It Happens Every Spring: Baseball is back, and with its baseball books and other literary signs of s

Digitized by Jessica Suchman and Catherine Nissley.

Chrysanthemum and the Bat

The vendors sell sushi, sake, hotto dogu to crowds of 50,000 in the stadiums of Japan, a nation of besuboru nuts. It is the same American Pastime that we watch, writes Whiting, who has watched it there for a decade, but then it's not quite the same. Japanese values – group identity, cooperation, respect for age and "face" – have permeated baseball. For Americans, what better way to learn about them than by watching them do our thing.