The Meaning of Ichiro (31 page)

Said one knowledgeable sportswriter, “I’d estimate that about 10 percent of ‘Japanese’ players are people of Korean descent
residing in Japan. Ninety-nine percent of them hide the fact because, if they are found out, life is hard and troublesome.
When you mention their background publicly, you should be prepared to be sued.”

This made for some awkward situations. There were NPB stars who could not play for Japan’s national Olympic team in 2004 because
they were born in Japan of Korean ancestry and had deigned not to apply to become naturalized citizens—perhaps, because like
many others in the same situation, they objected to Japanese government laws that awarded citizenship-at-birth solely on the
basis of blood, not geography. Yet, at the same time, publishing their names in this context without permission could well
result in litigation.

One of the more beloved players and managers in NPB in the latter part of the 20th century was a catacomb Korean, a man who
frequently agonized over whether or not to “come out” as he grew older but has yet to make the big move as of this printing.

Pure-blooded Giants cleanup hitter Shigeo Nagashima continually surpassed his home-run hitting teammate Oh in favorite player
polls among fans and media, despite far less spectacular statistics (he hit 444 career homers to Oh’s 868), and retained his
edge in popularity during all the years both men were managers—even though they both met with the same amount of success in
that capacity.

Granted, Nagashima also had a more charismatic, bubbly personality than the shy, gentle, oft-morose Taiwanese, but Warren
Cromartie, a former Montreal Expo who played for the Giants under Oh, saw his then-manager as a victim of discrimination,
noting Oh had once been barred from a high school tourney (but not the Koshien Tournament) because he was not a Japanese citizen.
“Oh was a
gaijin
like me,” he said. “That’s the way he presented himself to me. And you could see it in the way some people behaved around
him. The guys in the front office treated him like a lackey. But whenever Nagashima came around to visit, they would kiss
his ass all over the place.”

The concept of Oh’s “foreignness,” however, changed according to the situation. If Oh had trouble managing his players, then
it would be suggested obliquely among insiders that it was because he wasn’t really Japanese. However, if some interloper
from the country that had defeated Japan in the Pacific War, as it was known, posed a challenge to Oh’s single-season home
run record of 55, then it was a different story.

Consider what happened to the Hanshin Tigers’ American slugger Randy Bass in the last game of the 1985 season, against the
Giants in Tokyo. Bass, with a total of 54 home runs, was intentionally walked four times, the Giants catcher uttering an apology
in English each time: “I’m sorry.” He avoided a fifth base on balls only when he reached out to slap a pitch that was wide
of the plate into left field for a fluke single.

Oh, who as chance would have it, was managing the Giants that season, denied that he had ordered his pitcher to walk Bass,
but American reliever Keith Comstock, who played for Yomiuri that season, claimed that the team’s pitching coach had imposed
a fine of $1,000 for every strike his pitchers threw to the Hanshin slugger.

Some Giants apologists tried to argue that the Giants were just protecting a hallowed club record. However, former Giants
second base great Shigeru Chiba flatly declared that the team had acted out of good old-fashioned xenophobia.

“Of course, the Yomiuri group doesn’t want someone from another team to break a Giants record, but there was a special aversion
to an American doing it,” he told a reporter.

Retired Tigers slugger Koichi Tabuchi, who, as a Tiger alumnus, should have been rooting for Bass, sympathized with the opposing
faction.

“It was us against them,” he said years later in a
New York Times
interview. “I played in the same era as Oh and we felt very strongly about his record. At the time, I would confess that
people didn’t want anyone other than a
Japanese
to break this record.”

That incident also came to symbolize American frustration over the U.S.–Japan trade dispute, which was growing particularly
intense at the time. MIT fellow David Friedman would later write in the
Los Angeles Times,
“Bass’s predicament is perfectly consistent with Japan’s fundamental industrial ideology, long enshrined in law and practice,
of using foreign contacts to learn about and exploit others’ knowledge for the benefit of domestic interests. In Japanese
sports, as in technology and trade, buying the best for its own sake counts for little—that’s an American conceit.”

