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Emissaries renewed their commercial, religious, and athletic efforts. Both baseball and a seething nationalism continued. Schools conducted athletic meets in both Shanghai and Tientsin in 1902 and engaged in intercollegiate contests by 1907. Girls’ schools engaged in baseball, basketball, volleyball, and track and field events, all pastimes requiring unbound feet for mobility. In 1908 Max J. Exner, an American physical educator, arrived to conduct classes and train teachers, and the ymca organized basketball leagues.

Navy ships anchored in the Yokohama harbor. Despite the reinforcements the Americans succumbed 32–9 and suffered further indignities as the Japanese players spit three times on their sacred ground in ritual defiance of the racist ban and Japanese fans shouted obscenities. A Japanese newspaper trumpeted the result in front-page headlines, spawning baseball fever throughout the nation. S. cruiser attempted to restore American honor. S. government representatives, the sailors fell 22–6 before a standing-room-only crowd of ten thousand.

Two generations of Chinese Americans resided in the United States after the Exclusion Act of 1882, but they did so largely in segregated “Chinatowns,” limiting their assimilation and acculturation. Despite their isolation in separate schools and recreation facilities, young men and women of the second generation adopted American sport forms that marked them as different from their parents. Some proved good enough, though not white enough, to reach the professional ranks. In 1915 the Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast baseball league signed Chinese-Hawaiian Lang Akana to a contract, then reneged when white players refused to play with him.