or at least most part of them.’

But by the early eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was growing weaker. On either flank of Poland, new and hostile states were emerging. The duchy of Muscovy expanded to become Russia of the Tsars, consolidating central power over what is now European Russia and pushing eastwards to grasp the infinite wealth of Siberia. To the west, small and backward German princedoms along the Baltic coast now merged under the new and formidable kingdom of Prussia.

The Polish Commonwealth was really a ‘pre-modern’ state. Central authority was weak, regional diversity was wide and political influence lay in the hands of the nobility. The new Russia and Prussia, by contrast, represented a very different and ‘modern’ model of power. These were grimly centralised and authoritarian states, intolerant of ethnic or religious diversity and – above all – obsessed with the training and equipping of large professional armies.

Culturally, the Polish Commonwealth considered itself more civilised than its big neighbours, whom Poles regarded as primitive. In return, the despots of Prussia and Russia loathed the relative freedom of Polish society, regarding it as a threat to their own strictly controlled systems of government. In addition, both had historical reasons to resent Poland. On the Prussian side, the Teutonic Knights had been defeated by the Poles in the fifteenth century, frustrating their drive to conquer the whole Baltic region. The Russians had suffered repeated Polish invasions and political interference in earlier centuries, in the times of Muscovy’s weakness, and saw Poland as a deadly rival for control over Ukraine and Russia’s western borderlands.

Food Rationing in Scotland, 1945

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 61-62:

In Scotland the food allowance each person had to get by on at that time included the following: 2 ounces of bacon or ham, a finger of cheese (1.5 ounces), 7 ounces of butter or margarine, 2 ounces of cooking fats, 8 ounces of sugar, 2 ounces of tea (about 20 teabags), 4 ounces of sweets and 1 shilling’s-worth (5p) of meat. It doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Except this wasn’t a day’s ration – it was for one full week. Except for the bacon. That was two weeks’ allowance. Other staples such as bread, bananas and even potatoes (throughout 1947) were also rationed. As for fresh eggs, you could have one a fortnight – if you could lay your hands on one. Most urban families made do with the vile-tasting powdered version for the skimpy amounts of baking they could eke out of their precious rations of flour and sugar. On the plus side, people were allowed three pints of milk a week.

In fact, milk was just about the only commodity with which the Attlee government was generous; as part of its drive to maintain the nutritional health of the country’s children, in 1946 free school milk was introduced for all pupils up to the age of 18. This was later reduced to primary schools only. A quarter of a century later, free school milk was finally phased out by Margaret Thatcher. She was dubbed Thatcher the Milk Snatcher by her political opponents.

Those of us of a certain age well remember the crates of one-third-of-a-pint bottles which had to be humped in from the playground into the classrooms. For some unfathomable reason, once indoors, the crates always seemed to be stacked next to the school radiators, ensuring the milk was lukewarm by the time it was dispensed. It is one of life’s ironies that, despite food shortages and rationing, the children of postwar Scotland were better fed than many of their modern counterparts. That, in large part, was down to the free milk ration and free school meals (about half the UK’s pupils qualified for them), plus daily doses of free cod liver oil and concentrated orange juice which mothers determinedly rammed down the throats of protesting offspring.

Polish General Maczek in Scotland

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 22-24:

During the war years a large contingent of Polish soldiers lived in camps in nearby Symington and Douglas. They were under the charge of General Stanisław Maczek who was impressed by the warm reception from local communities. But then news of the Poles’ courage and tenacity in battle had reached Scotland long before the men, so the Scots already knew the value of those soldiers as allies.

A legendary commander, respected by friend and foe alike, General Maczek led the only Polish units not to lose a single battle after Poland was invaded by the Germans in 1939. Under blitzkreig attack, his forces made a dogged defence but their efforts were eclipsed when Russia invaded from the rear and they were forced to withdraw. Maczek was loved by his soldiers, who called him Baca, a Galician name for a shepherd, not dissimilar from the Scottish Gaelic word, Buachaille.

When Germany finally capitulated, General Maczek went on to become commanding officer of all Polish forces in the United Kingdom until their demobilisation in 1947. After the war he chose to remain in Scotland, a de Gaulle-like figure who epitomised the struggle for a free Poland. Like many other Polish soldiers, he felt unable to return to Poland under the Soviet regime.

