Baseball's arrival on Japan's shores should be viewed to have been in 1871 — one year earlier than is commonly thought in Japan — a British historian argues, based on two separate contemporary English newspaper articles from the time about a game played that year in Yokohama.
Next year is widely believed to mark the 150th anniversary of baseball's debut in Japan, introduced by Horace Wilson, an American teacher who taught English to Japanese students at a school later known as Kaisei Gakko, currently the University of Tokyo. Wilson taught the sport to his students.
The Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Tokyo recognizes 1872 as the beginning of the sport in Japan and credits Wilson, who was hired by the Japanese government to promote the modernization of the country's education following the Meiji Restoration, as one of the people responsible.