Diamond Diplomacy

To understand how Shohei Ohtani became one of baseball’s biggest stars, it’s important to look back at a century-long exchange between Japan and the United States. Baseball became the national sport of Japan in 1896, and since then, the U.S. and Japan have maintained a shared love of the sport, even as the countries encountered war and other political tensions.

For the past decade, director Yuriko Gamo Romer has been chronicling the Japanese, American, and Japanese American players who bridged those worlds. Diamond Diplomacy highlights pioneers like Kenichi Zenimura, the “Father of Japanese American baseball,” and his relationship with Babe Ruth. It features interviews with San Francisco Giants’ Masanori “Mashi” Murakami, the first Japanese player to play in Major League Baseball, and Warren Cromartie, an American who played for Nippon Professional Baseball. It tells the history of the 1949 San Francisco Seals Tour of Japan and features stories of Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, Lefty O’Doul, and many more.

Executive produced by Glen S. Fukushima and Steven Okazaki, the documentary – which was the 2025 runner-up at the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film – is a tribute to baseball’s cultural and political impact across generations.