The thousands of Polish servicemen left their mark on the Scottish Borders in many ways. Some stayed and created new lives and new families. One of their most enduring gifts was the open air map of Scotland they built in the grounds of what is now the Barony Castle Hotel in Eddleston, Peebleshire. While fighting in Holland, General Maczek once had been shown an impressive outdoor map of land and water in the Netherlands, demonstrating the working of the waterways which had proved such an obstacle to the Polish forces’ progress in 1944. At Eddleston the general and his fellow exiles decided to replicate the Love at First Sight 19 map; they conceived the Great Polish Map of Scotland as a permanent, open-air, three-dimensional reminder of Scotland’s hospitality to their compatriots. In 1975 the coastline and relief map of Scotland were laid out precisely by Kazimierz Trafas, a young geography student from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków. An infrastructure was built to surround it with a ‘sea’ of water and, at the general’s request, a number of Scotland’s main rivers on the map were even arranged to flow from headwaters pumped into the interiors of its mountains. It was, and still is, an amazing feat of engineering and design.

Sadly, it was allowed to fall into disrepair. After long years of dereliction, the first steps are now being taken towards its restoration. One day soon people will again marvel at General Maczek’s Great Polish Map of Scotland in the grounds of Barony Castle, once the home of the Murrays of Elibank, and later the Black Barony Hotel. In the war years the house and grounds seem to have been in use by Polish forces, and even then an outdoor outline map was one of the features used to help plan the defence of the Scottish coastline which was under threat of invasion after the fall of Norway. Whether this was really the case, I have not been able to ascertain. Returned to commercial use in the late 1940s, years later the hotel came into the possession of a member of the Polish community who had been billeted there in wartime. He was a great friend of the general, and gave him permanent use of a suite in the hotel.

General Maczek never did return to live in his beloved Poland; by the time it achieved genuine freedom, age and infirmity had taken their toll. In his later years he lived in Edinburgh. He died in 1994 at the age of 102, his name still synonymous with the history of World War II.

King's Own Scottish Borderers

From Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero, by Aileen Orr (Birlinn, 2014), Kindle pp. 21-22:

In passing, it should be said that all Borderers have an abiding affection for the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Raised in 1689 to defend Edinburgh against the Jacobites, the Kosbies, as the regiment is often called by the general public (but never by the soldiers themselves), has a long and illustrious history. Still traditionally recruiting from Dumfries and Galloway, Lanarkshire and the Borders, it has served in many campaigns including the Napoleonic Wars, both World Wars and the Gulf War. There are six Victoria Crosses among its soldiers. In August 2006, despite a groundswell of protest, the regiment was amalgamated with the Royal Scots to form the Royal Scots Borderers and became the 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland.

In the KOSB my grandfather achieved the rank of colour sergeant and was a strict disciplinarian with his men. When his regiment was back in Scotland and the men were returning to their barracks in Berwick upon Tweed after being out on military manoeuvres, he would first have them run up Halidon Hill and then double-time them across to Winfield Camp at Sunwick to have a brew with Wojtek. It was a social cuppa that both the squaddies and the bear enjoyed greatly. There can’t have been many farms in Scotland where you would come across a man talking over the fence to a bear which appeared to be hanging on his every word. But Sunwick was one of them.

Well before Wojtek’s arrival in Berwickshire, Polish soldiers had arrived in large numbers in many of the towns and villages along the Scottish Borders. In 1942 they came to the pleasant and peaceful town of Duns. Whereas some troops had received a lukewarm welcome when passing through, Duns did the Polish troops proud. The cheers of the townsfolk were tinged with more than a little relief. Earlier, when the Poles’ tanks and heavy artillery were first seen on the horizon, there had been a local scare that Duns was being invaded by enemy forces. When it was discovered the new troops were Poles, the flags on the street came out in earnest. 

Younger generations have little notion of the huge number of people that moved in great waves through Scotland during and immediately after the war. Many were military personnel sent to the oddest corners of the country in strategic deployments against the German juggernaut. Tens of thousands of soldiers were bivouacked in normally sparsely populated areas of countryside. The military equivalent of fully fledged townships would spring up in fields virtually overnight, like mushrooms. It meant a tremendous influx of people into rural areas, and the Borders was no exception.

