The Meaning of Ichiro (5 page)

When the season ends in early October, Americans pack their bags and go home to spend the winter as they like—those who spent
their season on the bench might head for the winter leagues, those who didn’t might head for the living room sofa. Japanese,
by contrast, would go off to autumn training, a reprise of spring baseball boot camp, which lasts until the final day of November.
In many cases even the top stars on the team would participate.

For years, the Tokyo Giants have held an autumn camp where typically the workday began at 7:00 in the morning and ended at
9:00 at night. Drinking and mah-jongg were forbidden. So was watching adult videos. One year, each player was required to
write an essay entitled “A Self-Examination Concerning Flaws in My Performance During the Past Season.”

As a BlueWave, Ichiro always stayed late after practice. Long after practice and long after his teammates had ensconced themselves
in Kobe’s neon-lit watering holes and fleshpots, he was hard at work on his form in the batting cages by himself. In the winter,
with permission from Orix, he played for the Hilo entry in the Hawaiian League.

Out of deference, Ichiro had politely tried his manager’s way of hitting for a while. After all, a willingness to conform
was a sign of good manners. But he found that the new stance threw his rhythm out of whack. Called back to the big team in
midyear, he could only manage a .188 batting average in 43 games, although in one memorable contest he did hit a single and
a home run off the PL’s leading hurler, Hideo Nomo. He subsequently declared, rather dramatically, that he would rather stay
on the farm team than continue trying to alter his swing.

“I’ve been hitting this way since high school,” he said. “That’s my batting. I’d rather stay on the farm than attempt a switch
now.”

“These young guys really say what they want,” remarked a somewhat bemused Doi, granting Ichiro’s wish to return to the minors.

Ultimately, Ichiro’s stubbornness, rare for a player in Japan, paid off. In 1994, Doi was forced to resign because of the
team’s mediocre record and a new manager, an irreverent spirit named Akira Ogi, took over. Formerly a second baseman with
the old Nishitetsu Lions, based in Fukuoka, he and his teammates had been as famous for their postgame debauchery as for any
exploits on the field. Ogi, a mere .229 career hitter between the foul lines, was a free-spending nightlife aficionado who
could negotiate the dense thickets of bars in Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe as well as any man alive. He liked to dress in the fashion
of a Japanese movie gangster—in white suits, white enamel shoes, gold chains and dark sunglasses—and liked to bring nightclub
hostesses with him to the ballpark.

His transition from player to manager seems not to have affected his approach either to the game or to life. Under Ogi, there
was no player curfew and few other rules. It was fine with him if an Orix player stumbled back to the
ryokan
drunk out of his mind, as long as said player was up the next morning running around the practice field and sweating the
alcohol out of his system.

“Drink hard, but practice hard,” Ogi was often heard to say. “That’s my motto.”

By all accounts, it was a philosophy he personally adhered to well past his middle years. Until he retired as BlueWave manager
in 2001, he would lubricate himself until the wee hours, arise in the morning for a run of several miles and follow that with
a sauna and a bath, during which he would douse his private parts with alternating buckets of hot and cold water. He boasted
that this ritual kept him young well into his 60s, able to vie with his players for the affections of young ladies in cities
all over Japan.

His on-field strategy was not remarkably different from the dogged step-by-step, base-by-base approach followed by the Giants
and most other Japanese teams, who worshipped at the altar of the sacrifice bunt. (After seeing Nippon Professional Baseball’s
button-down style of play during a lengthy stay in Tokyo, author David Halberstam was moved to remark, “They play as if they
were wearing blue business suits.”)

However, Ogi
was
unburdened by a belief in
totei seido
and the widely-held notion in Japan that orthodox form was all-important. He did not think there was anything at all wrong
with Ichiro’s swing and confessed that he could not figure out why Doi had not used him more. Thus, one of Ogi’s first acts
as manager was to stick Ichiro in the starting lineup, mostly in the leadoff spot, and let him hit any way he wanted. Ichiro
responded with a breakthrough season that baseball fans in Japan still talk about. Playing in Kobe’s idyllic new park, Green
Stadium Kobe, notable for its fan-shaped playing field and multicolored seats, he became the first Japanese player to accumulate
over 200 hits in a season, finishing with 210 in 130 games for a batting average of .385. The latter was a new Pacific League
record, just shy of the Japan record of .389 held by American Randy Bass, set in 1986. Batting leadoff, Ichiro also whacked
13 home runs, drove in 54 runs and, demonstrating exceptional foot speed, stole 29 bases. He was chosen the Pacific League
MVP and awarded a Gold Glove for his fine defensive efforts in center field, where he had unveiled the best throwing arm in
the Japanese game.

