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Robert Whiting is, without doubt, one of most knowledgeable foreign
writers on Japanese baseball. He has written three books on the
subject (including the best-selling "You Gotta Have Wa") and has been
reporting on the sport for nearly three decades. Now with his new
book, "The Meaning of Ichiro," he tackles the influx of Japanese
players into Major League Baseball, the Holy Grail of the sport.
Immediately we are struck with a seeming contradiction: the book is
named after Ichiro Suzuki, the Seattle Mariners' star rightfielder,
but actually the theme of the work is the entire relationship between
Japanese baseball and the Major Leagues. Despite the slight misnomer,
the monograph is a well-written and informative tract. Whiting has a
breezy and anecdotal style which is relaxing to read and clearly
underpinned by a tremendous amount of research.
His first two chapters actually do address the upbringing, training
and development of the world-famous Ichiro, and these are easily the
most captivating part of the book. Whiting uses Ichiro's rearing to
demonstrate the Japanese approach to baseball, which is basically to
train so hard you'll piss blood. This bushido attitude toward the game
started when baseball was introduced into Japan in the 1880s and taken
up by Ichiko, a Japanese high school that stressed endless repetition
and physical hardship in pursuit of Seishun Yakyu ("spiritual
baseball"). Indeed it was this orientation that led Japanese to the
present-day 1,000 fungo drill (a fungo is a soft bat used for practice
ground balls), where a player fields grounders for a veritable
eternity.
Nobuyuki Suzuki, Ichiro's father, trained his son brutally 365 days a
year, numbing his fingers on frigid days and rocketing baseballs at
his head when the child wanted to go play with his friends. This
contentious father-son relationship makes up the backbone of the first
two chapters and stands as a metaphor for Japanese baseball training
in general. The development and honing of basics skills is placed far
ahead of enjoyment of the sport. Whiting addresses both the positive
and negative aspects here, noting how fundamentally sound Japanese
players are due to their instruction.
The remaining chapters (all eight of them) give us some history of the
professional sport in Japan and profiles of all the major
personalities involved with re-importing the Japanese version to the
US. Much credit is given (and deservedly so) to Hideo Nomo and his
half-Japanese half-American agent Don Nomura. Nomura found a loophole
in the incredibly stringent Japanese contracts, thus liberating Nomo
to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1995, making him only the
second Japanese to compete in the Major Leagues and the first in
thirty years.
By way of explanation for this, Whiting correctly characterizes the
owners of teams in the Japanese pro game as dictatorial, power-hungry
despots who do their best to keep players at the level of indentured
servitude. Crossing over to the Major Leagues has therefore become a
major challenge to their power, and it offers the players brave enough
to attempt it an alternative to the Japanese leagues.
In the end, it is clear that Whiting feels there is much to be
celebrated with Japanese players joining the Major Leagues, though the
learning goes both ways. The behemoth North American players can learn
a thing or two about fundamentals from Japan, and in the other
direction, the Japanese competitors can come to enjoy the sport more.
Whiting's book is also a joy to read and an enlightening experience,
as it informs us about Japanese players like Ichiro and shines a light
on the Japan-US relationship via international baseball.
Rob Schwartz
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