Polish Easter Foods

My latest compilation from Culture.pl includes an article by Mai Jones listing 10 Traditional Dishes of Polish Easter. "White sausage, rye soup, cakes with poppy seed or cottage cheese... The numerous traditional Easter delicacies in Poland are surprising, sophisticated and inspired by spring."

Here is an abbreviated list of the dishes.

Biała kiełbasa: "This white sausage is made of unsmoked minced pork, with the addition of beef and veal, covered in a thin layer of pork casings and seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and marjoram."

Żurek or żur: "a soup made of homemade or store-bought sourdough from rye flour. It's garnished with boiled white sausage and boiled egg halves."

Eggs: "Whether served boiled, stuffed, fried or with mayo, there's no getting away from them. The decorative devilled egg is a hard-boiled egg, halved and filled with a mixture of the yolks, mayonnaise, mustard, onion and horseradish cream."

Śledź: Herring "is served gutted and filleted, in pieces that have been marinated in vinegar and oil, with or without vegetable. It's typically smothered with chopped, raw onion."

Chrzan: "produces pungent vapours and makes the eyes water, but white or red horseradish relish pairs well with the variety of cold cuts. The fiery relish draws out more of the meat flavour. The red type is called ćwikła and its colour is due to the addition of beetroot."

Mazurek: "The flat shortbread can be made of different kinds of dough and toppings – for example, marmalade, chocolate glazing, dried fruit or nuts."

Sernik: "a rich creamy baked cheesecake that differs from its American counterpart in cheese. You could try to replace the exclusively Polish cheese called twaróg with country, cottage, quark, curd or ricotta cheese, but it won't do the trick. Twaróg is more dense, sweeter, and less wet than those cheeses and less smooth than ricotta.... The Eastern Orthodox Church has a twaróg-based equivalent – the truncated, pyramid-shaped paskha."

Babka: "The tall, airy Easter babka is a no-knead yeast cake baked in a Bundt pan. It can be laced with rum syrup and drizzled with icing, but custom dictates that it has no filling."

Makowiec: " a poppy seed roll spun like a strudel. With poppy seeds as the main ingredient, it uses the same type of dough as the babka."

Easter lamb: "Made entirely of sugar and shaped like a lamb, this is the traditional centrepiece of the Polish Easter table and Easter basket. It often has a miniature red flag with a cross."

Polish Realia: On the Farm

Vocabulary from Muzeum Wsi Radomskiej 'Village Museum of Radom'

dom wiejski 'farmhouse, country house'
dom ludowy 'people's house' (community center?)
dworek 'manor house'
chlew 'pigsty'
kurnik 'henhouse'
obora 'cattle barn'
stajnia 'stable (for horses)'
stodoła 'barn'
strzecha 'thatch (roof)'
sławojka 'outhouse privy' (named after 1928 PM Felicjan Sławojka Składowski)

ciągnik rolniczy 'farm tractor' (cf. ciągnąć 'pull', pociąg 'locomotive')
brona 'harrow' (and 'portcullis'!)
grabie 'rake'
kosa 'sickle'
kosiarka konna 'horse-drawn mower'
pług konny 'horse-drawn plow'
sierp 'scythe' (cf. Sierpień 'August')
widły 'pitchfork' (cf. widelec 'food fork')
zgrabiarka konna do siana 'horse-drawn hay rake'
żniwiarka konna 'horse-drawn harvester'

pszczoła 'bee'
pszczelarstwo 'beekeeping in apiaries'
pszczelarka 'beekeeper' (pszczelarze 'beekeepers')
bartnistwo 'beekeeping in wild beehives'
bartnistka 'beekeeper'
pasieka 'apiary'
ul 'beehive'
ule rozbieralne 'movable beehives'

wiatrak koźlak 'post windmill' (which swivels on a post)
łopata wiatraka 'windmill blade'
wał wiatraka 'windmill shaft' (blade axle)
wiatr 'wind'
młyn wodny 'watermill'
koło wodne 'waterwheel'
koryto 'trough, chute'
żuraw studzienny 'crane well, shadoof' (cf. żuraw ptak 'crane bird')

