The Meaning of Ichiro (10 page)

Yomiuri was the reason the Central League had an average attendance of about 13 million a year while the Pacific League drew
only around 10 million. In Ichiro’s breakout year, the Orix BlueWave attracted 1,700,000 fans—not bad, if still far behind
the Giants—but then attendance slipped in succeeding campaigns as the novelty wore off. Tabloids that featured Ichiro on their
back cover in 1994 and 1995 found that his drawing power did not last as the public turned back to more familiar Giant heroes.
The number of times Orix played on nationwide TV during Ichiro’s entire Japan career could be counted on one hand. Elvis could
have come back to life and played in the BlueWave outfield and the result would have no doubt remained the same, such was
the enduring allure of the magical
Kyojin
name.

Although Ichiro could certainly attract a crowd on an afternoon stroll through the Ginza, and complained constantly about
intrusions into his private life by the media, it was, if the truth be told, the
lack
of attention from
b
sub
ru
fans that prompted him, at least in part, to make the move to the States. He viewed himself as a far better player than his
contemporary, the Giants’ popular center fielder Hideki Matsui, now with the Yankees (see
Chapter 10
). Matsui was a home run
slugger, but, as a general all-around player, he was, in Ichiro’s quoted opinion,
“ichi-ry
ja nai”
(not first class): an athlete who had yet to take his game to the level that was demanded of a superstar. Despite this, however,
Matsui continued to command the headlines almost daily over Ichiro—even after the Orix BlueWave had defeated the mighty
Kyojin
in the 1996 Japan Series.

“I could hit .400,” Ichiro muttered, “and still they would not come to see me.”

Thus it was not until he left his homeland to play in the U.S. that Japanese fandom finally gave him the attention he deserved.
Only then did he go from being a star player to a nationwide phenomenon and one who, ironically, caused a significant drop
in the Giants TV ratings. These actually fell to single digits at times in the 2001 season, the first time that had ever happened
to the team during
Goruden Awa
(“Golden Hour”) as the Japanese referred to prime time. Moreover, while their games still played to capacity crowds, discount
tickets were now easy to come by, a circumstance most people had once thought impossible.

Ask Japanese why they suddenly became so fixated on Ichiro and they would give you a variety of reasons. He helped people
take their minds off the bone-wearying recession that had infected Japan since the early 1990s. He proved the high level of
baseball in Japan—prompting even the Japanese baseball commissioner to say, improbably, as he watched his NPB lose its best
talent to the major leagues, “It’s an honor for me as commissioner to see Ichiro playing well in the U.S.” And he also validated
the national ego, as evidenced by the turgid encomium of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who announced to all citizens,
“Ichiro makes me proud to be a Japanese.”

Indeed, the response of an NHK announcer, when asked if she worried that the local professional game was being reduced to
a farm systern for MLB, was telling. “No,” she replied, “Japanese are excited because this shows Japanese superiority over
America.”

However, there was something even deeper going on here. For decades, Japan had impressed itself on the world’s consciousness,
primarily through its products, its currency, its visible cross-border acquisitions (like the Mariners), and its well-disciplined
tourists flush with cash. Japan was seen as a place where highly trained and largely faceless “organization men” marched efficiently
in lockstep—a place that produced few stars or exceptional talents worthy of mention.

But now, finally, here was Ichiro, a real live human being in Oakley Juliet sunglasses, besieged for autographs everywhere
he went. American kids loved him. Their parents admired him. His fellow players respected him. TV sports announcers all across
America were giddily singing his praises. Famed writer Frank Deford hailed him in a piquant documentary for Bryant Gumbel’s
Real Sports.
Jeremy Schaap did the same for
Sports Center,
while S. L. Price penned a loving profile in
Sports Illustrated.

The Ichiro-in-America phenomenon was a fantasy that many Japanese had long wanted to experience, if only vicariously. It had
special resonance in Japan because it gave the people something they had never quite had before: a full-fledged Japanese hero
who was idolized by Americans themselves. It was the Asian version of
Damn Yankees.
It was something the Japanese had not been able to do in the political arena or the entertainment world, or anywhere else.

These baseball triumphs also seemed somehow more substantive than the economic triumphs of years past. Ichiro’s rookie hit
record mattered; it would retain its significance over time. True, during the peak of the Bubble, the Nikkei hit an all-time
high of nearly 40,000 and was hailed as an economic Seventh Wonder—until the ensuing collapse revealed the smoke and mirrors
that had disguised the underlying weakness. In Ichiro’s case, however, no one was going to come along in ten years and claim
that his p/e ratio was out of whack.

