EARLY DAYS OF CRICKET IN JAPAN: J.P. MOLLISON AND THE YOKOHAMA CRICKET CLUB/YCAC
Mike Galbraith (author is indebted to an early account by John Sugiyama)
‘Life in Yokohama in the early days was singularly pleasant. Every type of sport was readily accessible.’ The club known for nearly 100 years as the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club (YCAC) and its founding cricket enthusiasts played a major role in the creation of this idyllic sporting environment fondly remembered in these words describing the 1890’s which could also have been applied to almost all of the time during the last 140 years.
South Africa in 1865 The 1st battalion of 10th’s cricket team In South Africa in 1865.
But Yokohama in January 1867 was a very different place when a twenty-two year old Scotsman named James Pender Mollison stepped off the P & O steamer Aden from Shanghai: ‘ .. the small Settlement was still a scene of devastation. Practically the whole place was destroyed, including shops of every kind, and most of the residents lost everything except what they stood in,’ he reported. He was arriving less than two months after the great fire of November 1866.
The YCAC and the sport of cricket in Japan both trace their recorded origins back to the Edo period and this remarkable man, although Mollison reported that he heard that cricket was played on the parade ground at the Camp on the Bluff before his arrival. ‘I have been told that cricket matches were played there before my time with great enthusiasm, although the place was destitute of a blade of grass,’ he wrote.
Perhaps for this reason, in 1868 Mollison, who had worked in Shanghai as a tea inspector and also played cricket there, together with his fellow cricketing enthusiast Ernest Price, a tea-taster with the firm Walsh, Hall & Co., set about getting permission from the authorities to clear and ‘turf’ 60 square meters in the middle of what was known as the ‘New Swamp’ in what is now Yokohama Koen (the park adjacent to the present Yokohama Stadium) in order to play the sport they were mad about.
Those were truly pioneering and dangerous days for foreigners in Japan. The country was about to be engulfed in a civil war (the 1868-70 Boshin war) as so-called progressive forces sought to end the 250+ year long rule of the Tokugawa shogunate. The outcome was unpredictable and the historical events on which the film Last Sumurai was based were just beginning to unfold.
Only a few years earlier Yokohama had been a sleepy little fishing village. Then the arrival of the ‘black ships’ of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 and 1854 forced the shogunate to very reluctantly open up Japan to foreign trade. Five foreign settlements were set up and granted extra-territoriality from 1859. Yokohama was finally designated as the place for a foreign settlement near Yedo, and foreign traders and diplomats started to build their residences there.
The Japanese were not happy and the emperor in 1863 even ordered that the foreigners be expelled. As a result for several years nowhere was really safe for foreigners and many were murdered. The most famous incident was when Charles Lennox Richardson was slashed to death by Satsuma samurai for not dismounting when their Daimyo passed while riding from Yokohama to Kawasaki Daishi shrine. This resulted in the Anglo-Satsuma war in 1863 and bombardment of Kagoshima. Further troubles with another major daimyo led to the bombardment of Shimonoseki. All these attacks were launched from Yokohama whose port was full of naval warships and military as well as merchants, sailing ships and steamers.
The Richardson affair led to a large garrison of British and French troops being stationed in Yokohama and thereby indirectly led to start of cricket as well as the introduction of most other contemporary sports into Japan. The Camp referred to by Mollison above was where the British troops were stationed and many of their officers were keen cricketers.
Mollison formalized the arrangements for his cricket team in a meeting in the dining room of his home and set up the Yokohama Cricket Club. Mollison was appointed president and Price became the secretary, a Mr. Murray the treasurer, and Mssrs Frazier, Hamilton and J.H. Scott of Butterfield & Swire were also named executives.
The YCC had no club house but just enough space for a pitch and outfield. The players carried their kit to the ground from the ‘Settlements’ where they lived and where was located the ‘Bar’. Here after games they drank copious amounts of cold claret and water, the favorite drink of the day.
The YCC most serious early games were against the Red-coats as Mollison called them. ‘We had some good cricket up to 1870–1871, chiefly against the officers of the Tenth Regiment who were a keen ‘cricketing lot,’ he wrote. The 10th regiment of Foot had only arrived in Yokohama in April 1868 and the officers of the 1st Battalion of the 10th had a longstanding cricket team.
10th regiment on parade at parade ground at the Camp which cricket was played first
Despite the turf, the wicket doesn’t seem to have been a good one for batsmen, especially compared with the Hong Kong cricket club where the home team batted for one a half days scoring 450 runs against the Shanghai cricket club in the first Interport between those teams in 1866, a game in which Price’s brother played but Mollison ‘too my great disappointment’ didn’t. (He did play for Shanghai in the following year when they got their revenge.)
The games were two innings affairs lasting two or more days. People working hard every weekday today maybe surprised to learn that these were played on weekdays. ‘To begin with, we had no telegrams to worry us and only two mails a month,’ Mollison wrote around 40 years later. Yep! They worked hard and even late at night to meet the deadline for the mail boats, and then most could relax and enjoy life and sports until the next mail arrived.
Detailed match reports and score cards survive relating to two games played between the YCC and the 9th in 1871. Scoring runs does not seem to have been easy and bowlers bowled a lot of wides. After 13 overs of the first innings of the first game, the YCC had managed to score only sixteen runs and of those 10 were from wides and at least one a leg bye! Mollison appears to have been a good opening bowler taking many wickets. He did bowl rather a lot of wides although not as many as some of the 9th’s bowlers. Batting number four or five, he doesn’t seem to have been a big-hitter like his friend Fraser, but he was clearly difficult to get out.
