The Meaning of Ichiro (15 page)

One might also mention the long history of pitchers who throw without proper rest, sacrificing longevity in their careers
for their teams. Most notable was Tadashi Sugiura, who pitched all four games of the 1959 Japan Series and was forced out
of baseball with a bad arm at age 30. Or Katsuhisa “Iron Man” Inao, a contemporary of Sugiura’s, who won 42 games in one season
and also suffered a shortened career. Although such abuses diminished in succeeding decades, starting pitchers in Japan still
tended to throw more than their U.S. counterparts, due to pressure from their managers, causing comparatively early retirements.

Then there was the high number of sacrifice bunts (two to three times as many as in the major leagues). As longtime coach
Shozo Eto put it, “The Japanese love to sacrifice for the team. It’s considered an honor.” In 2003 when Tokyo Giants infielder
Masahiro Kawai set an all-time record for career sacrifice bunts with 514, it was greeted with as much fanfare as if he had
surpassed the home run record. There were fireworks on the Tokyo Dome electronic scoreboard and a flowery ceremony involving
Kawai’s wife and children, accompanied by tears of joy all around.

But if the history of Japanese baseball has tended to mirror such traditional values as
wa, sh
danshugi
(groupism) and deference to authority, it has not been without its own homegrown contrarians. Masaichi Kaneda, the great
400-game winner of the ‘50s and ‘60s, dictated to his coaches when he would pitch, demanding, at times, three days of rest.
In the ‘70s it was the iconoclastic multi-Triple Crown winner Hiromitsu Ochiai, who disdained practice and refused to listen
to any team instruction that pertained to his batting routine. In the ‘80s there was Kazuhiro Kiyohara, who proclaimed that
the only reason to become a professional baseball player was to be able to attract beautiful young women and drive fast sports
cars. A 6′4′′, 220-pound love hunk, who became increasingly thick of girth and prone to injury as his career progressed, slugger
Kiyohara was notorious for his addiction to high-end hostess clubs in the posh Ginza district and was a regular target of
Japan’s infamous scandal magazines (more than once for reputed association with organized crime figures).

However, it might also be noted that Kaneda went on to become one of the most demanding, tyrannical, discipline-conscious
managers in the game. “My Way” Ochiai made a postretirement living by writing commentaries criticizing the improper batting
form of active players, instituting his own autumn Hell Camps when he became a manager in 2003, while Kiyohara sought to amend
his ways by “purification” at Zen temples and publicly expressed horror at any suggestion of a player strike for higher pay.
He was once heard to say, “A strike wouldn’t be fair to the fans or the owners.”

Postwar generations of youth have indeed asserted themselves in different ways—as younger generations tend to do. During the
‘50s, there were the massive, and often violent, leftist student protests against the government’s Security Treaty with the
United States. During the ‘60s, protesters in long hair, jeans and hippie beads marched against the war in Vietnam and smoked
marijuana. During the booming ‘80s era of rising stock markets and real estate values, it was the so-called
“shinjin-rui,”
or “new breed,” who wore Armani fashions and gold necklaces, drank imported beer, sniffed cocaine (if their parents were
wealthy enough to provide them with the appropriate allowance) and mocked the worker bee ethic.

However, it was also clear that as even the more rebellious members of each generation grew older and confronted the realities
of daily living, they became more conservative, eventually acquiescing to the values of the docile organization workers at
whom they had scoffed not long before. Blind corporate loyalty at the cost of unpaid overtime and diminished family life continued
to manifest itself, even in the face of (or perhaps exacerbated by) the corporate restructuring which took place in the post-Bubble
era.
Kar
shi
(death from overwork) remained a major social issue, while stress from overwork or the inability to satisfy superiors was
among the major causes of some 30,000 suicides that were committed in Japan each year.

In fact, one of the more notable such episodes involved the man who originally scouted Ichiro Suzuki out of high school and
urged the Orix BlueWave to sign him against the advice of others who thought that Suzuki was way too thin, even for the NPB.

His name was Kazutoshi Miwata and he had been troubled by his inability to sign another high school star, pitching sensation
Nagisa Arakaki, who was the BlueWave’s top pick in the 1999 draft. Miwata had been “ordered” by the ‘Wave front office to
sign Arakaki, but when the player rebuffed all of his advances and declared instead that he wanted to play for the Fukuoka
Daiei Hawks, managed by legendary home run slugger Sadaharu Oh, the scout was forced to admit failure.

Miwata, who had worked long hours on his task, under intense pressure from the team, began to show classic symptoms of extreme
stress—loss of appetite, sleep disorders, memory loss. Finally one day, he cracked. On a trip to Naha, Okinawa, to beg for
Arakaki’s parents’ signature on a contract, he went up to the 11th floor of an office building in the city and jumped to his
death. A court later ruled that pressure from work had caused his actions, entitling his family to receive government compensation
in the amount of $17,000 a year.

In the ’90s, as the deep post-Bubble recession gripped the country, a disenchanted, impatient and narcissistic generation
of twenty-somethings emerged. Wearing earrings, bleaching their hair hues of orange and blonde, and displaying, their apologists
insisted, a more independent, adventurous streak than any of their predecessors, they were seen to be more in tune with the
global youth culture.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the new professional soccer loop, the J.League. The J.League had been established in
the early 1990s and met with a considerable amount of success, although it still lagged somewhat behind professional baseball
in terms of fan popularity.

