The Meaning of Ichiro (11 page)

I watch baseball which was introduced by the Americans and it is not boring.

E
ARLY
M
EIJI-ERA HAIKU

Shiki Masaoka

The day passes with nine people doing nine different things at baseball.

The three bases are full; I’m very excited as to what is going to happen

The soaring ball goes high into the clouds,

Then comes down into someone’s hands.

E
ARLY
M
EIJI-ERA
WAKA

Shiki Masaoka

Jim Colborn was a onetime Milwaukee Brewers pitching star who was brought to Japan in 1990 to coach for the Orix BlueWave.
Hired to teach MLB methods to the pitching staff there, he found himself learning from his hosts instead. Lesson One began
on the opening day of spring camp. With the permission of Orix manager Shozo Doi, Colborn had ended his first session at one
o’clock in the afternoon. However, he discovered later that his assistant coaches, fearing ridicule from other organizations
over this early dismissal, held an afternoon practice in Colborn’s absence—with the players’ enthusiastic support. They repeated
this the next day, and the following one and the one after that, until Colborn realized what was going on and agreed to incorporate
the afternoon workout into his own formal agenda.

“What I was trying to do was to get them to conserve some energy,” said the soft-spoken California native. “I knew from talking
to other Americans who had played or coached in Japan that those long workdays the Japanese put in tended to wear the players
down over the course of the season. And at first, I couldn’t understand why they kept knocking themselves out. But then I
eventually came to realize that there were other more important objectives on their mind. Their practices, I found out, were
designed to teach patience and perseverance—
‘doryoku’
(effort)—as much as the skills of baseball, to instill character as well as to prepare for the game. That was why they were
so long.”

In time, Colborn also came to comprehend another truth about the Japanese system—the extreme importance of process. Whereas
in America you were always looking for new ways to do things, that wasn’t necessarily true in Japan. They had a set SOP, a
predetermined way of approaching the game, and they protected it like Fort Knox. The difference might be summed up by saying,
“In the U.S. we say ‘Just win baby.’ In Japan, it was ‘Just do it the right way.’ “

“All Japanese institutions were like that,” said Colborn, an intelligent, educated man who learned to speak Japanese during
his four-year stint with Orix and refined it in his subsequent capacity as a Pacific Rim scout for the Seattle Mariners (where
he recruited a young man named Ichiro Suzuki). “Our baseball reflects Western culture: aggressiveness, innovation, surprise.
But their baseball reflected Japanese values. Proper form. Rote learning. Harmony. Constant effort. It frustrated Americans
on our team who were just trying to win the game. They’d ask, ‘Why do we have to hop and skip for 30 minutes beforehand?’
Of course, the answer was because that was the way it was done.”

Other students of Japan have made similar observations. In 1992, for example, a team of researchers did a study on cultural
differences between Japan and America as reflected in sport and came to this conclusion: Japanese practiced “democratic conformity,”
in which players demonstrated control over their own wills by moving toward consensus within the group, while Americans showed
something called “reluctant conformity.”

It was the difference, they reported, between a “harmony-oriented strategy and one which stressed fulfillment of individual
potential and responsibilities.” Their findings were published in the
National Strength and Conditioning Association Journal,
in an article written by Bill Shang, president of NSCA’s Japanese affiliate.

Shang wrote: “In Japan, the team is thought of as a ‘household’— a close-knit community with hierarchical organization and
sub-leaders for its various groups, such as freshmen and sophomores. A successful leader in Japan motivates his people to
win for the coach or the captain rather than for personal glory or achievement.

“In Japan, the coach is the master; the athlete, a disciple,” he added. “The teacher-disciple (coach-athlete) bond is a very
important one and fits into the whole group orientation of the Japanese… . Moreover, whereas American athletes practice long
and hard, but concentrate simply on developing skills, in Japan, there’s a Zen approach to practice as more a development
of inner self than muscle and a player is bound to work out until he reaches mental limitations, which in most cases (are)
far beyond physical limits.”

Although not everyone agrees that sports reflect culture (indeed, some profess to find terms like “national character” and
“patterns of culture” downright offensive), the differences between baseball as it is played here and baseball as it is played
there are certainly impossible to miss—and, as we have seen, they date all the way back to the 19th century.

