On the Field: Sports Nationalism in YMCA Baseball Team

The film YMCA Baseball Team is in many ways a classic underdog sports story. The Korean team, made up of a ragtag group of people from different socio-economic classes and parts of the city, each with a unique and slightly eccentric personality, must defeat the almost professional, well-oiled military Japanese team in a game of Baseball. It differs from similar stories, however, in that it is positioned against the backdrop of colonized Korea and imperialist Japan. With this in mind, it is clear that the film is telling a nationalist story of Korea’s small triumph against its oppressors.

This story is reminiscent of nationalist re-creations and re-imaginations of Korean history. Em says in reference to nationalist writers in Korea in the late 19^th century:

In place of loyalty to the king and attachments to the village,
clan, and family, and in place of hierarchic status distinctions

among yangban, commoners, and base people, nationalist
historiography endeavored to redirect the people’s loyalty
toward a new, all-embracing identity of Koreans as a unique
ethnic group. (342)

This can easily be applied to YMCA Baseball Team. The Korean team in the film is led by a Yangban scholar, made up mostly of middle- and lower-class men, and managed by an educated woman. They overcome class differences in order to form a unified team, and only once their individual “attachments to the village, clan, and family” are overcome are they able to defeat their military oppressors and prove their strength as a team--that is, as a microcosm of the Korean nation.

Baseball, specifically, is an interesting place to situate this struggle. The sport has a long history as a nationalist American sport, and after it was brought to Japan during the Meiji restoration, it became a symbol of Japanese modernity, nationalism and westernization as well. So why place the struggle for Korean national identity within the framework of a game that is fundamentally representative of colonial oppressors?

Perhaps it is simply an issue of defeating said powers at their own game. This brings up an interesting question: why play the game in the first place? By adhering to the rules of baseball--and to the very concept that winning at baseball gives the winning team power of some kind--there is an implicit acceptance of the structures of power that created the rules. Why does the film not focus on a nationalist Korean team that plays a Korean sport, or refuses to play baseball?

The film ends with the Korean team winning, then triumphantly being arrested by the Japanese military. By acknowledging the power structures of baseball, and by adhering to the underdog story framework itself, the film is acknowledging the power, and arguably even some degree of legitimacy, of colonizing, nationalistic forces. The film thus seems to agree with the concept of nationalism as “a rational attempt by the weak and poor peoples of the world to achieve autonomy and liberty” (Em 343). Thus, nationalism is the film isn’t so much about resisting and driving out Japanese military forces--it’s about “autonomy and liberty” on a personal level. The team achieves nationalism in a moment of subjugation by the Japanese military--they are able to understand themselves as Korean within, and because of, the framework of the baseball game.

In the final scene, Hochang’s great-grandson continues the family legacy of baseball, and thus the legacy of Korean nationalism. The film seems to thus continue to believe in nationalism as a solution to Korea’s problems and a positive influence. This viewpoint is echoed in Korean pop artist Psy’s music video “Korea,” created for the 2012 London Olympics (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpYq1lSce1U). This “sports nationalism”, in which people understand and re-iterate nationalist narratives through sports competitions, is a recurring theme throughout the world and especially during the Olympics. It’s interesting that one of the most common ways we express and understand our national identities is through the embodied, visceral and physical medium of sports. Perhaps state narratives need to be viscerally linked to bodies in order to be understandable. In a post-human world where the nature of the body is constantly being re-examined, sports nationalism may become less relevant to national and personal identities; but given its positive examination in YMCA Baseball Team and in Psy’s “Korea,” it seems to remain as poignant in popular culture as ever.