Polish Realia: Forest Layers

Warstwe Lasu i Ich Mieszkańcy Forest Layers and Their Inhabitants

Las to ekosystem, którym szata roślinna powiązana jest ze światem zwierżąt i nieżywionymy tworami przyrody. We wszystkich biocenozach leśnich rośliny konkurują między sobą o światło. Rezultatem tego jest warstwowa budowa lasu. Prowadzi ona do odpowiedniego wykorzystania przestrzeni lasu przez rośliny, tworzać sprzyjające warunki do życia dla różnych zwierżat.
A forest is an ecosystem through which the vegetation is connected to the world of animals and not nourished by the creations of nature. In all forest biocenoses [= life assemblages], plants compete with each other for light. The result is a layered forest structure. It leads to the proper use of the forest space by plants, creating favorable living conditions for various animals.

Korony Drzew Tree Crowns

Najwyższą warstwę lasu stanowią drzewa. Ich korony zamieszkują niektóre zwierżeta np. [= na przykład (e.g.)] owady, wiewiórki, kuny, i liczne gatunki ptaków.
The highest layer of the forest is made up of trees. Their crowns are inhabited by some animals, e.g., insects, squirrels, martens, and numerous species of birds.

Pictured and named: buk pospolity 'common beech', świerk pospolity 'Norway spruce', sosna zwyczajna 'Scotch pine'; zawisak borowiec 'hawk moth', brudnica mniszka 'nun moth'; wiewiórka 'squirrel'; dzięcioł duży 'great spotted woodpecker', puchacz 'eagle owl', wilga 'oriole'

Podszyt Undergrowth

Poniżej do wysokości około 5 m jest podszyt. Warstwa, którą tworzą niskie drzewa i krzewa dobrze znoszące zacienienie tj. [= to jest (i.e.)] głóg, tarnina, dereń, czeremka, kalina, kruszyna, jałowiec, leszczyna. W podszyciu żerują m. in. [między innymi (among others)]: sarna, dzik, jeleń, zając, lis.
Below to a height of about 5 m is the undergrowth. A layer formed by low trees and shrubs that tolerate shade well, i.e. hawthorn, blackthorn, dogwood, cherry, viburnum, buckthorn, juniper, hazel. In the undergrowth feed, among others: roe deer, wild boar, deer, hare, fox.

Pictured and named: kalina koralowa 'coral virburnum'; kruszyna pospolita 'common buckthorn', leszczyna pospolita 'common hazel'; modraszek 'blue butterfly'; paż królowe 'queen's swallowtail'; orzesznica 'dormouse'; sikora bogatka 'great tit'; sikora modra 'blue tit'

Runo Leśne Forest Floor

Runo to warstwa do której dociera mało światła i jest wilgotno. Porastają ją drobne krzewinki - borówki, jagody, liczne zioła, trawy, mchy, porosty, paprocie, oraz grzyby. W tym piętrze lasu schronienie znajdują liczne owady, pająki, ropuchy, żaby, jaszczurki, węże, jeże, i myszy leśne.
The floor is a layer that receives little light and is damp. It is overgrown with small shrubs - blueberries, berries, numerous herbs, grasses, mosses, lichens, ferns, and mushrooms. This floor of the forest is shelter to numerous insects, spiders, toads, frogs, lizards, snakes, hedgehogs, and forest mice.

Pictured and named: borowik szlachetny 'boletus mushroom', muchomor czerwony 'red toadstool'; konwalia majowa 'mayflower', pióropusznik strusi 'ostrich fern'; jeż europejski 'western hedgehog', ropucha szara 'common toad', padalec zwychajna 'common slowworm'

Ściółka Mulch

Ściółka to warstwa, która leźy bezpośrednio na glebie. Tworzą ją opadłe liście, szyszki, owoce, nasiona oraz martwe szczątki roślin i zwierząt. Występują tu drobne organizmy, odźywiające się szczątkami organicznymi tj. bakterie, grzyby, glony, pajęczaki, wije.
Mulch is a layer that lies directly on top of the soil. It consists of fallen leaves, cones, fruits, seeds and dead remains of plants and animals. There are small organisms that feed on organic remains, such as bacteria, fungi, algae, arachnids, and myriapods.

