Abe Isoo

My father would tell me stories about my great-grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. He was a consequential figure yet most people have never heard of him. His name is Abe Isoo (1865-1949) and he lived through one of the most transformative periods in Japanese history including the end of the Tokugawa shogunate leading into the Meiji Era, which would mark a time of rapid modernization. He witnessed the rise of militarism in Japan and opposed it based on his Christian pacifist beliefs and democratic socialist idealism. It was a dangerous time to oppose the state, and he did it anyway.

He helped bring baseball to Japan. He built the program at Waseda University and, in 1905, led his players across the Pacific on the first overseas tour by a Japanese team. To him the game was never just a pastime — it was a kind of democracy you could practice with your body: fair rules, equal footing, a way of carrying yourself.

He also helped found the country’s first socialist party, exchanged letters with Leo Tolstoy, and spent the rest of his life arguing for peace while Japan marched the other way.

I built this site because that combination — baseball and pacifism, sport and conscience — deserves to be findable. Most of what exists about him is in Japanese, scattered, and behind academic walls. I wanted one place that tells his story plainly, in both of his languages, that I can keep adding to.

How it’s built — It’s bilingual from the ground up: every page exists in both Japanese and English, routed by locale, because his life belonged to both countries and I didn’t want it living in only one. A Next.js app on Vercel; the biography and blog are plain markdown, so I can keep adding to the record over time, and the portraits are served as optimized WebP/AVIF to stay sharp.