The Swamp ground was not only used for cricket but for all type of sports including rugby. Yokohama in those days had many sports clubs and increasingly many chose to use the Swamp ground.
Panorama of Swamp ground 1875
Unfortunately for Mollison and the YCC, the first battalion of the 10th Foot left Yokohama for Hong Kong in 1871 and the garrison in general shrank as the political situation in Japan stabilized under the Meiji emperor until the last troops were withdrawn in 1874.
The YCC and the other sports clubs were prospering in late 1871 when came a new dimension to sport in Yokohama appeared. The newly-formed Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club (KRAC), which survives to this day, challenged Yokohama to a rowing and athletics competition and duly arrived by ship in August of that year. Kobe had far fewer residents but unexpectedly put up a good show in the rowing and their team of three runners took most the main athletics’ prizes which caused consternation and anger in the local community regarding the poor participation and commitment of Yokohama’s male residents. Molllison’s most notable performance in athletics was to win.
From this simple start annual fixtures were to slowly emerge in a number of sports. The longest running regular sports fixtures in Japan are those between the YCC and the Kobe Cricket Club (KCC) which are now the YCAC and the KRAC. Still today these two clubs regard the Interport as the sporting highlight of the year. It was a tribute to both the ground and the interport that the 2002 Soccer World Cup was played at the Yokohama stadium covering part of the land that Mollison chose for his pitch and that the warm-up game for that final was the 113th soccer interport.
Meanwhile, the opening of the railway between Shimbashi and Yokohama in 1872 made it easier to play matches against teams from Tokyo. Leading players included McMillen of Mitsubishi, Treverthick of the Japan Railway Department, and Layard of the British Embassy.
With Yokohama now booming, more and more firms set up offices and the town quickly rose to rank alongside Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore as a leading port in the Far East. Trading houses like Jardines, Matheson & Co., Gibb Livingstone & Co., and the great tea firms like Mourlyan Heiman & Co. employed many very good cricketers and so there was no shortage of good players. ‘With business good and nothing to worry us, life was a pleasant thing in the early seventies,’ wrote Mollison.
Officers of the 1st battalion of the 9th in Yokohama 1871
Nevertheless, it was during the mid 1870’s that the club faced its first major crisis: local authorities decided to offer the land the club was using for development. So the cricket fanatics then acquired a larger piece of land – 120 square meters – right in the middle of what is now Yokohama Koen. It was turfed and fenced in and a single story clubhouse built in 1875. They even hired a local Japanese, a Mr. C. Yoshiwara, as a groundsman and manager. Yoshiwara-san was to work for the club for 40 years. The original ground was put up for sale with other lots and was acquired by Mollison himself. He built a tea-firing facility on it, but his business interests were not limited to tea. He even later became the Japanese agent for Alfred Nobel and the first importer of dynamite.
In 1900 the Yokohama club was enlarged and a running track added. A two-story club house built under the supervision of Mollison and a Mr. Duff. This soon burnt down but was rebuilt. Around the same time, the name of the club was changed to the Yokohama Cricket and Athletic Club (YCAC).
As the club grew nearly everyone assumed that it held the land in perpetuity. But sometime around 1910, the YCAC faced its second major crisis for, in fact, according to the old lease, the Japanese authorities could terminate the lease simply by serving ‘due notice’ which they now did. The club was obliged to hand over all its facilities in a gesture of foreign goodwill.
It was only the result of heroic efforts by a certain Mr. S. Isaacs that the club was able to acquire the land upon which it now stands. At the same time in order to register the club as a legal entity under Japanese law, the old club was disbanded and a new club simultaneously established based on articles of association dated June 26 1912. After much deliberation, the word ‘Cricket’ was changed to ‘Country’ in the name. The club was duly registered July 4 and 6 days later the land purchase was finalized.
A lot of work was now undertaken to level the land and fence it, to prepare the tennis courts as they are today, and also to build a stable. These developments were reported in the annual general meeting for that year as was a long list of subscriptions not only from all over Japan but also from overseas. The exact number of members in 1912 is not known but it was around 291. The following year that rose to 320 but the First World War caused membership to fall to 199.
In those days members got to the club mainly by street car and in the summer could walk down the hill to bathe in the clean water of Mikado Bay which was then part of the ‘Old Mississipi Bay’. Unfortunately, the beaches are long gone and the club now overlooks oil refineries that were built on the reclaimed land.
Photo by Jacqui Todd
The club was to suffer many ups and several downs such as the Great Earthquake in 1923 and World War Two, but the sporting spirit and traditions have almost continuously been preserved. Mollison himself survived the 1923 earthquake and continued to reside in Yokohama until his death in 1931.
It should be noted that cricket was also played by Japanese in those early days. In its westernization drive, the government decreed that males should take up sports. Along with many of the other sports introduced in Yokohama and Kobe including rowing, football, tennis, golf and athletics, cricket was taught and played by many leading high schools such as Kaisei as part of the curriculum for most of the Meiji period. However, universities and schools gradually became enamored with baseball and cricket tragically died as a sport played by Japanese until the 1970s and 1980s.
The YCAC is still a unique institution in Japan and much enjoyed and loved by its members and its sportsmen. Its grounds and facilities are still the envy of every other sports club in the country. But few of the cricketers and other sportsmen playing there today ever pause to reflect on the debt they owe to the vision, wisdom, pioneering spirit, and most of all to the passion for cricket of the extraordinary James Pender Mollison and his colleagues.