Pictured and named: mrówka rudnica 'red ant', żuki leśne 'dung beetle', ślimak winniczek 'vine snail', skulica i krocionóg 'types of millipedes'

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Polish Realia: Beneficial Insects

Owady Pozyteczne Beneficial Insects

Ciekawostka Trivia
Mrówki rudnice nazywane są sanitariuszami lasu. Zjadają bowiem owady będące szkodnikami lasu, ograniczając tym samym ich liczebność. Ponadto pełnia rolę czyściceli, usuwając chore osobniki i martwe szczątki zwierząt.
Red ants are called the sanitary workers of the forest. Because they eat other insects that are forest pests, thereby limiting their numbers. In addition, they fill a role as scavengers, removing diseased individuals and dead animal remains. 

Sanitariusze / Sanitary workers: Mrówka rudnica / red ants; żuk leśny / dung beetles

Drapieżcy / Predators: Przekrasek mróweczka / ant beetles; Biedronka siedmiokropka / lady bugs; Biegacz skórzasty / carabus beetles

Pasożytnicze / Parasites: Gąsienicznik czarny / ichneumon wasps; Bzyg prążkowany / marmalade hoverfly

Zapylacze / Pollinators: Pszczoła miodna / honey bees; Trzmiel ziemny / bumble bees

Próchnojady / Wood-eaters: Dyląż garbarz / root borers; Jelonek rogacz /stag beetles

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Polish Realia: Dead Trees in the Woods

Martwe Drewno w Lesie Dead Wood in the Forest

Martwe drewno jest naturalnym i niezbędnym wskładnikiem ekosystemów leśnych. Pozostające w lesie, obumierające i martwe drzewa a także ich fragmenty nie bezwartościowy materiał zaśmiecający las. Jest to nadzwyczaj istotny dla prawidłowego funkcjonowania ekosystemu leśnego zespół mikrośrodowisk życia i miejsc schronienia się lub gniazdowania ogromnej liczby gatunków organizmów żywych (zwierząt, roślin, grzybów).
Dead wood is a natural and essential component of forest ecosystems. Dying and dead trees remaining in the forest, as well as their fragments, are not worthless material littering the forest. It is an extremely important for the proper functioning of the forest ecosystem, a set of microenvironments of life and places of shelter or nesting of a huge number of species of living organisms (animals, plants, fungi).

Martwe drewno może mieć różną postać. Od obumarłych konarów na żywych drzewach poprzez obumierające drzewa, do martwych, leżących na ziemi lub stojących drzew różnej wielkości, leżących na ziemi drobnych gałęzi, wykrotów i złomów. Stopień zaawansowania rozkładu drewna również może być bardzo zróżnicowany. Od drewna jeszcze w pełni świeżego do silnie zbutwiałego przyjmującego postać murszu, przerośniętego grzybnią i korzeniami roślin oraz porośniętego poduchami mchów.
Dead wood can take many forms. From dead branches on living trees, through dying trees, to dead, fallen or standing trees of various sizes, small branches and debris lying on the ground. The degree of advancement of wood decomposition can also vary greatly. From wood still fully fresh to heavily rotten in the form of mulch, overgrown with mycelium and plant roots and overlaid with moss cushions.

Te różnorodne mikrośrodowiska są miejscem życia nadzwyczaj szerokiego spektrum organizmów. Grzyby rozpoczynają i cały czas uczestniczą w procesie rozkładu drewna aż do jego całkowitego rozpadu. Owady i inne bezkręgowce z wielu grup systematicznych żywią się martwym drewnem w różnych stadiach jego rozkładu lub zjadają zasiedlające je inne organizme. Natomiast zwierzęta wykorzystują martwe próchniejące drewno jako miejsce gniazdowania, schronienia, bądz zimowania.
These diverse microenvironments are home to an extremely wide range of organisms. Fungi begin and participate in the process of decomposition of wood until it completely decomposes. Insects and other invertebrates from many systematic groups feed on dead wood at various stages of its decomposition or eat other organisms that inhabit it. On the other hand, animals use dead rotting wood as a place to nest, shelter, or winter.

