The Meaning of Ichiro (30 page)

In succeeding years, a long line of visiting college and professional players, and individual coaches, from North America
have tutored the Japanese in a wide variety of skills and techniques, from the push bunt to the cut fastball. Ty Cobb, who
spent several months at Keio University in the winter of 1931, was one of a number of Americans who taught baseball on Japanese
college campuses in the early part of the century (although Cobb-san was unfortunately unable to teach Japanese to pronounce
his name properly and thus went down in Tokyo history books as
Ty Kapp).

When the prewar professional Japan League was established, players from the North American minor leagues like Harris McGalliard
enthusiastically participated. The most prominent non-Japanese from that era was the pitcher Victor Starfin, mentioned briefly
in
Chapter 3
, a stateless White Russian who won 303 games while playing for the Yomiuri Giants from 1936 to 1955, enduring
enforced house arrest during the Second World War. The 6′4′′, 230-pound Starfin is the only non-Japanese besides Sadaharu Oh,
Wally Yonamine and Horace Wilson in the Japanese Hall of Fame. Since 1962, when Don Newcombe and Larry Doby ended their careers
with the Chunichi Dragons, former major-league stars have been an integral part of
Nihon puro-yaky
.
Daryl Spencer introduced bigleague-style hard sliding, Clete Boyer taught modern infield defensive techniques and Jim Lefebvre
introduced tee batting in pregame practice.

The
gaijin
also captured their share of titles and records. Leron Lee, who played 11 years with the Lotte Orions, had the highest career
batting average of all players with at least 4,000 at-bats in Japan with a mark of .320. Randy Bass set the record for highest
single-season batting average in 1986 when he hit .389, and also won back to back triple crowns in 1985 and 1986. In addition,
American Bobby Rose chalked up several extremely productive seasons, including 1999 when he led the league in batting average
with .369 and RBIs with 153. In 2001 and 2002, in a remarkable sequence of events, first Tuffy Rhodes and then Alex Cabrera
tied Sadaharu Oh’s single-season home run mark of 55.

Overall, more than 700 foreign players have tried their hand in Japan in the first 70 years of pro baseball’s existence there,
but roughly half were not invited back for a second season. Among the more notable busts were Frank Howard, an amiable 6′8′′,
275-pound star slugger who played a total of one day in Japan before succumbing to a knee injury. Joe Pepitone received a
record salary to play for the Yakult Atoms in 1973, but hit only .173, complaining all the while about his living conditions
until he left in midseason to deal with a Stateside divorce. Rob Deer, a former Milwaukee Brewers and Detroit Tigers slugger,
could only manage a batting average of .151 with eight home runs for the 1994 Hanshin Tigers, while Boston Red Sox star Mike
Greenwell hit .231 in seven games for the same team in 1997.

The upshot of it all was that it took a certain type of individual to make it in Japan, and past success in MLB was certainly
no guarantee of a similar result in NPB. In addition to different food and living conditions, a language barrier and a new
set of cultural mores, a player had to be able to adjust to a heavier practice routine, tolerate more aggressive coaching
and adapt to a different breaking-ball, control-oriented type of pitching. Although Japanese pitchers threw a few miles per
hour slower on the average than their major league counterparts, they did have impressive control of all their forkballs,
splitters, curves, sliders and
shootos,
among others.

On top of all this, the
gaijin
had to deal with the ambivalent attitude Japanese displayed toward foreigners during much of the postwar era. Many real estate
agents, landlords and night club operators, to name a few, have had “no-foreigners” policies, as did certain bath house operators.

Foreign membership on Japanese teams which, in essence, meant those players not born and bred in Japan, or those born to Japanese
parents overseas, has been limited by rule. As this book went to press, each team in the Central and Pacific Leagues was permitted
four imported players, including up to three pitchers or three batters—with unlimited numbers of
gaijin
allowed in the farm system. (A foreigner who plays more than nine years in Japan is no longer subject to these
“gaijin”
rules.) The Japanese Players Association defended such restrictions, arguing that without them Japanese baseball would be
overrun by foreign imports, given the somewhat lower level of play in Japan, and that their presence would adversely affect
the development of younger athletes by denying them opportunities to play. This system stood in contrast to MLB, where there
were no such restrictions. It was, and is, possible for a major league team to field a starting lineup of players born outside
the United States. In 2003, 28 percent of all big leaguers carried foreign passports and seven members of the starting lineup
of the Florida Marlins in the final game of the World Series were born outside the United States.

In NPB, one still hears complaints about a
“gaijin
allergy” and the ideal of having so-called “pure-blooded” Japanese baseball has often been expressed by the sports insiders.
For example, in 1984, Takezo Shimoda, the onetime ambassador to the United States who also served a stint as baseball commissioner
in Japan, stated openly that “it was only natural that Japanese baseball be played by Japanese as the gap between the respective
levels of the Japanese and American games narrows.

