The Henry Chauncey Collection of film and photographs from the Harvard baseball team's tour of Japan

The collection consists of a scrapbook photograph album detailing the Harvard University baseball team's trip to Japan in the summer of 1934 and film reels showing footage from China, Japan, and the United States. The album, labeled “Harvard Baseball trip to Japan (Honolulu en route), July-August 1934,” contains 67 black & white and sepia-toned photographs, including group shots of the baseball team, landscape scenes, shots of Chauncey, the team aboard the M.S. Tatsuta Maru Tokio, combined group shots with Japanese teams, Keio University photographs, and a picture of the Waseda University team during a game. It also includes six Japanese postcards, two newspaper clippings, including “Japan Plays the American National Game,” by Henry Chauncey, which appeared in The Literary Digest on November 24, 1934.

The collection also contains 11 film reels in three different formats and sizes from 1926 to 1934: four 7” diameter reels with footage of Japan, two 2 ½” x ½” unlabeled reels, and five 16mm reels; nine of these reels have been digitized. The digitized footage shows various scenes of Tokyo, Japan, as well as Shanghai and Hong Kong, China. Many of the subjects captured in the scrapbook's photographs are also documented on Chauncey's film reels. One reel documents the team's stops at Stanford University and Hawaii while en route to Japan, which shows footage of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a military review at Schofield Barracks and with members of the Harvard baseball team. Some of the footage's other highlights document baseball games and practice times with American and Japanese baseball players, including the Harvard baseball team, Keio University, and Waseda University, both of Tokyo, Japan. The rest of the footage mostly captures the travels of the Harvard baseball team throughout China and Japan. It is possible that some of these films may have been used for strategic reconnaissance of Tokyo Bay by the United States military during World War II.