Diamond Diplomacy

Official Selection, 2025 Hawai’i International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2025 Mill Valley Film Festival

Japan’s love of baseball is legendary, but its history with the sport is also a checkered diplomatic affair with the United States, with enough highs and lows to fill a feature documentary. Yuriko Gamo Romer’s DIAMOND DIPLOMACY is just that, building upon her short film Baseball Behind Barbed Wire to explore a relationship as much about xenophobia, war, incarceration, race, and trade tensions as it is about home runs and strikeouts.

From Babe Ruth’s exhibitions in Japan in the 1930s, to Japan’s first forays in the MLB, to the Hideo Nomo controversies and the current Shohei Ohtani era, baseball becomes an incisive way to understand US-Japanese soft power. And just as convincingly, the documentary shows how baseball, seen from the perspective of these passionate interactions, has always been bigger than the United States.