Kin Takahashi: Early Japanese Trailblazer
By Peter Mann
Whilst researching the new placekicker on the Las Vegas Raiders roster, Kansei Matsuzawa, attention drifted to a much earlier Japanese name from the very early days of the sport’s growth in America: Kin Takahashi.
Someone who, although he lived for less than forty years, left a lasting imprint on those of a Maryville College, East Tennessee persuasion. Born in Hirao, in the Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan, in the mid-1860s, Takahashi, as a student, would find his way to America, initially to San Francisco, in his late teens.
If the modern-day Raiders kicker, Matsuzawa, was on a ‘journey,’ then Takahashi’s is something else altogether; not only did he move to San Francisco, whilst there it seems he forwent his religious beliefs and converted to Christianity.
Several accounts exist about the reasoning behind Takahashi’s migration, but after his parents learned of his religious conversion, as followers of Shintoism and Buddhism, they severed any financial support they had been providing.
Takahashi carried on regardless, promoting Christianity through the Japanese Young Men’s Christian Association (JYMCA), where he served as treasurer, supporting its missionary efforts and regular Bible classes.
At approximately 22 years of age, in 1888, Takahashi was seen to have left San Francisco, after two years at Hopkins Academy in Massachusetts, for East Tennessee, some 4,000 km on the opposite side of the country. Again, reports of this move are sketchy and differ in nature.
However, at Maryville College, he helped found the Maryville Scots football program, with Takahashi listed as their first quarterback, first captain, and coach in the 1890s.
What is just as impressive for Takahashi is that, despite playing the fledgling sport that became college football, he was diminutive in stature, said to be just 5ft 2 in tall, and weighed just 123 pounds.
Takahashi spent shy of a decade in East Tennessee, and, as well as founding their football program, also laid the foundations for the building of the college’s Bartlett Hall (the first, on-campus YMCA in the US), Maryville College website saying of this point in history that; “According to ‘By Faith Endowed,’ a history of Maryville College written by professors emeriti Dr. Arda Walker and Dr. Carolyn Blair, Kin wanted to show his appreciation for Maryville College before he graduated.
Combining two of his passions – athletics and religion – Kin decided the campus needed a Y.M.C.A. and gymnasium building.
And he not only convinced the college administrators of this, but he also convinced the student body, Maryville town residents and potential donors in the North, as well.”
The college itself was built in 1819, with its oldest building being that of Anderson Hall, c.1870, named after their founder, Isaac L. Anderson, whilst Bartlett Hall, built c.1895/6, was done so by Takahashi and his fellow students.
Takahashi laid the building’s cornerstone in 1896, one that even today, some 130 years later, still reads ‘Christ is our Cornerstone,’ whilst the football program became the college’s second sponsored sport.
He didn’t see the finished product of Bartlett Hall, though, shortly after returning to his native Japan at age 30, where he’d work as a Christian social worker and hold a post at Japan’s YMCA.
The influence and magnitude of the diminutive Takahashi is still to this day fondly remembered at Maryville, with Karen Beaty Eldridge, Director of News and Public Information, saying of him that, “They can’t always pronounce his last name, but an impressive number of people here know that he’s responsible for the building of Bartlett Hall.
Without question, he is a legend in the history of Maryville College.
For current students, Kin Takahashi is an example of how one student can make a tremendous difference on this campus.
You add to that the facts that he came to Maryville with almost no money and a limited knowledge of the English language – then his contributions to the College are more impressive.”
Dr Samuel T. Wilson was a Professor at Maryville at the time Takahashi was a student there, and he wrote in his book, ‘A Century of Maryville College,’ that, “He possessed a truly marvellous natural endowment of initiative, adaptation, and energy.
For example, he turned his talents to many varieties of work, from cooking to lecturing, in earning his own expenses.
It was not long until he had won for himself the unquestioned position of student leader in the College . . . He was a born organizer in religious activities as elsewhere.”
Furthering the insight into the footballing side which Takahashi brought to Maryville College life, Wilson added, “He marshalled his team in his room and worked out before them the theory of his plays, illustrating them by moving grains of corn on the diagram of a gridiron outlined on his table.”
Whilst a quarter century on, Joseph Cockram wrote in his book, ‘Heroes of the Campus,’ in 1917 that, “How the undersized Japanese taught those surprising and elusive tricks merely by the aid of a football manual and his personal practice plays with corn grains is still told with pride by the loyal sons of Maryville.
His lightning-like dashes around the ends, puzzling the opposing team with his catlike agility, are part of the athletic annals of Tennessee,” from a detailed account of Kin Takahashi’s short-lived life by Tom Anderson, Appalachia Bare, May 2021.
As the first football team in the region, Maryville soon faced a challenge and the birth of a rivalry with the University of Tennessee, which emerged in the early 1890s. On 15 October 1892, the first intercollegiate game was contested in Knoxville, the University program winning 25-0.
They competed against each other several times in Takahashi’s final years in Maryville and, in his last meeting between the two programs, in 1897, and following two shut-out successes the previous year, Maryville romped to a thumping, 56-0 victory, sending their Japanese hero off in style (via Neyland Nation, April 2025).
Having returned home, completing a remarkable ‘journey,’ later that year (1897), Takahashi would, in May 1902, pass away, at the tender age of 36, perhaps not even knowing the imprint he’d left behind during his American adventures.
In 1977, he was inducted posthumously into the Maryville Scots Athletic Hall of Fame, and in 1998, the ‘Kin Takahashi Award for Young Alumni of Maryville College’ was created, forever immortalising the Hirao-born Takahashi in Maryville’s history.
PETER MANN
NFL ANALYST
PETER IS A LIFELONG SPORTS FAN, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR BASED IN COUNTY DURHAM. HE HAS FOLLOWED THE NFL AND THE RAIDERS SINCE THE 1980s, AND LOVES BOTH SPORTS AND FAMILY HISTORY. PETER HAS A DEGREE IN SPORT & EXERCISE PSYCHOLOGY, AND CAN BE FOUND ON TWITTER @petermannwriter