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You Gotta Have Wa

Robert Whiting's Homepage at JapaneseBaseball.com

You Gotta Have Wa

by Bill Dwyer (Sep 1, 1989)

Digitized by Jessica Suchman and Catherine Nissley

The concept of kamikaze pilots has most certainly baffled the American mind ever since World War II. Loyalty to one's country is one thing; suicide on its behalf entirely another.

So it is ironic that one of the best explanations of that Japanese approach to fighting a war comes in a book on the game of baseball, "You Gotta Have Wa" (team harmony) by Robert Whiting.

In Whiting's book, baseball is everything to the Japanese, including war. Their approach to their version of the Great American Pastime is tense and militaristic. And the joy they seem to glean from it is consistent with their approach.

The topic of Japanese baseball is probably not a particularly compelling one to many readers, including even the most avid sports fan. To the American at the corner bar, swilling beer while watching the Cubs and Cards from Wrigley Field and reading the box scores from the morning sports section, Japanese baseball is something played by a bunch of light-hitting Asians and a handful of Americans in the twilight of their careers. And the only reason the Americans are over there is for a couple big paychecks before they go over the hill for good.

Much of that is the truth. But Whiting turns this scenario into a fascinating collection of anecdotes that, in the end, adds up to a nicely researched and written book that goes beyond the games and the clichés and into some intriguing sports sociology. There are the Japanese heroes:

– Choji Murati, the veteran pitcher who lived and breathed the accepted work ethic of a major-league pitcher by throwing hundreds of pitches each day, even on days when he wasn't in a game. Murati felt a twinge one day, kept right on throwing until the pain was so intense he simply could not do it any more, and finally came to Los Angeles, where Dr. Frank Jobe discovered he had been pitching with a severed tendon.

– Sachio Kinugasa, who stepped onto the field in the Japanese major leagues Oct. 18, 1970, and did not step off again until he retired Oct. 22, 1987. In that time, he broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive game record of 2,130 with 2,215 of his own, and even kept playing the day after a pitch broke his left collarbone. 

– Shinechi Ishimaru, the 20-game-winning pitcher turned kamikaze pilot, whose heroics became legendary when he demanded to throw 10 strikes to a hastily recruited catcher on his aircraft carrier before flying to his death.

And there are the American anti-heroes, the gaijin (foreigners) who came to Japan to play for crowd appeal, huge salaries and, many felt, for the purpose of providing the Japanese press and fans with easy whipping boys"

– Davey Johnson, a power hitter now managing the New York Mets, who enjoyed great success in Japan before suffering a hand injury that limited his hitting. In Japan, players play through injuries: they merely practice harder until the aches and pains depart. When Johnson wouldn't and couldn't, he was deemed to have disrupted team wa and eventually was released, even though he was among the best players on his team.

– Reggie Smith, the volatile former Dodger whose temper once took him into the stands after some fans at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Smith was afforded little or no privacy, and his flamboyant personality flew right in the face of the Japanese way. The Japanese have a saying: "The nail that sticks up shall be hammered down." Eventually, Smith was, and left Japan in anger.

– Randy Bass, arguably the most successful gaijin to play Japanese baseball, who got to within one home run of the fabled Sadaharu Oh. In the final game of the season, his last chance to tie the record of 55 homers in a 130-game season, he was thrown nothing but horrible, unhittable pitches. The manager of the team playing against Bass that night, who allegedly instructed his pitchers as to how to pitch to Bass, was, of course, Oh himself.

Bass eventually left Japan because his 8-year-old son was suffering from a brain tumor. When he was criticized for putting family before team and for demanding that the medical insurance his contract called for be paid, the rift was too wide for him to return. And if there ever had been a chance for him to be forgiven and welcomed back, it ended when an official of his Japanese team, upon returning from California and a negotiating session with Bass, leaped to his death from a hotel balcony. Baseball kamikaze, apparently.

Whiting captures all that and more in a wonderful narrative manner that gets the reader through the book quickly and easily. And he ends up with a picture of a Japanese culture so built around face-saving and groupthink – not to mention an American baseball culture built around ego and greed – it is a wonder the two cultures can even come close to coexisting in a game that has readily available weapons such as bats and balls.

Among Whiting's most telling anecdotes is about an 11-year-old boy who went through a workout with his softball team on a hot day. The team's pregame workout consisted of 20 dashes of 160 yards each, a two-mile run and a fielding session of 100 ground balls. When the youngster's team lost, the coach ordered 10 30-yard dashes, 10 60-yard dashes, 10 laps around the field (310 yards each), 10 sprints up and down the stadium stairs and 3 60-yard dashes to finish up. And all this without any water.

The 11-year-old youngster collapsed and died of a heart attack. His parents sued the coach and team and were paid 40 million yen (about $260,000). The local newspaper, in reporting the incident, pointed out that the workout had been fairly normal.

From the tone of Whiting's book, the only surprising thing about the case of the 11-year-old was that the parents even bothered to sue. Their sons' death, while tragic, was also honorable in the context of what baseball symbolizes to the Japanese populace.

No way, you see, should there be no wa.

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