> an American professor in Tokyo, some 20 years after Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships opened feudal Japan to the world. The game became a national obsession in 1896, when a team from the elite First igher School of Tokyo 一 known as Ichiko 一 beat a group of American businessmen and ted a historian tisionaries. ho po Score, 29-4, made headlines around the Counlss ba promp