The Meaning of Ichiro (6 page)

When Ogi told him, “As long as I’m manager of this team, I’m going to need your services,” Ichiro snapped to attention and
replied, by all means, he would continue to provide them.

Under Japanese rules, he would, however, become a free agent after nine years of service, and he determined to make himself
ready when the opportunity presented itself. He spent two weeks as a guest participant in the Seattle Mariners’ spring training
camp in early 1999. On his return to Kobe, he began seeking advice from American players in Japan, like teammate George Arias,
about the differences between the two games, as well as what he would have to do to succeed in the United States. He also
embarked on a sophisticated weight-training program to develop the explosive capacity of his muscles and took to using a regulation
Major League Baseball in practice sessions (the Japanese professional baseball is slightly smaller than the one used in the
major leagues). In addition, he managed to develop a new way of running, switching from a chest-puffed-up form to a crouching
style which, sportswriters remarked, resembled that of a lion chasing its prey (it was actually patterned after Carl Lewis).

Finally, in 2000, his chance came. According to one version of this story, Ogi, after six years as a manager, and with the
BlueWave steadily sliding into the second division, had begun to feel guilty about standing in the way of his star’s inevitable
date with destiny. In the age-old Japanese clash between
giri
(duty) and
ninj
(human feeling),
ninj
was now winning out. Thus, one evening that fall of 2000, he invited Ichiro and his new bride Yumiko to dinner at a Chinese
restaurant in Kobe for a heart-to-heart talk.

“Tell me again, Ichiro,” he said, laying down his chopsticks when the main course was finished. “Do you really want to go
to the major leagues?”

“Yes,” Ichiro replied. “I really want to test my ability.”

“He’ll do anything you tell him to. He’s that loyal,” Ichiro’s wife chimed in. “But please let him choose his dream.”

At this, Ogi sighed and said, “I want him to stay, but that’s selfishness on my part. He’s already done a lot for us. If Ichiro
really wants to go to the States, I’m just getting in the way.”

Then he turned to Ichiro and said, “I can’t very well stop you from going now, can I?”

With that, Ogi gave the couple his blessing and released Ichiro from any further obligations.

It was a touching, heartwarming story.

And it was even partly true.

But there was another version as well. At that point, Ichiro had only one year to go before he did become eligible for free
agency. If the team let him go early under a new system called “posting,” devised jointly by the baseball commissioners of
the U.S. and Japan (see
Chapter 6
for details), Orix stood to earn a substantial lump sum from the MLB team that signed him.
His Orix salary was already at $5 million a year, an expensive proposition for a team that, even with its all-world luminary,
was not exactly a cash cow. He had just hit .387. What if Ichiro batted .400 the next season and legitimately demanded a doubling
of his pay? It was a burden Orix would not be overly eager to assume. Would it not be the better part of valor to let him
go now and make it look as if they were doing him the favor?

In the end, the answer to that question turned out to be “yes.” Orix received $13 million from Seattle and left Ichiro to
negotiate his own deal with the major leagues.

An important part of Ichiro’s master plan to emigrate to the States had been finding a wife, a goal he accomplished in late
1999, the wedding taking place in the U.S. in a small private ceremony at Los Angeles’s Riviera Country Club to avoid the
media crush.

The lucky young lady was one Miss Yumiko Fukushima, a television reporter for the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), one of
the major commercial networks in Japan, and the news of their engagement received wide media coverage of the type the American
press might devote to a royal wedding. Press reports unfailingly pointed out that Yumiko was conveniently fluent in English
and familiar with the United States, which would no doubt be a big help to her husband in making the adjustment to a new culture.
Writers glowingly noted that she was also well-versed in baseball, having been previously engaged, albeit temporarily, to
a ballplayer in the Central League, before switching her affections to the Pacific League. Coming in for the most favorable
comment, perhaps, was the fact that she was seven years Ichiro’s senior, a bit long in the tooth for a Japanese anchorette,
but ideal for a young man like Ichiro lacking in worldly experience and requiring the stabilizing influence of a mature woman.
As one reporter less than tactfully pointed out, “Ichiro can see the seams on a 150-kilometer per hour fastball, but he can’t
see the wrinkle lines around Yumiko’s eyes.”

Ichiro had not been lacking in female companionship prior to meeting his bride. Far from it. He had been involved with a number
of high-profile young women, bimbonic and otherwise, including a former singing and dancing star in the famous all-female
Takarazuka troupe, and a beautiful, impulsive young actress named Riona Hazuki, later famous for a
kamikaze
marriage to a Honolulu sushi shop employee she had just met, one which lasted all of one week. Said teammate Shigetoshi Hasegawa,
“One of the reasons Ichiro remained in the team dormitory was that it was easier to carry on his romantic liaisons from there
than it would be operating out of a private apartment, under the constant eye of the press. The team would always arrange
a hotel for him and smuggle him out somehow, like under a blanket in the back seat of a van.”

