Faculty Book Review--January 2005
Robert Whiting's
The Meaning of Ichiro:
The New Wave from Japan & the Transformation of our Pastime
By John Booth
It’s
been almost seventeen years since I saw my first Japanese baseball
game live. I had been in Japan for just five days, part of a
two-year stint teaching English to Japanese businessmen and middle/
high school students. A tad homesick, my friends and I longed for
doing something familiar, something American, something like say
watching baseball. Bob Horner, formerly
of the Atlanta Braves had just signed with the Yakult Swallows of
Tokyo. Horner had hit 27 homeruns and driven in 87 runs with the
Braves in the pre-steroid era of ’86. So with maps in hand, we hopped
on the subway and headed out for western Tokyo and Jingu Stadium,
home of the Swallows of the Japanese Central League.
Our tickets were out in left field
and quickly we realized we were with the fans of the away team, the Osaka-based
Hanshin Tigers--we found out this was always the case in Japan. Whenever the Tigers were up, the fans
our us chanted
non-stop screaming, “Ka-to-ba-say” (get a hit) and then the
name of the person at bat while banging on plastic bats (something
akin to what Angel’s fans would later use during their “Rally
Monkey” World Series of 2002). In right field, Swallows' fans did
more of the same when their team took to the batter’s box in the
bottom of the innings. Vendors sold grilled buckwheat noodles
with chopsticks as well as the ubiquitous squid-on-a-stick. As
Americans, we all knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore....
That all
being said, I grew to love the Japanese version of baseball. Teams played
“small ball,” bunting whenever a runner was on first and hitting and running
100% of the time with a 2 and 1 (in Japan a 1 and 2) count. Starting
pitchers were yanked after only going 2 innings or so and giving up only 2 or 3
runs for the coach did not want to let the game get out of hand.
(I later learned that statistically speaking, Japanese teams came back from
deficits far less than American teams did). Umpires apologized on the PA system for bad calls even reversing those
calls a full ten minutes after the controversial decision. Still,
managers when mad at a call sometimes physically abused the umps, evening
kicking them on a few occasions. on a brighter note, players never spoke
of themselves or their personal achievements--it was always about the team
and the concept of group harmony or Wa.
And of course, the most
Japanese of all differences, teams played to a tie after 10 (now 13) innings
in order that both teams be rewarded (and save face) after an epic
struggle (or was it just that the trains stopped running late at night and
people needed to get home or face $200-$300 taxi cab rides!) I even read both of Robert Whiting’s books on Japanese baseball
at the time, The Chrysanthemum and the Bat (1977) and
You Gotta Have Wa [Harmony] (1989) to understand fully all the
subtle cultural nuances reflected in Japanese ball. After viewing over
50 games in person and three times that on TV, I was clearly Yakyu
(Japanese baseball) mad and proud of it!
Upon returning to America in 1991, I was often asked
about my time in Japan. The conversation (perhaps with my not so subtle
steering) inevitably came around to Japanese baseball. Was it
entertaining? How were the fans? Was the ballpark food any good? And the
whopper of them all, where there any players good enough to play in
America? Squid-on-a-stick stories aside, my standard response to the latter
question was that the position players could field well but were not strong
enough to bat for average and power in the US but that 20-25 pitchers could
make it onto US rosters. Eyes often rolled followed by, “Come on, really,
they’re that good?” American players late in their years had been going
over to Japan to extend their careers since the 1950s but Japanese players
good enough to come and play in America?!? Yet, by 1995, eyes again were rolling in disbelief as a young
man named Hideo Nomo was whirling fastballs past unsuspecting Major Leaguers
at an amazing clip. In the ‘80s it had been Japanese cars and in the 90’s
it would be pitchers landing on the shores of America. Even position
players such as Ichiro (Suzuki) would prove me wrong by achieving all-star
status in the big leagues by the year 2000.