Baseball was first taught to the Japanese by visiting American professors shortly after Emperor Meiji assumed the throne in
1868, thereby ending centuries of feudal, isolationist rule, and initiating the nation’s all-out effort to modernize, which
became known as the Meiji Reformation. During the emperor’s reign, which lasted until 1912, Japan devised a new constitution
based on that of Bismarck’s Germany. The Japanese built an army trained by French officers and fashioned a navy modeled on
that of Great Britain, importing educators, scientists and engineers from Europe and North America to help them develop their
schools, railroads, hospitals and police, as well as their postal and bureaucratic systems. This period was initially defined
by an intense interest in all things Western and a proportional disdain for things homegrown—a time when many Japanese men,
for example, exchanged kimonos for three-piece Western-style suits and bowlers.

Baseball, at the time known as
b
sub
ru
or
tama asobi
(playing with a ball), initially met with more approval in some quarters than the traditional fighting techniques like
kenjutsu
or
jujitsu,
believed by certain progressives at the dawn of the Meiji Era to be anachronistic and dangerous remnants of Japan’s feudal
past.

Later, however, as discontent arose over the unequal treaties Japan had been forced to sign with the West, a backlash against
Western values occurred. In 1890, for example, an Imperial Rescript on Education reemphasized the centuries-honored traditions
of Shinto and Confucianism, while an elite educational institution called the First Higher School of Tokyo, or
Ichiko,
founded in 1886, emerged as a bastion of Japanese culture, standing firm in the face of outside influences that seemed to
be overwhelming Japan.

Although Ichiko embraced some key Western technologies, its students also studied the martial arts and practiced Zen in the
pursuit of purity and mental and moral discipline. Ichiko students lived in campus dormitories, symbolically isolated from
the rest of society by a fence deemed sacred by the student body. Ichiko was, in fact, the premier prep school in the land
and a major stepping-stone for students who wanted to attend Japan’s most prestigious institution of higher learning,
Teikoku Daigaku
(Imperial University), the elite hopper from which the future leaders of Japan would emerge.

Ichiko’s baseball team was established in 1886. In contrast with the baseball played at
Meiji Gakuin,
its archrival and a Christian missionary school noted for its laid-back, American-style approach, Ichiko developed something
called
seishin yaky
(spiritual or spirit baseball), which essentially turned the game into a new sort of Japanese martial art.

According to historians, the Ichiko baseball regimen drew on the concepts of
bugei
(military arts), with a strong emphasis on constant training (which would grow into harsh summer and winter baseball camps)
and the development of fighting spirit or inner strength. A team motto urged participants to practice so hard that they urinated
blood, while another team rule forbade complaining of injury or pain. The underlying ideology also embraced group loyalty,
love of school and nationalism. (With peanuts and Cracker Jacks coming in considerably further down the list.)

The Ichiko baseball phenomenon did not occur in isolation. For one thing, it closely paralleled the development of a new school
of judo, established in the mid-1880s, under the guidance of Gakushuin University professor Jigoro Kano, which was attracting
a lot of attention at the time. Kano’s creation was an amalgam of modern scientific techniques and the old pre-Meiji art of
jujitsu,
with a focus on blood-and-guts training. The Kano school’s month-long winter camp was held in February, the coldest part
of the year; participants arose at 4
A.M.
for a run of several miles before beginning an intense two-hour morning workout,
followed by another two-hour workout in the evening.

Kano, unlike some of his contemporaries, had great respect for the old masters, whose teachings he believed need not be set
aside in the quest for enlightenment from the more industrially advanced West. A respected scholar who served as headmaster
of Ichiko for a time in the mid 1890s, he held that ancient concepts could be harmonized with modern thought and he took pains
to incorporate the idea of
seishin
into his new martial arts. He wanted to preserve the sweat, agony and ordeal that characterized the training of men in olden
times—stressing development of strength, skill, stamina, courage, “martial timing” and an immovable mind. In particular, he
thought that with the proper combination of technique and mental willpower, a man could be made unstoppable. At the same time,
kenjutsu
enjoyed a similar revival in the form of
kend
,
thanks to its popularity with the police force.

A driving force behind the development of the Ichiko baseball team was its player-manager, Kanae Chuman. In 1894, he gave
the imported sport a bona fide Japanese name that would stick:
yaky
(field ball). It was also the title of a book Chuman would write in 1897, said to be the first ever book solely on baseball
in Japan. In it, he described proper training methods and other aspects of the games, emphasizing that “Ichiko players should
ignore the American way and devise a system that suits Japanese.” He advocated that his team practice two or three months
before playing its first game.