At the same time, many Japanese back home found it difficult to fully grasp the idea that Ichiro was truly, madly and deeply
accepted into the fold by the American public, given the unpleasant history the two peoples shared. The sense of insecurity
was palpable enough that some Japanese sought confirmation from their American acquaintances that Ichiro was indeed as popular
as they had been led to believe and not simply the beneficiary of overzealous and slanted reporting, as was often the case
in Japan.

They found it odd that although he had made a sustained assault on the long-standing single-season hit record of 257 held
by George Sisler and had monopolized the batting leaderboard all year, he received almost uniformly positive treatment by
American fans and media—his success failing to activate any nativist, xenophobic strain in the American character. To Ichiro
fans, this was puzzling because it was in marked contrast, for example, to what American sluggers in NPB had experienced when
chasing titles or attempting to break Japanese records.

In point of fact, the pride and satisfaction in Ichiro’s achievements coexisted with a strange, indelible desire in Japan
to hold the world at arm’s length—as reflected in 2001 by the remark of one Ministry of Justice official who explained, to
a UN representative, the minuscule number of refugees Japan took in annually by saying, “Japanese don’t like foreigners.”
This attitude, which waxes and wanes, has been dubbed a
“gaijin
allergy” and its sneezes continue to resonate through many areas of Japanese society.

Some historians trace this allergy to the centuries of isolationism dating back to the Tokugawa Shogunate, whose rule of Japan
from 1600 to 1868 was marked by the fear that interference by foreigners and foreign ideas would threaten its hegemony. The
shogunate had initiated a policy of national seclusion that banned foreign travel. With a few minor exceptions, anyone caught
trying to leave or return to Japan was liable to face execution.

After Commodore Matthew Perry and his Black Ships arrived at the white sands of Shimoda in 1853, demanding that the shogunate
abandon its isolationist pose and open its ports, that era was supposed to have ended.

But it hadn’t. Not quite.

With the fall of the shogunate and the ascension of the reform-minded Emperor Meiji to the throne 15 years later, Japan began
a campaign to absorb foreign learning and technology in order to catch up and overtake the more industrially advanced West.
The phrase which, for the most part, characterized this effort,
wakon-yoshi
(Japanese spirit, Western skill), meant, essentially, “Give us your technology but don’t intrude in our society or disrupt
our national spirit of
wa
or harmony.”

The resulting bipolar relationship with foreign culture was marked by an intense interest for the Japanese in how they sized
up against the West. The country’s self-esteem soared to new heights when Japan defeated Russia in the war of 1905 and expanded
its military power throughout Asia, eventually pulling out of the League of Nations. It sank to new depths in the aftermath
of World War II when it was utterly dependent on the outside world to keep from starving. Then it rose once more in the postwar
era, during which Japan threatened to flood the world with exports.

Boasting of technological superiority, Japanese companies manufactured and exported high-quality products, but the country
had not been successful in producing human beings who could truly interact with others in foreign lands. In the eyes of many
consumers of Sonys and Hondas, the Japanese themselves remained two dimensional—a sort of caricature taken from
Madame Butterfly
and the numerous published accounts of Japanese corporate Groupthink.

Midori Masujima, a prize-winning sports journalist, touched on this when she wrote in 2002, “We’ve never really been a member
of the world community, not in the Edo period, not in the Meiji era and not today. Though we may have been a guest, or a provisional
member, or a member-in-training, we have never been a full-fledged, card-carrying member.” She addressed what she called Japan’s
“complex”—a language complex stemming from a chronic inability to master the English language, and a sports complex stemming
from its inability to prevail in international sports events, save for the odd marathon or judo triumph. Thus was there a
craving for approval from overseas, for a vindication of Japan itself, that attached itself to the athletes who made their
way across the Pacific.

The measure of the success of Ichiro, Nomo and the others is, in Masujima’s words, that “these Japanese athletes had taken
the Japanese sports inferiority complex—the sense that Japanese are not physically or experientially ready for world competition—and
proved it wrong.”

As she put it, they were taking their place on the world stage and giving young and old “a new vision of the world,” and went
on to say:

I believe that the statistics and the records and the splendid skills displayed by Japanese athletes are not just about athletic
talent. I believe that these athletes in this brand-new century represent a new way of thinking, a new philosophy that has
arisen within Japanese society, and that this new philosophy will have a tremendous influence.

… Stock prices are falling and Japan’s long recession continues. Violence and crime appear to be on the rise as a result.
Yet, today’s athletes—active overseas in greater numbers and in more sports than ever before—have made us remember the confidence
and the pride we have lost. “Maybe we can make it through these hard times after all.” “Maybe the world will finally accept
us … for what we truly are, regardless of whether we are good or bad at foreign languages.” I think Japan’s athletes can inspire
such hopes in the Japanese people… . Not only are they standing shoulder to shoulder with their overseas peers, in some cases
they are leading the way.