The Meaning of Ichiro (58 page)

Draconian discipline eventually made its way back to Waseda as well. After his namesake departed and the school went through
15 losing seasons, Renzo Ishii returned to Waseda as manager in 1988 to win the championship of the Big Six, Tokyo’s top university
league. All in all, Renzo’s mainstream approach made the baseball world more comfortable than Tokichiro’s iconoclasm: a
konj
philosophy was easier to apply and did not require a patient affection for one’s athletes or an irrepressible sense of humor,
traits not shared by every-one in the game. Baseball remained a taxing endeavor, which separated it from its American cousin.

Tobita’s NHK radio interview was recorded in August 1962, five years before his death. The adventures of Tokichiro Ishii were
related in the book
“Kanpaku san no Home Run,”
by Junji Tominaga, Chukei Shuppan, Tokyo, 2003. See pp. 1-16, 356-366. The latter segment contains a description of Suishu
Tobita. David Shapiro, a personal friend of Tokichiro, provided additional details. Izu “Hell Camp” described in
Sports Nippon,
July 25, 2003, p. 3. “Bashing the players this way …” from
Nikkan Sports,
November 2, 1996, at start of that year’s “Hell Camp” in Miyazaki. Ichiro Suzuki’s comments about
seishin yaky
or
konj
,
as he referred to it, came in an author interview, November 7, 2002.

About Kazuhiro Kiyohara and Seishin Yaky

Still another believer was Kazuhiro Kiyohara, the burly Giants hero who joined the team in 1997 after 11 years with the Seibu
Lions. In the mid-’90s, Kiyohara, who was famous for his long line of girlfriends and nighttime escapades, but also for his
attitude of respect toward the game—he always bowed upon entering and leaving a park—experienced a series of injuries that
affected his batting average and threatened his career. In the Giants 25-day autumn camp in ‘97, Kiyohara took what was perhaps
a record 30,000 swings, which works out to about 1,200 a day. (On hearing of this, New York Yankee manager Joe Torre remarked,
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a player swinging a bat 1,000 times a day, let alone 30 days in a row.” Neither had his
2003 batting coach Rick Down.) Kiyohara’s “30,000 swings” from
Nikkan Sup
tsu,
October 28, 1997, p. 5. Torre and Down’s comments on Kiyohara came in author interviews, March 14, 2003 and April 29, 2003
respectively.

In the winter of 1999, coming off yet another disappointing season in which he was also accused of associating with organized
crime figures, Kiyohara shaved his head, donned the robes of a Buddhist monk and spent several wintry days, from 5:30 in the
morning until mid-night, chanting and meditating at a Buddhist temple in Kagoshima, interrupting his daylong spiritual practice
only long enough to swing the bat. It was an effort, he said, to “regain the purity of my high school days.”

Kiyohara’s schedule:

5:30 Wake up.

6:00 Ring Temple Bell. Clean Temple.

6:00 Radio Calisthenics; Vocal Training.

7:00 Supplicant Drills—Hands, Knees and Face to the Floor.

8:00 Breakfast.

10:00 Incense Burning, Chanting.

1:00 Reading Scriptures.

4:00 Lunch.

5:00 Shadow Swings.

8:00 Sermon by Chief Temple Priest.

12:00 Lights Out.

Kiyohara’s sojourn to the Kagoshima Zen temple was described on the front page of the
Tokyo Sup
tsu,
December 22, 1999. Gary Garland, author of the informative
japanbaseballdaily.com
Web site described the visit of Hanshin Tiger right-hander Taiyo Fujita as “one of those ludicrous attempts at a spiritual
toughening up that many Japanese players engage in.” Fujita spent one Friday in January 2003 camping under a freezing cold
waterfall in Gifu Prefecture for 110 seconds. “I thought it would kill me,” said the player, who was shaven bald and wore
white garments that made him resemble a Buddhist monk doing
“omisogi,”
a kind of cleansing rite. The account appeared in Garland’s portion of the
baseballguru.com
Web site, January 10, 2003.

Not all of them were addicted to practice—Koji Uehara, the man who easily struck out Barry Bonds three times in that 2003
exhibition game, preferred American-style workouts between starts.

The Guttman-Thompson book
Japanese Sports: A History
provides some interesting material about the early development of baseball. But beware a book that gives you page upon page about
kemari,
an ancient “game” in which elegantly robed Heian courtiers stood in a circle and contrived to keep a gaily colored ball in
the air by kicking it—an exercise akin to the equally bold practice of strewing beans for expecting royal princesses (exalted
above other forms of exertion) to be picked up as a way of maintaining muscle tone—but not even a brief introduction to the
wildly popular Koshien High School Baseball tournament, a mecca for the sport even before there ever was a professional game,
or a mention of the contributions made by Moriyama and Tobita. Granted, this is an academic work, but given the theories espoused
therein—i.e., “the attraction of baseball is as a ‘bittersweet comic drama of the dysfunctions of corporate life’”—one wonders
if the authors ever put down their research treatises and interviewed real-life ballplayers, fans and other flesh-and-blood,
on-the-scene participants. If they had, they would at least have understood that it was Nagashima the public most identified
with, not Oh, as they erroneously suggest.

About Fan Behavior

Not everyone agrees with the idea the fans in Japan only let loose when they join the highly organized
endan
or cheerleading groups. The aforementioned Kelly studied fan behavior at Koshien Stadium for a time in the mid-’90s and claimed
this view of the fans “conforms too neatly to certain stereotypes about an alleged Japanese character of mindless collectivism
(their ‘undividualism’ we might say).” He quotes a passage in the book
You Gotta Have Wa
that describes the Japanese fan in the
endan
as shedding his usual “restraint” and becoming a “veritable wildman, yelling and screaming nonstop for nine solid innings,”
implying this author sees the fans as automatons.

He declares that, in Japan, in general, the “more numerous infield audience … by and large behaves rather like crowds at American
ballparks,” and goes on at great length about the “sociality” of the Hanshin bleacher fans, in a labored article layered in
social science terminology.
(“Sense and Sensibility at the Ballpark: What Fans Make of Professional Baseball in Modern Japan,”
available on the professor’s Web site,
[email protected].
It also appeared as “An Anthropologist in the Bleachers,”
Japan Quarterly,
1997.)