Japanese translation help 1908 postcard
 

Just got this 1908 postcard from Japan, picturing a Santa Clara College baseball player. If anyone can help with a translation of the writing, I'd be grateful.

The seller, from Japan, told me that the writing says: "Santa Clara University vs. Keio University Baseball Game at Hawaii, 1908.

A fellow collector used Google translate and came up with: "Memorial Great Battle Baseball: Ralaritansa National and American Army Expedition"

Personally, I hope it really says Memorial Great Battle Baseball... but it probably does not.

Cool postcard. Is that Diamond Head in the background?

Open the photo on your computer. Then download the Google translate app on your phone. Use the camera feature and point it at the Japanese text to translate it.

Memorial Great Battle Baseball... love it, but am still skeptical.

Here is a picture of the 1908 Santa Clara team. I'm not a vintage glove expert, but it looks like the player in the postcard has a first baseman's glove. That would likely make the player Broderick (top left in the team photo).

FWIW, the most well known player in this picture is Arthur Tillie Shafer (top right), who is in the M116 and D304 sets and has a Helmar Stamp.

I don’t speak Japanese, but I do speak Chinese. As luck would have it, a solid chunk of Japanese is based on Chinese, so often the characters have similar meanings, although they have sometimes changed a bit over time.

念纪 can mean a lot of different things depending on the context. But in this context, memorial works well.

大 means big, large or great.

戰 means a battle or a fight

球 means a ball

野 has a few different meanings, but usually I would translate it as wild, untamed, or undomesticated. Could be that ball wild was the Japanese word for baseball 115 years ago.

So based on Chinese, I would definitely agree with the memorial great battle baseball (or wild ball) translation.

My wife is from Japan and she said it reads (roughly) as "On the road - Keio University against Santa Clara University - great memories of a baseball game". It doesn't mention a year or a place, so the seller may have just known it was in 1908 in Hawaii.

Could be a catchers mitt. Need an expert of baseball equipment to be sure

"Memorial Great Battle Baseball"

You absolutely do not want to battle baseball in Japan. It can get weird and extremely violent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocyUzoaoVfQ

There are some sites that mention this game -- features future NY Giant Tillie Shafer.

https://gostanford.com/sports/2010/12/1/208074999.aspx
In the summer of 1908, the Santa Clara College team had played against Japan's Keio University team in Hawaii. Two years later, Shafer was invited to go to Japan to instruct the Keio University team in the finer points of baseball before its planned U.S. tour in 1911. In December 1910, Shafer and his boyhood friend, Fuller Thompson (who pitched briefly in the major leagues in 1911), sailed to Japan and worked with the Keio team, which resulted in a book titled The Art of Keio Baseball. Shafer and Thompson appear to have been very successful because the Keio team won three-fourths of its games on its U.S. tour.


https://www.baseball-fever.com/forum...-from-the-game
In the summer of 1908 Shafer traveled to Hawaii with the Santa Clara baseball team. There, he met and played against Keio University, a Japanese college. He would later travel to Japan and train their players, becoming the first major leaguer to do so.

Thanks for all of the helpful and interesting replies!

I’m a bit late to this, but as the board member resident in Japan I thought I’d chime in anyway.

The kanji 野球 (Yakyuu) is still the word for baseball in Japanese actually (“Pro Yakyuu” is what Japanese people call the professional league here). 野　in Japanese means “field” (among other things) and 球　means “ball” so you can see why they combined those two to describe baseball.

A lot of the characters in that photo have dual military and sports usages, so Google Translate makes it sound more militarized than it actually is.

軍 (“gunn”) can mean both “army” and “team”, in baseball it refers to the latter.

戦　(“Sen”) can mean both “battle” and “game”. In the baseball context it refers to the latter.