Edward Yoshie the first Canadian to pitch pro ball in Japan and NPB
Edward Yoshie (Vancouver, BC), the first Canadian to pitch in Japan (middle, with from L-to-R), Hiroshi Nakao, Takehiko Bessho, Fukuzo Tada and Hideo Fujimoto. It is an impressive group as Nakao, Bessho, and Fujimoto are Hall of Famers.
December 28, 2022
By Evan Christie
Canadian Baseball Network
Not much is known about Edward Eishiro Yoshie’s early life.
What we do know is that he was born in Vancouver, BC on July 9, 1922 to parents from Sendai, Miyagi prefecture and in 1938, at the age of 15, his parents sent him to their hometown.
The same thing happened many nisei (second-generation) kids, with their parents not wanting them to become too “westernized”. An equal number of families decided to go in the opposite direction, attempting to assimilate their kids to their new culture more quickly. Examples include guys like Wally Yonamine and Andy Miyamoto who only returned to Japan in the 1950s to play pro baseball.
Yoshie would move in with his parents’ family and would attend Sendai Daiichi High School, more commonly known as Sendai Ichiko, a portmanteau of “first” (ichi) and “school” (gakko). While he was there, he joined the school’s ball team, where his talent for pitching was apparent to everyone.
By 1940, he had helped the school win the Miyagi Prefectural Tournament, then Tohoku Regional Tournament for just the second time in their history. This qualified them for the National High School Tournament, also known as the Koshien Tournament.
This was no small feat. Tohoku, the northern region of the main island of Honshu, is made up of six prefectures: Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Iwate, Yamagata, and Miyagi. Not only did Sendai Ichiko have to fight through the best teams in Miyagi, the region’s most populous prefecture, but then his team also had defeat the best schools from the other five.
Somehow, Yoshie and his classmates were able to pull it off. Koshien wouldn’t go to a school-per-prefecture model until the early 1970s, thanks to top prospect Suguru Egawa. His school lost in the Northern Kanto Tournament in his first two years and organizers were worried that having the best high school pitcher in the nation not compete could hurt the tournament’s prestige.
Sendai Ichiko would get a first round bye and met Chiba Commercial High School in the second round, where they got thumped 7-0. And thus ends the tale of the first Canadian to compete at Koshien.
However, Yoshie had gotten on to the radar of Waseda University. Waseda, a member of the Tokyo Big 6 League, is one of the most prestigious programs in Japan. Yoshie would pitch for them from 1941 until the Big 6 League was shut down by the government in 1943. During which time Waseda won two Big 6 Titles, in the fall of 1941 and the fall of 1942.
Since Yoshie was not Japanese by birth and a university student, he would not get drafted into the military during WW II, but he would be monitored thoroughly by Japanese counterintelligence agents.
After graduating in 1945 he would return to Sendai, and joined the Sendai Hirose club, a local amateur team. This put him on the radar of the Kyuei Flyers of the Japanese Professional League (the precursor to Nippon Professional Baseball).
Kyuei (a portmanteau of the team’s co-owners, Tokyu and Daiei) liked what they saw and signed him for 1948. This would make him the first foreign player to play for what is now the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, unknowingly beginning a long tradition of Canadian Flyers/Fighters alumni.
Said alumni include Bob Alexander (Vancouver, BC), Rob Ducey (Cambridge, Ont.), Nigel Wilson (Ajax, Ont.), Dustin Molleken (Regina, Sask.) and now AJ Yamaguchi (Vancouver, BC).
By modern metrics,, Yoshie was the Flyers’ best arm, going 16-19 with a 3.14 ERA, 3.21 FIP, and 100 strikeouts and 5.5 WAR in 338 innings of work.
This meant that he’d stay on for another year with the Flyers, now back to being called the Tokyu Flyers after Daiei had split off the buy the Venus Stars (now technically the Chiba Lotte Marines thanks to a chain of mergers that bears not mentioning here). However, the Flyers’ original ace Giichiro Shiraki would return to form and Yoshie’s playing time would go down significantly.
In an attempt to get more playing time, Yoshie signed with the Yomiuri Giants for NPB’s inaugural season in 1950. However, the Giants had two workhorse Hall of Fame ace caliber starters in Takehiko Bessho and Hideo Fujimoto, so Yoshie was only able to pitch in 14 games, starting only six. Despite being very good by modern metrics, sporting an ERA+ of 81 and a FIP- of 84, the 1950 season would be Yoshie’s last in pro ball.
He would soon move to Shizuoka and work for the Daishowa Paper Company. Daishowa had an elite amateur ball team and with them, Yoshie won the 1953 Japanese Inter-City Amateur tournament. Yoshie would pitch in their 4-1 quarter-finals win over the Toso Electric Railway Company (Kochi, Kochi).
From there… Yoshie disappears off the map. Despite Daishowa making the Inter-City Tournament many times thoughout the 50s, Yoshie doesn’t appear on the tournament’s records after 1953.
It is known that at some point he went back to Vancouver and passed away there on January 21, 1986. He remains the only Sendai Ichiko alumni to play pro ball and has the honour of being the first Canadian ever to play in both Japanese professional ball, and NPB itself.