Martwe drzewa tak naprawdę nie są martwe, bowien żyją życiem ogromnej liczby zasiedlających je organizmów.
Dead trees are not truly dead, because they live the lives of a huge number of organisms that inhabit them.

Ciekawostka! Trivia!
Kloda świerkowa kłada się przecętnie przez 60-80 lat, rozkład starych pni dębowych trwa często nawet 100 lat. Proces rozkładu przebiega szybciej w miejscach wilgotnych i na drewnie leżącym na gruncie niż w miejscach suchych i na drzewie obumarłym jeszcze stojącym.
A spruce log lies for 60-80 years, the decomposition of old oak trunks often lasts up to 100 years. The decomposition process takes place faster in damp places and on wood lying on the ground than in dry places and on dead wood still standing.

Martwe i obumierające drzewa wykorzystywane są przez szereg gatunków ptaków - dziuplaków. Dzięcioły w takich właśnie drzewach wykuwają dziuple a inne dziuplaki zasiedlają je i wykorzystują jako miejsce gniazdowania i schronienia.
Dead and dying trees are used by a number of species of birds - hole-nesters. Woodpeckers carve hollows in such trees, and other hole-nesters inhabit them and use them as nesting and sheltering places.

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Animals pictured:
Rębacz pstry 'ribbed pine borer, spotted sawfly' Rhagium inquisitor
Gmachówka drzewotoczna 'carpenter ant' Campolotus ligniperda
Dyląż garbąrz 'longhorn beetle' Prionus sp.
Kruszczyca złotawka 'golden buckthorn' Cetonia aurata
Jelonek rogacz 'stag beetle' Lucanus cervus
Paśnik palączasty 'bowhead beetle' Plagionotus arcuatus

Ryjówka aksamitna 'common shrew' Sorex araneus
Jeż europejski 'western hedgehog' Erinaceus europaeus

Dzięciol duży 'great spotted woodpecker' Dendrocopos major
Dzięciol zielony 'green woodpecker' Picus viridis

Polish Realia: Mushrooms

Jaki to Grzyb? What Mushroom Is This?

Goryczak żółciowy 'yellow bitter, bile bitterness' (edible), Tylopilus felleus

Pieprznik jadalny (kurka) 'Chanterelle' (edible), Cantharellus cibarius

Lisówka pomarańczowa 'orange fox' (inedible), Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca

Muchomor sromotnikowa 'green fly agaric toadstool' (poisonous), Amanita phalloides

Mleczaj rydz 'milk thistle' (edible), Lactarius deliciosus

Borowik szatański 'red bolete' (poisonous), Rubroboletus satanas

Koźlarz czerwony 'red lectern' (edible), Leccinum aurantiacum 

Krowiak podwinięty (olszówka) 'curled cowhide' (poisonous), Paxillus involutus

Borowik szlachetny 'Boletus edulis' (edible), Boletus edulis

Muchomor czerwony 'red fly agaric toadstool' (poisonous), Amanita muscaria

Podgrzybek brunatny 'brown bay bolete' (edible), Imleria badia

Maślak zwyczajny 'common butternut squash' (edible), Suillus luteus

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Making a Model Sports Town, 1960

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle p. 44:

In 1960, the Ministry of Education designated Tanashi a “model sports town” for excellence in “shakai taiiku,” a phrase perhaps best translated as public recreational athletics. The education authorities became involved because, as the Tanashi mayor noted years later, physical education was considered a component of the social studies curriculum (shakai kyōiku). Along the same lines, the local newspaper would later refer to Little League as a form of “extracurricular education” (kagai kyōiku). A nominal matching subsidy accompanied the “model town” designation wherein the town took on a mandate to form a special association to promote sports. Dr. Sasa was a logical choice for president of the Tanashi City Taiiku Kyōkai Physical Education Association, which became an umbrella organization akin to what in an American context would be called a city recreation commission. This quasi-official advisory group was closely affiliated with the Tanashi City Education Department but run by local business and community leaders. It oversaw the activities of pre-existing sporting groups and promoted new ones. As of 1961, this recreation commission oversaw sports groups in nanshiki [soft rubber] baseball, kendo, judo, swimming, archery, track and field, and tennis. The new Little League was formed in 1962 under the commission’s purview with Sasa as the inaugural president and the pre-existing nanshiki league’s directors kept as the new league’s board.