Ironically, Oh, the manager, figured in two other controversial assaults on his record by
l’etranger
from across the sea. In 2001, American Tuffy Rhodes, a former Houston Astro and Chicago Cub of little distinction—unable,
it was said, perhaps unfairly, to handle a real major league fastball—found himself having the season of his life with the
Kintetsu Buffaloes. In Japan, thanks to a rigorous weight training program, he was transformed from a 5′11′′, 175-pound leadoff
hitter into a 210-pound home-run hitting phenom. That season, he reached the 54th homer plateau with a full 12 games left
in the season. It was a quest that received little attention in the Japanese press, partly because Rhodes played in the less
popular Pacific League. The domestic sports media preferred to print front page stories about local Central League stars,
like Giants slugger Hideki Matsui, accomplishing comparatively lesser feats—a sad state of affairs that Ichiro could have
certainly sympathized with. There were none of the usual charts and graphs depicting Rhodes’s assault on the record, although
the sports dailies were full of them the following year when Matsui was on track to have his first 50-home-run season. And
despite the fact that he was also hitting .336 at the time with 129 RBIs and leading the Buffaloes to a rare pennant, Rhodes
had received not a single endorsement offer or appeared in any ads.

New York Times
Tokyo bureau chief Howard French described the situation as “an unsightly reminder that for all the talk of the internationalization
of the game, exclusionary provincialism still runs deep in Japanese baseball.”

The friendly, outgoing Rhodes said he noted no real prejudice—“occasionally a wider strike zone,” he told French. “But as
far as the home run race, so far, so good. I haven’t gotten any ugly fan mail or anything like that.” But then Rhodes came
up against the Daiei Hawks in a late-season weekend series in Fukuoka, with the Buffaloes’ pennant triumph assured, and all
bets were suddenly off. The Hawks were then managed by Sadaharu Oh, following his tenure as Yomiuri skipper, and history was
destined to repeat itself. Of the 18 pitches the Hawks mound corps threw to Rhodes in the Sunday afternoon game, pitifully,
only two of them were strikes.

Afterward, Daiei battery coach Yoshiaru Wakana admitted it had all been his doing. “I felt bad because we couldn’t win the
pennant,” he said, “and if Rhodes broke the record I would have felt sorry for Oh. I doubt Oh wants to see Rhodes break the
record in front of him. I just didn’t want a foreign player to break Oh’s record.”

Oh’s response was, once again, that he had been left out of the loop, that it had all been up to the players to decide. But
sportswriters who knew him believed that deep in his heart, Oh, the situational Japanese, wanted Matsui, a full-bore Japanese,
to be the one to break his record—if anyone was going to do it. (It might be noted here that when Matsui joined the Giants
he was given the uniform number 55, the significance of which absolutely no one missed.)

Observers noted, however, that the general mood appeared less xenophobic than before—perhaps because, it was speculated, Japanese
fans had witnesses the magnanimous welcome accorded to Ichiro in North America, even as he was seriously threatening the single-season
hit record of 257 held by George Sisler, as well as Shoeless Joe Jackson’s single-season rookie record for hits. As the aforementioned
Tabuchi put it, “Back then [i.e., in the ‘80s] the game seemed like Japanese versus the U.S. But now, with Ichiro and Sasaki,
people are watching a lot of American ball and have gained a real appreciation for it. There’s no prejudice anymore.”

Buffaloes slugging third baseman, the rebellious, porcine Norihiro Nakamura, of the dyed orange hair, was especially livid.
“What they did was rude,” he said. “This is why Japanese baseball is no good.” And whereas former baseball commissioner Takeso
Shimoda had been largely silent on the Bass emasculation, the current NPB chief Hiromori Kawashima was quick to denounce the
affair. “The decision of the Hawks to walk Rhodes,” he declared, “was completely divorced from the essence of baseball, which
values the supremacy of fair play.”