It was in 1994 that he also officially became known by the handle “Ichiro,” rather than Suzuki—which was the second most common
surname in Japan. It was a PR stunt dreamed up by Ogi and an Orix coach in an effort to change the image of a team that had
grown weak and complacent, as well as to separate their new outfielder from the anonymous clutter of all the other Suzukis
in Nippon Professional Baseball. It was an idea Ichiro initially thought frivolous. He found it embarrassing to be introduced
that way over the PA system. By the end of the season, however, with Ichiro a household word and commercial endorsement offers
flooding in, he did not want to be called anything else.

The following year, picking up where he left off, he propelled the BlueWave to their first pennant in 12 years and copped
his second MVP in a row. He topped the league in hitting again, with a .342 average, and led in RBIs with 80. What’s more,
he belted 25 home runs, while upping his number of stolen bases to 49.

By this time, he was so famous it was difficult for him to walk the streets of Kobe, now, tragically, reduced to rubble in
many neighborhoods by the great earthquake of 1995, which had collapsed the city’s overhead highway and turned many of the
downtown office buildings into grotesque shells of twisted metal, leaving some 300,000 people—one-fifth of the metropolitan
population—homeless. Ichiro had quietly donated considerable amounts of money out of his own pocket to help in the relief
effort.

Basking in the reflected brilliance of Ichiro’s luminosity was
pater
Nobuyuki, who attended every Orix home game he could, making the two-hour drive west from Nagoya. He had just authored a
book,
Musuko Ichiro
(My Son Ichiro), in which he recounted his relationship with his son, and, in the process, turned the Airport Batting Center
into a tourist attraction. As a result of that tome’s substantial sales, he had become a minor celebrity himself, fielding
dozens of media requests every day. He could be seen sitting in the infield stands at Green Stadium Kobe signing autographs
for fans and being interviewed by sports reporters. However, it was a turn of events that embarrassed Ichiro. He complained
to his father, who subsequently moved to the outfield bleachers, where he might be less easily spotted.

The press had dubbed Ichiro the “Human Batting Machine” and he continued to do justice to the name, putting together the most
impressive skein of hitting seen in Japan since the heyday of Sadaharu Oh. In 1996, he batted .356, won his third straight
MVP and led his team to victory in the Japan Series over the Yomiuri Giants. In 1997, moving to third in the batting order,
he hit .345. A year later it was .358, then .343 and .387 after that. That made seven batting titles in a row, baby, an unprecedented
feat in the NPB, as was his aggregate batting average over that period of .353. He had become such an adroit, dexterous hitter
that he was downright eerie at times. In 1997, for example, he went two entire months—216 plate appearances in all—without
striking out. In the 1999 season, he managed to get hits on 70 percent of the strikes he swung at—an esoteric if nonetheless
astonishing baseball statistic. His bat control was so good that in one game in the year 2000, he hit a pitch that bounced
in front of home plate for a single to the outfield (the video highlight of this sensational hit is often played these days
on American television). Ichiro believed himself on the verge of hitting .400, something that had never been done in Japan.
By then the press had come up with another word for him:
kaibutsu
(monster). It was praise of the highest order.

As he was being catapulted into superstardom, Ichiro was also morphing into a symbol of the assertive new youth in image-conscious
Japan. He would appear at the park dressed in baggy jeans, T-shirt and backwards baseball cap, rap music blaring from his
Walkman—the strains of “Fuck you motherfucker” and other popular lyrics of the time audible, if not intelligible, to non-English-speaking
listeners, as he strolled by.

