The Meaning of Ichiro (3 page)

“That kid of mine,” Nobuyuki would later write. “He was really stubborn, willful. Sometimes I got so mad at him. But it was
also times like that that I knew he was something special. He had a great natural talent.”

That Ichiro was preternaturally talented became ever more apparent as he grew. In the sixth grade, as a rail-thin child who
lacked power and strength, he still had better baseball skills than most high school players. He hit the pitching machines
so well at the Airport Batting Center, which he now frequented with his father as often as four times a day, that Nobuyuki
asked the superintendent there to increase the speed. At first, when Ichiro was in the third grade, the speed was set at 65
miles an hour, which he handled easily, be it fastball, curveball or
shooto
(a kind of screwball), the different pitches which the machine could be set to throw. Within three years, he was hitting
balls at 75 miles per hour, but then even that became too easy, so the manager at the batting center jerry-rigged a machine
for his special client with a spring attachment that upped the speed to 80 miles per hour. That, he said, was the absolute
limit. But in time the boy complained it still wasn’t fast enough. Eventually, when Ichiro turned 15, the superintendent would
physically move the machine itself several feet closer to the batter’s box, creating, in effect, a 93-mile-an-hour pitch (the
equivalent of an upper-limit fastball in Japan’s professional leagues at the time). His most frequent customer easily mastered
even this.

Throughout all the batting center sessions, Ichiro’s father continued to stand behind home plate, making sure his son only
swung at strikes. This was not an inexpensive proposition. One set, or “game” as it was called, cost the rough equivalent
of a dollar for 25 pitches, and as the machine was somewhat erratic, pitches not infrequently missed the mark. Although Nobuyuki
could not be described as a wealthy man, he uncomplainingly bore the cost.

Nobuyuki also devised what he called a “life or death” drill, in which he stood just six feet away from his son and delivered
pitches that Ichiro was required to swat to the left or right sides of the diamond in order to avoid hitting his father. It
was a perilous exercise, because from the fifth grade they had begun using a much harder professional-league-approved ball—hard
enough to cause concussions and broken bones if directed with enough force at the human body. The father believed the risk
was necessary to teach his son bat control.

In addition, the father, who had been an avid golfer until he decided to devote all his free hours to his son’s baseball training,
also tried to incorporate the basic elements of a golf swing into Ichiro’s batting form, the idea being to shift weight from
one foot to the other while completing the swing, to get the entire body fully behind the motion. The result was the eventual
development of a style of hitting in which Ichiro swept his front foot in the air pendulum-style as he went into his swing.
It was a batting form that Ichiro kept all throughout his Japan career, one which also made it look as though he were running
before he had even finished his swing.

Through it all, the father tried to inculcate in his son his philosophy of life, the four principles of which were
doryoku, konj
, nintai,
and
ch
wa
(effort, fighting spirit, patience and harmony). Likened by some to the ethos of the
bushi
or samurai, dating back to the days of the medieval warrior, to Nobuyuki, they were merely the guiding principles that he
had learned from his parents. By all accounts, Ichiro had little difficulty in assimilating them. As a child, he was self-composed
and betrayed little emotion. Unlike others on his Little League team, he did not jump up and down after a big play. Instead,
he acted as if hitting a home run or winning a game in the ninth inning was the most natural thing in the world. He had the
word
sh
ch
or “concentration” ink-brushed on his glove. It was a state of mind he endlessly sought to maintain.

By the time Ichiro was 12, he had his heart set on a professional career, as an excerpt from a sixth-grade essay he composed
made clear:

My dream when I grow up is to be a first-class professional baseball player …. I have the confidence to do the necessary practice
to reach that goal. I started practicing from age three. From the age of nine I have practiced baseball 360 out of 365 days
a year and I practice hard. I only had five to six hours (in a year) to play with my friends. That’s how much I practiced.
So I think I can surely become a pro. I will play in junior high and high school. When I graduate I will enter the pros. My
dream is to join the Seibu Lions or the Chunichi Dragons. My goal is a contract signing bonus of 100 million yen.

According to published reports, he was, by this time, already practicing his autograph.

Years later, sportswriters reading Nobuyuki’s published account of his sessions with Ichiro would find echoes of
Kyojin no Hoshi,
an enormously popular cartoon series that first appeared in the 1960s in
manga
or comic form and was later adapted for television. It told the story of a young boy’s long and difficult climb to stardom
with the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, Japan’s quintessential professional team. The protagonist learns the game under the tutelage
of his father, an impoverished postwar laborer who takes his son to a practice field and subjects him to hours’ worth of fierce
training that leave him battered and bloodied and crying from pain.

