There is little argument that the spread of baseball in Japan began with Horace Wilson, a native of Gorham, Maine, who fought in the U.S. Civil War and later moved to Tokyo as a foreign teacher hired by the Meiji government.
The question of when the game was played in Japan for the first time, however, is a murkier subject, and the widely held belief is that Wilson introduced the sport to Japan in 1872.
It was not a mystery that author and historian Rob Fitts was actively trying to solve when he stumbled upon a newspaper article containing a reference that seemed to push back the introduction of the sport in the country to an earlier date.
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