Robert Whiting’s third book on Japanese baseball,
The Meaning of Ichiro: The New Wave From Japan & the Transformation
of Our National Pastime (2004), deftly chronicles the flight of
elite Japanese baseball players to the Major Leagues over the past 15 years
(although the first Nipponjin to play for a major league franchise
was actually Masanori Murakami in SF in 1964. (detailed in Chapter 4). As
the title suggests, Whiting's early portions of the book focus on the
Zen-like education of Ichiro under the tutelage of his father and practicing
Buddhist, Nobuyuki. His father ran a family-owned electrical parts
factory but at 3:30 everyday, Nobuyuki excused himself from work and took
his son to the neighborhood field to play ball. After some jogging and
light game of catch, the nine-year old Ichiro would throw 50 pitches, take
200 swings at pitched balls, and field 50 balls each both as an infielder
and outfielder. Dinner and homework began at 7pm and when completed,
father and son would head out to the nearby batting center where the boy
would take 250-300 swings emulating his favorite batter stars from the
Japanese pro leagues. Returning home usually after 11pm, Ichiro’s
father would dutifully massage his son’s feet for as dad said, “If the feet
are healthy, you are healthy.” It is little vignettes like this that
give you a better understanding of why the
disciplined Samurai-like Ichiro (who weighed a mere 175 lbs when signed by
Seattle!) was able to break the single-season hit record this year with 262
hits (in 162 games) held for over 84 years.
Still, the exploits of Ichiro may not have happened if
not for what many Japanese at the time saw as the wagamama (selfish) attitude of Hideo Nomo in 1995.
Whiting points out that an odd clause in the contract between Japanese and
Major League baseball as well as strict owner rules regarding player rights
limited the ability of Japanese players to move from team to team
within Japan and virtually prevented players from jumping ship to the
major leagues as well. All that changed when Nomo, the son of working-class
parents from Osaka, pushed to fulfill his dream of playing in the American
major leagues--even if it went against all of the Japanese mores of the
time. He (along with a Japanese-American lawyer) found a
loophole in the league’s rules and “voluntarily retired”—Nomo could not play for another team
in Japan but was eligible to play in America. The Los Angeles Dodgers
scooped him up for a mere $2 million dollars and he went 13-6 with 236
strikeouts that first year in the majors. All his pitching starts
games were shown on jumbotrons to huge crowds all around Tokyo—even at the
wee hours of three or four in the morning. Nomo, quite literally,
become an overnight sensation on both sides of the Pacific and the rest is
history; the gates had opened and other ballplayers would follow.
Still, the Japanese owners tried to close the loophole
but were sued by Major League Baseball. The eventual compromise led to the
current posting system in place today. Players in Japan become eligible for
free agency after ten years of service in Japan. Over 20 players have
followed the path of Nomo since he first landed in the US. Some like
Ichiro and Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui have become superstars. Others like
former Yankee Hideki Irabu (once called a fat toad by owner George
Steinbrenner) and the Mets Tsuyoshi Shinjo had short stretches of success in
the US but eventually fizzled out and returned to play ball again in Japan--both
are still in uniform today. Finally, the
jury is still out on the likes the Mets Kazuo Matsui (no relation to
Godzilla Matsui) as to whether or not he can measure up to the numbers he
posted in Japan as an All-Star for the Seibu Lions.
I still miss Japanese baseball but thanks to the
Internet, I can follow the exploits of my teams via The Japan Times
online or even listen to streaming broadcasts of the games via real audio
via links on the teams' Web Sites (The Japanese broadcast is pretty basic, i.e. ballru for ball, striku
for strike, hitto for hit, etc.). Even better, as Whiting’s book
happily points out, I know that more Japanese sluggers like catcher the
Fukuoka Hawks' Kenji
Jojima are sure to be on their way or that Seibu Lion's fireballer Daisuke Matsuzaka will
be on the hill at a major league venue real soon. The “New Wave,” as
dubbed by Whiting, is here to stay and our national pastime will forever be
transformed....I’ll sake to that!