The Meaning of Ichiro (12 page)

Another key figure was Chuman’s teammate Jutsuo Aoi, a pitcher/ infielder whose “1,000 swing” batting drills evoked associations
with the famed 17th-century swordsman Musashi Miyamoto. In his classic work,
The Book of Five Rings,
Miyamoto preached the Way of the Martial Art, which he exhorted devotees to “put into practice morning and evening, day in
and day out.”

“Surpass today what you were yesterday,” Miyamoto wrote. “See to it that you temper yourself with one thousand days of practice,
and refine yourself with ten thousand days of training.”

The Ichiko baseball team’s success in defeating a team of American traders and missionaries belonging to the private Yokohama
Country and Athletic club in a series of historic games in 1896 received prominent newspaper coverage—a first for baseball
in Japan—and caused the game’s popularity to soar. Suddenly, “spirit ball” was elevated to the status of national sport.

Ichiko games were rich in symbolism because they demonstrated to the nation the potential fruits of hard work and conveyed
the message that if the Japanese could defeat the Americans at a game the foreign barbarians had invented, then surely they
could surpass them in trade and industry as well. The fact that U.S. sailors were added to the Yokohama team at one stage
and still the Ichiko players prevailed made the experience especially sweet.

Star pitcher Tsunetaro Moriyama, a left-hander who later pitched a shutout against the Yokohama Americans, became Japan’s
first baseball legend, hypostatsizing the grand virtues of
konj
(fighting spirit) and
doryoku
(effort). Moriyama threw so hard every day at the Ichiko grounds, using a brick wall on the field for target practice, that
he eventually wore a hole in it—a permanent tribute to fighting spirit that is now commemorated by a plaque. He was also famous
for his habit of setting up a lit candle as a target and trying to extinguish the flame with his pitches. He threw so many
curveballs in practice that his arm became bent; to straighten it out, he would dangle from the limbs of the cherry trees
that bordered the field, pretending to ignore the pain. Moriyama expanded Chuman’s philosophy about preparation when he said,
“Two or three
years
are needed before a team can play its first game.”

Ichiko was also memorialized in a 1905 poem entitled
“Yaky
Buka,”
an abridged version of which follows:

The crack of the bat echoes to the sky

On cold March mornings when we chase balls on the ice

Year in and year out, through wind and rain

Enduring all hardship, we practice our game

Ah for the glory of our Baseball club!

Ah, for the glitter it has cast! Pray that our martial valor never turns submissive

And that our honor will always shine far across the Pacific.

From the early part of the 20th century, the baseball teams of prestigious private universities Keio and Waseda came to the
forefront, incorporating the Ichiko ethos, which came to be known as
bushido b
sub
ru (bushido
being the term for the way of the samurai warrior).

In 1905, Waseda made a historic tour of North America. It marked the first time intercollegiate squads from the two countries
would face each other, but it was significant in other ways, as well. At the time, Japan was in the midst of a war with Russia—one
from which it would emerge victorious and demonstrate convincingly that it had become a major power. It was the idea of Waseda
dons and Japanese government officials that by sending a team of college athletes all the way across the Pacific just to play
a sporting contest, while simultaneously fighting and winning a war with behemoth Russia, the small island nation would declare
in no uncertain terms its arrival on the world stage.

The Waseda nine won only nine of 26 games against teams from Stanford and the University of California, among others, but
thoroughly impressed critics everywhere with their grasp of the game. The
San Francisco Chronicle
declared that the “little bronze-faced athletes” (“Japs” as the paper also put it) played “gilt-edged baseball,” and that
although they were defeated more often than they emerged victorious, they were not in the least disgraced. As the
Eugene Register
put it, “They made every spectator realize that the students of Waseda University know how to play baseball.”

The trip gave a healthy boost in confidence to the players from Japan. Waseda returned home loaded with the latest in equipment
and technique (pitcher’s windups, sacrifice bunts, sliding into base), as well as American style cheering. Back home, the
team drew 60,000 to some of its subsequent intercollegiate games. The Keio-Waseda games, played in the separate spring and
fall seasons which came to characterize intercollegiate and interscholastic competition, were especially popular and attracted
increasing newspaper coverage.

A book called
Saikin Yaky
Gijutsu
(Modern Baseball Techniques), which was inspired by and published shortly after the 1905 trip, stressed the application of
Japan’s “3,000-year-old martial arts … combining physical and spiritual strength” to baseball, as well as to other imported
sports like football and boat racing. This, the author maintained, would eventually produce a type of baseball superior to
that of the U.S.

Credence was lent to that theory in 1924 when Waseda hosted a strong University of Chicago team and defeated them convincingly
in a series of contests representing new heights for the Japanese game and once again elevating baseball to a symbol of national
pride. The manager of that Waseda team, Suishu Tobita, a squat, intense individual, became famous as a practitioner of his
own brand of
bushido
ball. He encouraged his players to practice—as he himself had done during his playing days at Waseda—until they had “collapsed
on the ground and froth was coming out of their mouths.” His infield ground ball drills were so ferocious that he would often
back his victims all the way to the outfield fence. Although college managers at other schools like Keio and Gakushuin had
on occasion tried a less regimented, less groupist approach to
yaky
, bushido
ball was so successful it spawned many imitators.

By the time the first professional league in Japan had been established, in 1936, amateur baseball already had a solid grip
on the public’s interest. The annual National High School Championship baseball tournament, established in 1916 by the
Asahi Shimbun,
drew capacity crowds for the two weeks it lasted. The newspaper used the tournament to increase circulation with reports
on the games, as well as to promote the concept of Ichiko’s
bushido
spirit and to tout baseball as a tool of education. The highly opinionated Tobita became a regular columnist for the
Asahi,
extolling the virtues of student baseball as “the only true form of the game.” Samples of his musings about the new fighting
technique based on old spirit include: “The only real baseball is year-round baseball…. Character is more important than technique….
Baseball is more than just a sport. It is an expression of the beautiful and noble spirit of Japan.” This paralleled, incidentally,
similar arguments being made in favor of the game in the United States at the time, which extolled it as an expression of
democratic values and good citizenship.

Japanese had actually gotten their first taste of professional baseball in 1908 when a team of minor and major leaguers from
the U.S. called the Reach All-Americans won all of its 17 games versus amateur competition on a tour of the archipelago. Similar
tours followed, reaching an historical peak of sorts in 1934, when Babe Ruth, playing his last game in a Yankee uniform, headlined
a team of big-name American players that won all of its 16 games against a team of former college players, semiprofessionals
and high schoolers, mostly by lopsided scores. Ruth, who during the series hit .408 and clubbed 14 home runs, led a huge confetti
parade through the Ginza before several hundred thousand wildly cheering Japanese fans.

That 1934 tour had been sponsored by the
Yomiuri Shimbun,
which would vie with the
Asahi
for the title of Japan’s leading daily newspaper. Despite the unsuccessful assassination attempt on the life of Yomiuri owner
Matsutaro Shoriki by an extreme right wing group named the Warlike Gods Society, who were angered that he had allowed foreigners
to play baseball at Jingu Stadium, located on the grounds of the sacred Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, it was by far the most successful
of the professional tours from America—thanks in part to bright-eyed pitcher Eiji Sawamura, a fastballer said to throw in
the high 90s, who struck out Ruth, Lou Gehrig and two other major league stars in succession, in a 1-0 loss.