Village Children Playing Baseball

"Village Children Playing Baseball," from 1936, rendered in ink on paper, captures the spread of baseball — imported from America in the Meiji period and enthusiastically adopted — to the village level, where children played the game with whatever equipment was available in the fields and vacant lots of rural Japan. Kawakami's depiction of children at play with this quintessentially Western-origin sport has the same affectionate quality as all his cross-cultural subjects: the encounter with the foreign rendered joyful and human through its absorption into everyday life.