by Joseph Davis, Contributing Writer
Here in the States, the Major League Baseball season is officially underway as the 30 teams of arguably the world’s best players face off to try and win the World Series. However, despite baseball being considered America’s Pastime, the sport is also widely popular in many other nations, including Japan, where it’s been played for almost a century at this point. I mention this despite the fact that for this month’s Out of Market I’ve chosen a Taiwanese film, simply because of the fact that for the period the film occurs, the island (then called Formosa) was under the control of the Japanese. However, the movie Kano goes far beyond just being a baseball movie, and is very much worth the three-hour runtime (plus ads, as I watched it on Tubi).
We have a team of students at an agricultural school who, at the start, have never won a game of baseball before; they’re truly a team of underdogs. In a few ways, I want to compare this movie with the U.S. film Miracle, as you have a group of young kids in a sport they do love and going up against what feel like immeasurable odds: the U.S. Hockey team against the Soviets, and the Kano baseball team going to the Kōshien tournament. This makes a lot of the things we end up seeing in the movie click and make sense as time goes on. Much like with their schooling, as a canal is being built during this same time, they’re trying to cultivate a team with a drive for success, much as the city is cultivating a system to boost growth and success. Seeing this growth on its own is impressive and could have been a story in its own right — a coming-of-age sports story in a way — but there is far more to it than that.
This team is going against the odds, not just on the field, but off it as well. It’s referenced on multiple occasions how the team is multicultural: Players on the team are of Han Chinese, Japanese, and Indigenous peoples to the island itself. This is referenced as, at the time, it was highly unexpected for a team to make the premier tournament in Japan from a small team from an agricultural school, but also because, much like other powerful nations at the time, there was a strong belief that their subjects were inferior to their own. It distinctly happens twice in the film, where a character asks how the team hopes to go up against others that are fully Japanese. However, and what really clicks for this for me, is how the team always views themselves as brothers on the field. They don’t see the lines others want to define them as — they define themselves, and that’s a great and powerful message to have. It helps build to the end of the movie, when the crowd around the team grows and supports them.
There are a few subplots to this movie, and some of them seem to just fizzle out. For example, one player has an interest in someone who then marries someone else (which, admittedly, feels weird knowing the characters on the team are around high-school age), and this plot doesn’t go much of anywhere. However, while I do want to warn any prospective viewers of some of these moments, they do not take away from the subplots which do make the film feel more genuine and clear-cut. One of these takes place as cutaway moments where we see one of the players from a team Kano faced in 1944 as he is deployed to the island. At first, I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not, but as I’ve sat and thought through the moments, I’ve come to not only appreciate its inclusion, but the way it builds upon the story: one where despite the beginnings of the team and where they came from, they grew and managed to receive the honor and respect of those they went up against. It’s a minor part of the story, but one that helps to punctuate it.
Ultimately, Kano is worth taking a swing at. I won’t comment much about the portrayal of the baseball games itself, mostly because, much like fantasy baseball, I’d have no idea what I was talking about, but the story is intriguing, enjoyable, and inspiring. It’s about rising above your station, shocking the world, and having honor and respect, no matter the outcome.
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