“The only way to become a man and succeed in life,” the father says at one point, “is to suffer and persevere.” Through years
of enduring such hardship, the boy grows into a sinewy young man and becomes a star pitcher for the mighty
Kyojin
(Giants), a left-handed smokethrower who can make a pitched baseball perform impossible gyrations.
“Hoshi,”
the boy’s name, was also a homonym for “star.”

Kyojin no Hoshi
was grounded in the harsh work ethic that Japan embraced as the nation clawed its way up from the ashes of war. It also informed
the way the country approached the game of baseball in the postwar decades. Several sequels followed until changing generational
attitudes began to result in a somewhat less rigorous approach to the art of cultivating young ballplayers.

Although Nobuyuki bristled at such comparisons—“Baseball was fun for both of us,” he insisted—Ichiro found them rather close
to the mark.

“It might have been fun for him,” he said, “but for me it was a lot like
Kyojin no Hoshi.
It bordered on hazing and I suffered a lot. But I also couldn’t say no to him. He was doing his utmost to help me.”

By the time Ichiro entered junior high school in 1985, Nobuyuki had become so convinced his son possessed the ability to make
it as a professional, he went to see the coach of the school’s baseball team with two requests:

“Do whatever you want with my son,” he said, “but please don’t change his batting form. He has worked a long time to perfect
it.”

And then he added the kicker: “No matter how good Ichiro is, don’t ever praise him. We have to make him spiritually strong.”

With afternoon sessions now out of the question because of the year-round practice routine school teams in Japan required,
Nobuyuki shifted into a different kind of support mode. He continued to leave his factory at 3:30 every day, but now he went
to observe his son’s after-school practices. He would stand there behind the backstop, hands in his pockets, and watch silently
as Ichiro and his teammates went through their paces. As long as his son was on the practice field, he would not sit down,
because his son could not sit down. It was a kind of moral reinforcement. He would drive his son home in the family car after
practice and when dinner had been eaten, he would take him to the batting center for their nightly two-hour session, often
staying there until the place was closed down. Then it was time for homework and Nobuyuki would always stay awake in case
Ichiro had questions that needed to be answered. Neither father nor son ever went to bed before 2
A.M.
during this period and never until Nobuyuki had capped the day off with the nightly foot massage.

A big problem was Ichiro’s abnormally slender physique, especially since the boy was a starting pitcher as well as the team’s
cleanup hitter. He was a notoriously fussy eater. His dislike of vegetables was exceeded only by his fondness for Kobe filet
steak and sashimi, two of the most expensive items on the menu in Japan. So Nobuyuki proposed a deal that would put a huge
dent in his pocket. He offered to allow Ichiro to consume all the Kobe beef and raw tuna he wished as long as he ate a lot
and drank abundant quantities of milk at the same time. Ichiro agreed, much to the reported displeasure of his mother, whose
say in her second child’s upbringing had been steadily diminished.

Ichiro led his junior high school team in pitching, hitting and fielding for three years running, at the conclusion of which
he and his father were besieged by high school baseball scouts.

At this point, a major choice was to be made. In junior high school, Ichiro’s marks were so impressive that teachers thought
he might gain admission to Todai, Japan’s top university, if he applied himself in his studies. But that meant he had to choose
between attending a rigorous top-ranked academic high school and enduring what was known in Japan as “Examination Hell,” as
the admission tests for Japan’s top colleges were called, or going to a top-ranked baseball school, to prepare for a career
in the pros. After what appears to be not a great deal of agonizing, he opted for the latter. Once there, he stopped studying
and, by his own admission, “slept in class.”

In Japan, high school baseball was almost a religion—akin to Texas high school football, only more so. It had a long, honored
tradition that dated back to the Meiji Era (1868-1912). Indeed, by the time the first professional league was established
in 1936, high school baseball already had a 50-year history. The National High School Baseball Championship Tournament, established
in 1915 and held each summer since 1924 in cavernous 50,000-seat Koshien Stadium, near Osaka, had become a revered national
institution. It was the most prestigious sporting event in the land, famous for its ear-splitting brass bands and wild, colorfully
costumed cheering groups bussed from hometowns all over the country, and even more for its shaven-headed, sweat-soaked participants,
dashing madly on and off the field, fighting to the point of collapse for the glory of their alma mater. (A shorter spring
invitational tourney that previewed this event was also highly popular.)