Soccer, originally introduced to Japan in the 1940s, had, as yet, developed no discernible culture of its own. Thanks to a
modern, internationally minded founder and commissioner, the J.League stressed individuality and freedom. Players were allowed
to let their hair grow long, to dye it, to have beards and even to grab their crotches in jubilation after scoring a goal.

Baseball’s first poster boy for the new generation of restless youth was a reticent moonfaced pitcher named Hideo Nomo, a
pitching ace with the Kintetsu Buffaloes, who had long nursed a burning ambition to play in America. Nomo was fed up with
the traditional constraints of group loyalty and the wear and tear on his arm that his manager was causing. “I’m not going
to ruin my career for one man,” he was heard to say.

With the secret help of an agent, Nomo found an obscure loophole in the Japanese rules that enabled him to sign with the Los
Angeles Dodgers, despite not yet being eligible for free agency. The first Japanese pro baseball player to defy the system,
he was subjected to a brutal attack by Japan’s media, which labeled him a “traitor,” a man who did not understand the concept
of
wa,
as well as condemnation from the powers-that-were in NPB.

But a former Kintetsu pitching coach named Hiroshi Gondo, after visiting Nomo in the United States, was able to offer an explanation
of why a ballplayer of his caliber would actually want to defect.

“Compared to the American way, Japanese baseball is just like being in the army,” he said. “Playing in the major leagues might
be very tough, but they leave things up to the individual player. Players there know major league team practice is not really
enough so they will do their own training afterward. In Japan, everybody, regardless of whether you are on the first team
or the farm team, does the same training. Team management doesn’t treat players as professionals. Players are so controlled
by team management here that it makes you wonder why more Japanese players haven’t left for the big leagues.”

“You shouldn’t worry about what other people think,” Nomo himself drawled, in a rare, talkative moment. “If you think you
are right, you should go ahead and do it. The important thing is to have a strong sense of who you are.”

This was not exactly the received wisdom of Japanese classrooms and offices. But Nomo eventually managed to overcome his considerable
difficulties, to carve out a new life for himself and prevail. How he did it is a story that comes later.

In 1964, I was the first Japanese to play in the major leagues. At the time I was only 20 years old. Because of various circumstances,
I had to return to Japan to play baseball. I actually wanted to stay there, but at the time I couldn’t express those feelings
to many people. I say this to all you young people. You only live once. So don’t listen to what the people around you say
and follow the path you think is best for you.

M
ASANORI
M
URAKAMI, MAY
1995

W
HEN THE NEWLY FORMED
T
OKYO
G
IANTS TOURED THE
United States in 1935, a Pittsburgh Pirates scout tried to sign their ace pitcher, Eiji Sawamura, who was billed on that
trip as “The Man Who Struck Out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.” But Sawamura flatly refused. He wanted no part of living in the
United States, he said; the rice there was no good, the women were too haughty and he couldn’t understand the language. Thus
did the first recorded attempt by an American major league team to recruit a Japanese baseball player come to an end, and
it is safe to say that given the comparatively low level of the game in Japan at the time and the onset of war in the Pacific,
similar efforts did not soon follow.

Then in 1961, however, when the Tokyo Giants made the unprecedented move of training at the Los Angeles Dodgers camp in Vero
Beach, Florida, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley became so enamored of Shigeo Nagashima, Yomiuri’s clutch-hitting, charismatic
third baseman—dubbed “Golden Boy” in Japan for his movie-star good looks—that he tried to buy the cleanup star’s contract.
Nagashima was interested, but the Giants’ aging founder and owner Matsutaro Shoriki turned the offer down flat. He was building
a new baseball dynasty and made it clear that unless Nagashima could find a way out of his Yomiuri contract, which bound the
superstar to the proud
Kyojin
for life, duty to team—and country—would have to come first.

Now, hundreds of American players, mostly refugees from the U.S. minors, had played in Japan, both before and after the war.
In the early ‘60s Japan became a lucrative market for aging major leaguers like Daryl Spencer, Jim Marshall, Ken Aspromonte,
Bob Nieman, Chuck Essegian and Norm Larker, no longer in demand by teams back home. However, traffic the other way was nonexistent,
thanks to a combination of NPB contractual restrictions and cultural barriers. It took a freak occurrence for a Japanese to
finally be allowed to don the uniform of an MLB squad. The year it happened was 1964 and the player’s name was Masanori Murakami.
And, as a result of his adventures in America, he found himself in the middle of a battle royal that threatened to destroy
baseball relations between Japan and the U.S., not to mention his own career.

It was a conflict that pointed up certain differences between the U.S. and Japan in their respective attitudes toward contracts
and
ningen kankei
(human relations).

Murakami was a baby-faced left-handed pitcher, a trim six-footer, barely out of his teens, who belonged to the Nankai Hawks
of the Pacific League. In 1964, the unproven farm team hurler was sent to America, along with two other young players, to
spend the season honing his craft in the lower rungs of the San Francisco Giants’ minor league system. He was part of a novel
player exchange agreement, approved by both the Japanese and American baseball commissioners, that the Nankai and San Francisco
organizations had created, the latter purportedly anticipating that one day they might send players from their farm system
to train in Japan.