Rhodes, frustrated at being unable to see anything resembling a strike, lost his rhythm, along with his usual discipline,
and failed to hit another out-of-the-park blast. But, finishing at 55 homers, he did qualify for a share of the record. He
was also accorded an interesting barrage of end-of-season publicity, thanks in part to French’s article, which, according
to one
Times
staffer, received a louder protest from the Japanese government than any other story on Japan that the paper ran that year.
Although only one national sports daily, the
Tokyo Chunichi Sup
tsu,
carried the story of Rhodes’s record-tying 55th blast on page one, the
Asahi Shimbun
ran a photo of Rhodes on its front page, as well as on the cover of its weekly feature magazine
Aera.
What’s more, Rhodes was an overwhelming choice for the Pacific League MVP and the city of Osaka honored him for his “contributions
to the city,” giving him a special award for being a “positive representative for the city of Osaka and for heightening sports
awareness.” It was not clear whether some of this gratitude was due to the fact that he had stopped at tying the record and
not broken it.

One could say that the mood
had
indeed changed perceptibly, although not enough for Rhodes to be given the Matsutaro Shoriki award, doled out every year
by the Yomiuri Group to the person who contributes the most to Japanese baseball. It was hard to argue there was a more deserving
candidate, but the prize went instead to crowd favorite Tsutomu Wakamatsu, the manager of the Yakult Swallows, whose team
had defeated the Kintetsu Buffaloes in the Japan Series in five games.

For his part, Rhodes did not forgive and forget. In an interview with Michael Murphy of the
Houston Chronicle,
in February 2003, he said, “I was so frustrated. I still can’t speak to him [Oh]. At the All-Star Game, if he’s one of the
coaches, I still couldn’t shake his hand or say anything to him. He tampered with the game, which you don’t do. But that’s
the way it is. Things are different over there.

“I just look at it like this: If Sadaharu Oh wants the record that bad, then he can keep it. The record doesn’t make the man,
the man makes the record. If someone takes that record from him, he’s still going to be Sadaharu Oh. I mean, Babe Ruth is
still Babe Ruth, right?”

In 2002, one year after Tuffy Rhodes’s historic run, the big free-swinging Venezuelan slugger Alex Cabrera, the onetime Arizona
Diamondback whose big-league career had been derailed by back problems and who was now playing for the Seibu Lions, made his
own sustained assault on Oh’s record, one which came to a similarly unsuccessful conclusion, thanks again to the Daiei Hawks
pitchers.

Cabrera had hit his 54th home run with 11 games left in the season, tied the record on October 3 with five games left, then
came up against the Oh-managed Hawks.

“My pitchers shouldn’t think about the record,” said Oh in a pregame interview. “They should just pitch like they usually
do. It’s only a record and I won’t die if Cabrera breaks it.”

Oh need not have worried.

In the contest that evening, Cabrera was fed a steady diet of unhittable fastballs, inside high. He was walked twice and sent
to first base in another at-bat when a pitch caught him flush in the elbow. Cabrera was upset and so was his manager, who
ordered him to retaliate. Later, rounding third and heading home, he slammed full force into the Hawks catcher, elbowing him
in the head and nearly knocking him out in the process. In the entire contest, Cabrera saw a total of six strikes, prompting
a postgame outburst in which he let fly a string of invective at the Hawks manager.

“Oh didn’t want me to break the record,” said the voluble Venezuelan. “It’s not professional. He should have made his pitchers
throw strikes.”

Battery coach Wakana had departed the team in the previous offseason (and no one else in the organization had seen fit to
make Delphic pronouncements about the sanctity of Oh’s mark, or rather the mark he now shared with Tuffy Rhodes). Yet the
hapless manager found himself yet again denying he had ordered his pitchers in any way to prevent the
gaijin
from breaking the record.