Early Little League Sponsors in Japan

From Rounding the Bases: The Story of Little League Baseball in Japan, by James J. Orr (U. Hawaii Press, 2026), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Japanese society had not yet reached the level of affluence sufficient for parents to afford registration fees, so leagues had to be fully supported by sponsorships and donations. Each team required from $200 to $300 in 1959 dollars for equipment, uniforms, insurance, and charter fees. For their original Tiger squad, Hatch and his wife bought the uniforms from Takada and sewed on the team name and Little League patches. With more kids wanting to play, soon enough it became apparent they needed sponsors if they were going to equip all their teams adequately. Hatch was lucky in that among the first journalists to cover his team was Bobby Hirai, a colorful Canadian-born reporter for the Mainichi Newspapers who had an entrepreneurial bent. Hirai helped Hatch make important connections in the Japanese and foreign business and media communities.

Hirai had a long career as a facilitator between Japanese and foreign celebrities and corporations. The son of the chief officer at Mitsui Bussan’s Toronto Office before WWII, Bobby grew up with a love for ice hockey and dancing. Repatriated to Japan as a teenager with his family in 1940, he began two years of intensive study, including formal Japanese, at Keimei, a special school set up by the Mitsui family for returnee children, followed by a year at Waseda’s International School before beginning Keio University. During the wartime era of animosity toward the English-speaking world, his mother insisted he keep a secret English-language diary to maintain his fluency, and despite official government policies mandating frugality—“luxury is the enemy,” as the slogan went—he routinely visited the Philippine embassy carrying a change of clothes so as to enjoy their surreptitious dance parties. Immediately after the war his natural English ability was quickly recognized by two reporters for the G.I. newspaper Yank, one of whom was the famous postwar literary agent Knox Berger. As a gofer and translator, for about half a year he scrounged everything from printing presses for the G.I. publication to lodgings for his reporters. It was during this stint that he was present when former wartime Prime Minister Gen. Tōjō Hideki famously shot himself in an attempted suicide moments before his arrest for war crimes. After returning to and graduating from Keio University, Hirai worked as a journalist for Mainichi. Eventually he created a career for himself handling logistics for visiting foreign celebrities and mediating between Japanese and foreign, mainly U.S., corporations.

Although Hirai never served in the U.S. military, his Canadian background and Occupation-era interpretation services made him a member of what historian Guthrie-Shimizu calls a community of entrepreneurial, transnational brokers like “Cappy” Harada that helped mediate American and Japanese baseball interests. Men like Harada and Hirai benefited from connections in a “new military-sanctioned sports entertainment business that would become a cultural manifestation of the American overseas military presence and a staple of American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.”

In the post-Occupation 1950s, the conditions favorable to American-led sports initiatives still applied for Little League, and Hirai helped Hatch tap into these resources. In addition to favorable coverage Hirai came to Hatch’s aid when he was having trouble getting the official league rules translated. And Hirai arranged for Hatch to meet a number of key expat businessmen who provided essential support for his teams.

First among these American supporters was Davey Jones, a longtime Pan-American public relations executive based in Tokyo, and “one of the boys” in Bobby’s group of cronies in Tokyo. Pan-American had a history of supporting sporting events in Japan, and Jones proved an ally of Hatch’s Little League. Following Hirai’s introduction, Jones and Pan-Am sponsored a luncheon meeting with many other members of the American business community in Tokyo on July 12 in that first year. These business leaders created a board for the Kunitachi Little League, with Hatch as its president and officers from Pan-American, the Tokyo Lions Club, as well as the Kunitachi city government. Pan-American and the Lions Club (#503) became the main sponsors in 1959, and the new league’s four team names reflected their sponsorship: After the Tigers, the other teams were the Lions, the Clippers, and the Orions (the last two after Pan-Am’s legendary prewar pan-Pacific service and icon).