20th National Junior High School Championship Baseball Tournament (Summer Koshien), Nishinomiya, 1934.

20th National High School Baseball Tournament (Summer Koshien), 1934. The tournament, organized by the Japan High School Baseball Federation and Asahi Shimbun (who published this postcard), takes place during the summer school vacation period, culminating in a two-week final tournament stage with 22 teams in August at Hanshin Koshien Stadium, in Nishinomiya City. The 1934 championship saw Goku Central of Kure City defeat Kumamoto Kōgyō of Kumamoto City 2-0.

The 1934 National High School Baseball Championship at Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya (then still a relatively new venue, built in 1924) was the 20th summer tournament and is remembered as one of the most dramatic early editions of the event.

The tournament was still formally organized for chūtō gakkō (“middle schools”), roughly equivalent in age to today’s high school students under the grade system then used, and drew a record number of teams from across Japan – twenty-two – into competition between August 13–20. Kureko (Kure Port) was the tournament champion, defeating Kumamoto Kōgyō by a score of 2-0.

In November 1934, following the tournament, Japan organized its first “All-Star” baseball squad, including university and amateur players, to compete against a visiting squad of American major league baseball All-Stars on a barnstorming tour of the country.

20th National Junior High School Championship Baseball Tournament (Summer Koshien) commemorative postcard, Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, 1934, displaying the “Crimson Red Grand Champion Flag”. The tourney that year was won by Kureko (Kure Port) High School. Several Koshien players would later achieve Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame status playing professionally after the first professional teams were organized in 1936.

In the fall of 1934, a team of Japanese university and amateur players (there were no professional teams at the time) were recruited to face an All-Star team of barnstorming American major league baseball players, among them Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. A Koshien standout, 17-year-old pitcher Sawamura Eiji from Shōnai Shōgyō High School, Mie Prefecture, who struck out 97 players in 48 innings of pre-tournament regional competition, famously faced this team of visiting American major league All-Star players. Entering the game in the fourth inning, the high school pitcher struck out nine batters over the course of five innings, including the New York Yankee “Murderer’s Row” of Ruth, Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx in quick succession, and kept the American All-Stars scoreless before a home run by Gehrig in the seventh inning tagged Sawamura with a 1-0 loss.

Connie Mack, who was managing the American team, was so impressed by Sawamura’s performance that he offered him a contract with the team he owned, the Philadelphia Athletics; Sawamura declined, citing a reluctance to leave home.

The 1934 Koshien tournament also became famous because many of its standout players would later move on to prominence when, two years later, the first three professional baseball teams were organized, among them the Dai Nippon Tokyo Yakyu [Baseball] Club (later the Yomiuri Kyojin [Giants]).

Koshien players from this era, including several 1934 Koshien participants, were on the early pro team rosters and later achieved Hall of Fame status. Sawamura would complete Japanese pro ball’s first no-hitter in 1936 go on to pitch the first no-hitter in Japanese pro baseball history in 1936 (he’d do it again in 1937 and 1940), and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1959. The Sawamura Award (equivalent to the Cy Young Award), given to the best pitchers in the Japan League since 1947, is named in his honor.