Shochiku Robins
Japanese baseball team
The Shochiku Robins (Japanese: 松竹ロビンス, romanized: Shōchiku robinsu) were a Japanese baseball team that played in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). The franchise originated in the Japanese Baseball League (NPB's predecessor) and existed from 1936–1953, when it merged with the Taiyo Whales. Originally based in Tokyo, the club moved to Osaka in 1941.
Franchise history
Japanese Baseball League
Dai Tokyo
The club was founded as Dai Tokyo before the 1936 Japanese Baseball League season, with ownership by the Tokyo daily newspaper Kokumin Shimbun. The team made history that year by signing an African-American player, Jimmy Bonner, 11 years before Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color barrier.
The worst team in the league its first year, the club improved in spring 1937.
Lion
On August 31, midway through the 1937 fall season, the team changed its name to the Lion Baseball Club when it was acquired by Komajiro Tamura, with sponsorship by Lion Toothpaste.
Late in the 1940 season, the Japan Baseball League outlawed English nicknames (due to rising tensions with the West). Owner Tamura refused to change the team's name, insisting that "Lion" is Japanese (In actuality, he wanted to honor the team's sponsorship contract with the Lion Corporation.) The team completed the season as Lion, finishing in last place, 50 games behind Tokyo Kyojin.
Asahi
In 1941 the team moved from Tokyo to Osaka and acquiring new sponsorship from Asahi Shimbun; from 1941 to 1944 it was called the Asahi Baseball Club.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Shochiku Robins” is japanese baseball team. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Shochiku, Robins and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q11532185. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1953, 1941 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shochiku Robins” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.