India vs Japan T20I Photo/BCCI

In the land of baseball, cricket is all set to score on Tuesday when India and Japan celebrate 75 years of diplomatic ties with a T20 International for the Suzuki Cup at the petite Sano International Cricket Ground, about 80 km from Tokyo.It’s a historic occasion. But neither side is likely to be as tense and twitchy as those who played the first-ever cricket match in the Land of the Rising Sun in the summer of 1863. In that game, some players carried unusual protective gear: revolvers. The wicketkeeper would place his piece behind the stumps. The ground was guarded ‘by a small force armed with rifles’.Few cricket matches have been more nerve-wracking.Two British sides, the Navy and the Shore Team, the latter consisting of expatriates in Japan, faced off in the port town of Yokohama. Players were nervous because an attack from the sharp-sworded samurai was feared.Details of the strange but true incident came to light in 2012 following the efforts of dogged amateur British historian Mike Galbraith, who subsequently wrote about it in The Japan Times.While researching sports in Japan, Galbraith spotted the Wisden obituary of a British admiral, Sir Harry Rawson. The tribute said that he had played in the first cricket game in Japan. Further research led to an article in London-based ‘Cricket’ magazine written by James Campbell Fraser, the Shore Team’s skipper and a former Harrow student.In his article, Galbraith quoted Fraser: “It was a most novel sensation for the wicket-keeper, as he carried his revolver backwards and forwards from wicket to wicket and placed it behind the stumps.”Galbraith had earlier calculated that the match was played towards the end of June. However, he later discovered a naval officer’s diary, which led him to conclude that the game occurred over a month earlier.“The evidence shows that the match was played on or around May 12, 1863,” he said in an email response last week.In Japanese history, these were the final years of the shogunate, a period ruled by hereditary military governors. An incident in which bodyguards of a Japanese warlord had killed an English merchant had caused rage and bitterness. All foreigners were asked to leave the country by the end of June 1863.Galbraith said that the marines were sent to provide security cover for the expatriates and were stationed on the ships. However, no samurai attack occurred that day or later.The Navy team won. Fraser’s Shore men ‘got a jolly good lickin’.Five years later, the first cricket club in Japan was set up by Scottish tea merchant J P Mollison in Yokohama. But the sport didn’t take off; baseball did.Of late, though, cricket is finding its feet. According to the Japanese Cricket Association website, there are 7,300 players and about 14,000 annual participants in the Land of the Rising Sun.Japan’s greatest moment in the willow game came when the women’s team claimed bronze at the 2010 Asian Games.