However, the more old-fashioned of Ichiro’s followers believed a supportive wife to be a necessity if their hero was to realize
his dream of big-league stardom and Yumiko, in the manner of so many other Japanese women before her, did not disappoint them.
She surrendered her career to become a dutiful wife, moving back home to study cooking and brush up her English language skills.
As if to confirm her adherence to old ways and reassure an anxious public, she could be spotted by Japanese photographers
walking three steps behind her husband in postwedding excursions. It was a customary and respectful distance long observed
by traditionally minded wives in Japan. However, not everything about Yumiko was conservative. It was she, according to reports,
who persuaded him to grow a beard—“You’ll look like Brad Pitt,” she had reportedly said—and encouraged him to wear rock star
sunglasses when he was in public.

The union survived a postnuptial scoop by the popular Japanese weekly photojournalism magazine
Friday
which reported on Ichiro’s lengthy affair with a 30-year-old married woman and the secret $100,000
tegirekin
(solatium for severing relations), arranged by lawyers, he had been obliged to pay as a result. The indiscretion was made
public when the husband (of whom Ichiro was reportedly unaware) discovered the deal and leaked it to the press.

Fortunately for Ichiro, he was able to afford it. And then some. In the fall of 2000, he signed a three-year deal worth $12
million with the Seattle Mariners, negotiated by his new American agent Tony Attanasio.

He was finally on his way.

We still can’t get over the fact that he is a real hero to Americans.

We still can’t see that.

S
ATOSHI
G
UNJI, BOOK EDITOR
, K
ADOKAWA
P
UBLISHING
,

N
OVEMBER
2002

Ichiro is the first cool Japanese I’ve ever met.

U
NIDENTIFIED
A
MERICAN SPORTSWRITER

T
HERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN A SPECIAL CONCEIT IN THE LAND WHERE
baseball was born that a small man could not play in the major leagues.
A small Japanese man, that is. That particular species was viewed with the same disdain which Americans used to have for products
bearing the label “Made in Japan”—once a synonym for poor quality.

As the first position player ever from Japan to seek his spot in the major leagues, Ichiro was considered too slight and too
fragile. An advertised 5′9′′, 156-pounder, his seven batting titles in Japan were regarded as insignificant by the vast majority
of MLB insiders, Bobby Valentine and company notwithstanding, because they believed the Japanese played a second-rate, Ping-Pong
type of game. Sure, there might have been a few pitchers capable of performing at the top levels of the American game, but
they were the exception. Playing every day was something else.

Suzuki’s detractors snootily declared that the bigger and stronger MLB pitchers would cut the 27-year-old wisp down to size
with high inside fastballs. ESPN’s Rob Dibble, in a preseason interview with the Seattle Mariners’ then manager Lou Piniella,
had stated flatly that he would strip naked and run through Times Square if the little squirt won a batting crown.

Actually, size turned out to be less of a problem than people had anticipated. From mid-2000 to the spring of 2001, while
no one was really watching, Ichiro had gained nearly 20 pounds on top of his listed weight of 156 pounds through intensive
weight training. In fact, when he reported to the Mariners camp in sun-drenched Arizona, the uniform they had readied for
him was too tight, thanks to new muscle mass in his arms, shoulders and legs. This raised suspicions in some quarters, although
never proven, that he had been taking steroids, suspicions fueled by the fact that he had refused to join other NPB stars
and play on Japan’s baseball team in the Sydney Olympics. Reporters speculated that he was afraid to take the required drug
tests. Whatever the reason, Ichiro was stronger than he had ever been. He also insisted that the Mariners’ 5′9′′ height listing
was off by nearly two inches.

Ichiro did, in fact, endure a period of adjustment. Initially, he found it difficult to get used to the pitching motion of
American hurlers, which was much quicker than the “one-two-and-three” herk-and-jerk style of many Japanese pitchers, incorporating
as they usually did a brief pause at the height of their delivery to throw off a batter’s timing. With Americans, he discovered,
there was simply no “and.” They just wound up and came right at you. Because of this, Ichiro found it necessary to eliminate
the pendulum-style leg lift he had used all his years in Japan and employ a new, more compact stance that, ironically, would
have pleased his former manager Shozo Doi.

His new manager, Piniella, also had his doubts. After watching his expensive rookie bat in the first several games of the
exhibition season, during which he hit balls nowhere but to the opposite field, Piniella took him aside and asked, in some
frustration, “Don’t you know how to pull the ball?”

“Sure,” came the reply. “Anytime. That’s easy.” It was just that for the time being, he was focusing on a more important task:
building a zone for himself in his head. He was working on chopping the ball to left field and, in the process, creating a
mental “wall” in the outer part of the strike zone, for use as a permanent point of reference. Once he had done that, he would
shift his focus to left center and when he had that mental zone down pat, he would hit to center, then right.

Piniella was not impressed. “Why don’t you show me right now that you can pull the ball to right,” he said.

So in the very next exhibition game, Ichiro banged out three sharp line drives to right field and put a permanent end to all
discussion about where he could and could not hit the ball.

Piniella later confessed his astonishment that a batter could have that much bat control.

Ichiro wound up batting an impressive .321 for the exhibition season, and once the season started, it did not take long for
the man (now sporting a new spiky hairdo and Day-Glo sunglasses) to serve notice that he was indeed special—that it was the
pitchers who would have to learn to adjust to him and not the other way around.