Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams (film screening)

Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams   

Tuesday, September 2, 6:00PM (ET)

Doors open 5:30PM | Film Screening | In-Person | JFT Event Hall

Directed by Ema Ryan Yamazaki • 2019 • 94 minutes • Presented in Japanese with English subtitles • Trailer 

Baseball is life for the die-hard competitors in the 100th annual Koshien, Japan’s wildly popular national high school baseball championship, whose alumni include U.S. baseball star OHTANI Shohei and former Yankee MATSUI Hideki. But for Coach Mizutani and his players, cleaning the grounds and greeting their guests are equally important as honing their baseball skills.

In director Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s dramatic and intimate journey to the heart of the Japanese national character, will those acts add up to victory or prove a relic of the past? Koshien is not just a sports film—it’s a thoughtful portrait of education, mentorship, and generational expectations in modern Japan. 

Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams is part of our Body & Soul: Japanese Sports Cinema series.  

Baseball player SATO Ayami (里 綾実) will join us for a post-screening Q&A!

This event is now fully booked and registration is closed. We will have a rush line before the event to release available seats on a first-come, first-served basis. Admission is not guaranteed. Thank you for your understanding!

Director Profile:

Ema Ryan Yamazaki is a Japanese-British filmmaker known for her nuanced, cross-cultural storytelling. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, focusing on documentary and editing. After graduation, Ema worked on a few documentaries and series for channels like Al Jazeera English, CNN, HBO, and NHK. In 2017, Ema’s first feature length documentary, Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George’s Creators, was released worldwide.

Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams (2019) is Ema’s second feature film. After premiering at DOC NYC, the film aired in primetime on ESPN in 2020. Since then, Ema continued to work on a variety of projects including working as a Co-Director and Supervising Editor of the official Olympic film “The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022. Ema’s latest feature The Making of a Japanese (2023) made its world premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival. 

Most recently, Ema was Editor and Co-Producer on ITO Shiori’s Black Box Diaries (2024), which world premiered at the Sundance Film Festival’s World Documentary Competition to critical acclaim and went on to receive a Best Documentary Feature Film nomination at the 97th Academy Awards. Instruments of a Beating Heart (2024), a documentary short edited down from The Making of a Japanese, won Best Short Documentary at the 40th IDA Documentary Awards and was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 97th Academy Awards.

Guest Profile:

SATO Ayami (里 綾実) is a Japanese baseball pitcher for the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team and a member of the Japan national women’s baseball team. She is also celebrated as one of the most decorated pitchers in the world, having won the MVP award three convective times in World Cup and she has led to six World Cup gold medals. In 2025, she becomes the first woman to ever play for Toronto Maple Leafs, a professional men’s baseball team in Canada.