“Besides,” he added, “Japanese baseball will never be considered first-rate as long as there are former major leaguers no
longer wanted in their own countries in key spots in a Japanese lineup.” In 1999, Giants manager Shigeo Nagashima announced
to a group of supporters that his “ideal” for many years had been to field a purely made-in-Japan lineup.

Nagashima had been an illustrious member of the V-9 Giants (1965-1973), so-called because they had won nine straight Japan
Championships and were themselves known as “pure-blooded” because all of their members were home-grown—with a couple of caveats.
First baseman Sadaharu Oh, born of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, carried a Taiwanese passport and needed a reentry
visa whenever he left Japan; he had once been banned from playing in a schoolboy tourney because he was not a Japanese citizen.
Left-handed pitcher Masaichi Kaneda, Japan’s only 400-game winner, who finished his career with Yomiuri, was a naturalized
Japanese, one of some 600,000 Korean residents born and raised in Japan. Many of them were the children of wartime laborers
forcibly brought in from the Korean Peninsula, fingerprinted, forced to carry special ID cards and otherwise discriminated
against.

The 1960s were a time when the Japanese longed particularly for heroes, as the country rose from the ashes of defeat and sought
a new kind of national identity. If their laurel wearers turned out to have Korean or Chinese blood, the fact could be conveniently
brushed aside. That Rikidozan was, in fact, born in North Korea was an unpleasant and inconvenient item of information that
was unreported by the media in elevating him to national hero status.

The word
“gaijin”
(literally: “outside person”) is considered demeaning by many foreigners living in Japan (and by some Japanese as well),
but it was not always thus. Back in the Meiji Era, according to the
Asahi Shimbun,
the term was used simply to refer to people outside one’s immediate circle of acquaintances. Before the Second World War,
foreigners in Japan were referred to as
jin
(different people) or
seiy
jin
(Westerners), then during the postwar occupation, in which several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were stationed in Japan,
many children began to refer to all Caucasian foreigners as
Amerikajin
(Americans), a practice that did not please the British, French, German and Australians living in the country. Gradually,
gaijin
became the word used for white people and
kokujin
or
gaijin
for blacks, but was not applied to other Asians or Arabs.

In the late 1980s, the use of the word
“gaijin”
fell out of favor in newspapers, on TV and in official government documents, replaced instead by the more formal
“gaikokujin”
(person from another country). It was more polite. In July 1991, the Office of the Commissioner of Japanese Baseball began
using
“gaikokujin”
in its contracts and official correspondence. Still, in daily conversation,
gaijin
remained a staple.

Another term used, incidentally, was
suketto,
literally, “one who helps.” The implication is that one is there not as a member of the group but as an outsider with special
skills or expertise to impart. A
suketto
is hired—indeed often overpaid—to raise the skill or technology level in his field, to refrain from any wa-damaging activities,
and then to depart quietly so his pupils can practice what they have learned from him. The term had been applied not only
to foreign ballplayers but to engineers, technicians, bond traders and others in the long string of experts Japan has employed
to raise its level of competition.

In baseball, the question of ethnicity was sometimes subjected to rather fine distinctions. Wally Yonamine, a second-generation
Japanese-American who was born and bred in Hawaii and won three batting titles for the Yomiuri Giants, was considered a
gaijin
under NPB rules, while Sachio Kinugasa, a Hiroshima Carp infielder whose mother was Japanese but whose father was a black
American, was not. Kinugasa, holder of the consecutive-games-played record in Japan with 2,215 (more than Lou Gehrig, fewer
than Cal Ripken Jr.), was born and raised in Japan, graduated from a Japanese high school and held Japanese citizenship.

Among home-grown players, there was also a sort of situational ethic which determined the extent of one’s “pure-bloodedness.”
For example, Kinugasa had a big aggressive American-style swing, normally a no-no in compact form-conscious Japan, but it
was reluctantly tolerated by his batting coach because, as he put it, “Kinugasa wasn’t really Japanese, so it couldn’t be
helped.” The great Kaneda (who soft-pedaled his Korean background) was notoriously short-tempered and combative; whenever
he got into a brawl with an opposing player, writers would shrug and invariably whisper that it was his Korean blood that
was causing his behavior because a
“wa-
loving” Japanese would simply never behave that way. The same was true with Hiroshima-born Isao Harimoto, the only player
in Japan with 3,000 hits and one of the few Koreans in the game who didn’t try to hide his background. Harimoto endured taunts
about his ethnicity from his schoolyard days on up. There were more than a few Korean players in the NPB who assumed Japanese
names, sang the praises of the Japanese way and did whatever else was necessary to stay safely in the closet, the better to
get along with the crowd.