2 The All-Americans represented the best of the best. The team of all-stars came by ship, the Empress of Japan, that departed Vancouver, British Columbia, on October 20 and arrived in Yokohama 10 days later. It was November 9, 1934, and Babe Ruth had just connected for the first of his 13 home runs during an eighteen-game, 12-city goodwill tour of Japan.
It landed softly on the other side of the fence in right center field at a ballpark in Sendai, a city on the northeast coast of Japan, 187 miles from Tokyo. Though war clouds were gathering, it dropped peacefully out of the sky of Japan, seven years before bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and eleven years before atomic blasts destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