In pregame practice he would entertain the fans with a flashy routine normally associated with showoff Americans, shagging
fly balls with behind-the-back catches. While warming up between innings, he would demonstrate his arm strength by throwing
all the way across center field to the left fielder, from his right field position. During a delay in one game he sauntered
onto the pitcher’s mound and began hurling pitches—at 85 miles per hour—delighting the restive crowd. While waiting out a
long argument involving the umpires in another contest, he passed the time by playing catch with the bleacherites.

Newsweek International
featured him on the cover of an issue in mid-1996. “He’s hot. He’s hip. He’s the new face of Japan,” blared the magazine,
“… a new breed of brassy ballplayer intent on breaking the mold in which everybody marched to the same beat.”

Well, not entirely.

In reality, Ichiro was not quite the iconoclast some journalists made him out to be. Like all of his young teammates, he helped
clear the field of equipment at the end of practice. Although he could now afford a luxury apartment, he continued to live
in the BlueWave’s spartan dormitory throughout the season so he could be near the team’s batting cages.

What’s more, at the end of each season, he packed his bags and headed off to the team’s fall camp—a five-week rerun of spring
training. Ichiro never attempted to use his status as the game’s brightest young star, one who was in constant demand for
lucrative commercial endorsements, to gain special dispensation.

When Orix offered less-than-heart-palpitating salary raises, he did not take his case to the press, as a player in America
might, but instead uncomplainingly signed his contract. After his MVP year in 1996, many baseball watchers had expected the
BlueWave to double Ichiro’s 1995 pact of 160 million yen, which would have made him the third-highest-paid player in the game.
But the club made a surprisingly low offer of 260 million yen, which Ichiro meekly accepted. He himself had had to negotiate
the deal as NPB rules at the time banned agents for Japanese.

“I have actually only been playing professional baseball for three years,” he explained to the
Asahi Shimbun,
a leading daily newspaper. “I wonder how it would appear if I had asked for the same kind of money that the top guys are
making.”

The Yakult Swallows’ curmudgeonly manager Katsuya Nomura, a man notoriously critical of young players, had nothing but praise
for this brightest of new stars in the NPB constellation.

“He’s wonderful,” gushed Nomura. “He hits well. He runs well. He plays good defense. He’s polite in his private life and is
kind to his parents. I’ve never seen anyone like him. It’s strange that such a person is born into this world.”

At the end of the millennium, Ichiro won a nationwide poll conducted to determine Japan’s favorite sports star, while yet
another survey determined him to be the best baseball player in NPB history. As he closed in on his ninth year, which would
qualify him for free agency, he began to get attention from abroad, where he had developed a small cadre of distant admirers.

One of them was Bobby Valentine, who had spent the 1995 season in Japan managing the Chiba Lotte Marines of the Pacific League.
At the time, Valentine had called him “one of the five best players in the world.”

Ichiro himself had begun mulling a career move to America as far back as 1996, after a standout performance against a group
of visiting Major League All-Stars featuring Cal Ripken, Barry Bonds, Brady Anderson and Pedro Martinez, in a postseason series
of exhibition games. (“That little shit can really hit the ball,” Bonds was overheard saying.) Los Angeles Dodgers manager
Tommy Lasorda, who later saw the videos of Ichiro demolishing those visiting MLB pitchers, urged owner Peter O’Malley to sign
him up. As one veteran observer of the game on both sides of the Pacific Ocean put it, “For Ichiro, Japan was an aquarium.
But he really deserved an ocean. He belonged in the major leagues.”

“I was in a funk,” Ichiro himself said after the 1996 series finale. “I saw those MLB players and I thought to myself, ‘That’s
what I want to do.’ ”

But actually doing it was not that simple. Despite disturbing signs of change, the most disturbing of which to Japanese purists
was the abrupt defection of Pacific League ace pitcher Hideo Nomo for the States in 1995, through a technicality whereby a
voluntarily retired player could sign with any team he chose abroad, baseball in Japan had not quite yet turned into a game
of raging individualists. Deep down, Ichiro was still anchored by the traditional Japanese concept of
on
and
giri
(obligation and duty). That meant that as long as his manager required his services, Ichiro was going to stay put and not
seek a subterranean way out of the NPB and into the major leagues. He could have used the loophole Nomo used, which came to
be known as the “Nomo Clause,” but he refused to betray his manager, the man who had helped make his fantastic career possible.