The Meaning of Ichiro (9 page)

Against that background, a kind of historical watershed occurred in 1991 when then-Mariners owner Jeff Smulyan was on the
brink of moving his team, a perennial loser with depressed attendance, to Florida. In an effort to keep the club where it
was, a group of Seattle politicians and business leaders led by Slade Gorton prevailed upon Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi,
whose firm’s American branch was based in Redmond, Washington, to buy a majority share in the franchise. Yamauchi, an eccentric
Kyoto aristocrat whose passion for the board game
go
far exceeded his minimal interest in
b
sub
ru
and who had never been to Seattle to see the Mariners play, agreed to do it as a “gift” to the community.

However, the idea of a foreigner, or rather a
Japanese
foreigner, buying an MLB team was not warmly received in the country at large, thanks to the growing economic friction with
Japan. At that particular time, Japan was at the height of its economic power. Its firms were buying up U.S. landmarks like
Rockefeller Center, Pebble Beach golf course and Columbia Pictures. The U.S. trade deficit with that country was so huge,
courtesy of burgeoning Japanese automobile and electronics exports, that many Americans had begun complaining of a “Japanese
invasion” and the threat it posed to the future of the faltering U.S. economy. It was a time when the rhetoric flew hot and
heavy.

In January 1992, for example, in response to U.S. Japan-bashers, the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament in Japan had
termed the Americans “lazy and illiterate,” while Shintaro Ishihara, a popular novelist turned politician, claimed that Japanese
could always make a better product than the Americans. That latter remark prompted U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings to retort
undiplomatically that Ishihara was forgetting who made the atomic bomb. In a visit to a weapons factory in South Carolina,
Hollings suggested employees “draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it: Made in America by lazy and illiterate workers
and tested in Japan.” In a highly charged incident some months earlier, a group of U.S. lawmakers had been photographed smashing
a Japanese car with a sledgehammer.

Against this background, Philadelphia Phillies owner Bill Giles declared his opposition to the sale of the Mariners to Nintendo.
“It’s a patriotic issue for me,” he sniffed, while Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent announced it was not in
the best interests of Major League Baseball to have foreign ownership by any other than a Canadian organization. A poll conducted
at the time revealed that 70 percent of Americans queried were opposed to having Japanese own a major league franchise.

However, Seattleites, for their part, were beginning to view their region as part of the Pacific Rim. Not only did Asians
constitute by far the largest minority in the Puget Sound area, the territory was dependent on the exports of Microsoft and
other companies to Japan and the rest of the Asian economies. Many jobs also depended on the very Japanese imports that were
taken to task in the country at large. There were enough folks who appreciated Nintendo’s record as an upstanding member of
the corporate community in the Pacific Northwest to successfully push the idea of Japanese ownership through, although it
did not survive completely intact.

Although the major leagues had eventually agreed to Yamauchi’s acquiring 60 percent of the Seattle franchise, they did so
only on the humiliating condition that he restrict his voting interest to less than 50 percent. It was a restriction described
by Donald Hellman, director of the Institute for International Policy at the University of Washington, as “out and out racism.”

Nonetheless, Yamauchi, described by one business writer as “a likeable crab,” agreed to pay $75 million of the estimated $125
million total price of the team, and consented to leave the day-to-day management of the Mariners to Nintendo America’s chief,
Howard Lincoln. Lincoln hired Pat Gillick as general manager, a man who had a reputation for creating competitive teams on
less than exorbitant payrolls, and the Griffey/Rodriguez era was launched. Then in the winter of 1999, Gillick signed Kazuhiro
Sasaki, relief ace of the Yokohama BayStars, who became an instant success with the Mariners, winning the 2000 Rookie of the
Year award with a record of 37 saves and an ERA of 3.16. That year, the Seattle Mariners made a profit (of $10 million), the
first in the history of the franchise. And, of course, they made even more money in 2001 when Yamauchi suggested the team
acquire Ichiro Suzuki. By the end of that year, Japanese was virtually a second language at Safeco Field, with ideographs
featured in advertisements all over the park. Suzuki was unable to walk in downtown Seattle without being mobbed.

Ironically, those owners who initially opposed Yamauchi’s acquisition wound up benefiting from it heftily thanks to MLB TV
broadcasting contracts with Japan that proved to be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Author Shawn Wong, an Asian-American professor of English at the University of Washington who had himself experienced discrimination,
was particularly happy about the way things ultimately turned out. He was so moved by the sight of 45,000 people in Safeco
Field chanting Ichiro’s name when he came up to bat (and yelling
“sanshin”
when Sasaki struck out an opposing batter) that he declared the people of Seattle had become global citizens without leaving
home.

In an article he wrote for the
Seattle Times,
he praised the respect and loyalty, “distinctly Japanese traits,” exhibited by Ichiro and Sasaki. The latter had quietly
signed a contract extension without the bargaining in the media that was standard for American stars. When it was over Sasaki
made the simple public statement, “I love the city of Seattle and my teammates.” Wong also movingly described a little white
boy holding up at sign at Safeco which read, “I want to be Ichiro when I grow up.”

“Today,” wrote Wong, “the corporation known as Major League Baseball is looking like a global missionary, marketing its products
in Japan and around the world… . I’m beginning to think that an entire city can understand how race changes their culture
and society and can embrace and even encourage that change.”

For Japan, the significance of Ichiro’s accomplishment was a slightly different matter. His success was one of those great
postwar moments for the Japanese that inspired a sense of triumph—like the exploits of Rikidozan, a former sumo wrestler who
popularized pro wrestling in Japan by defeating outsized American wrestlers in carefully orchestrated matches. Rikidozan’s
first match, in 1954, was seen by a record 24 million people, nearly one-third of the nation’s population at the time, who
crowded in front of promotional TV sets set up in public squares around the country and watched in delirious joy as their
hero pounded an American, Ben Sharpe, into submission.

His matches gave an enormous boost to the nascent television industry in Japan, as well as an incalculable lift to the spirit
of the nation, still trying to recover from defeat in war. Said Matsutaro Shoriki, the president of the Yomiuri media conglomerate
that had telecast the Rikidozan matches, “Rikidozan, by his pro wrestling in which he sent the big white men flying, has restored
pride to the Japanese and given them new courage.”

Another triumph was the conquering of the U.S. auto market in the 1980s. This inspired an enormous wave of self-congratulation,
endless platitudes from political leaders in Tokyo and hundreds of books and TV documentaries about the end of the U.S. century
and the rise of the Japanese one.
The Japan That Can Say No,
a saber-rattling polemic by the aforementioned Shintaro Ishihara, one which essentially extended a middle finger to the U.S.A.,
sold a million copies.

The Ichiromania that swept Japan was certainly no less intense, as evidenced by the full-frontal blast of coverage in the
ubiquitous sports dailies, featuring large photos and detailed pitch-by-pitch charts of each Ichiro at-bat. In NHK’s twice-daily
broadcasts of Mariners games (shown once live, once on tape on the network’s 13-year-old satellite channel), viewers were
treated to endless shots of their idol doing knee bends in the outfield, joking with his teammates on the bench, stretching
in the on-deck circle. These were interspersed with taped replays of his pregame warm-ups, autograph signing sessions and,
of course, earlier at-bats, ad infinitum. After watching all this for half a season, one Tokyo-based TV reviewer suggested
sarcastically that NHK change the name of its daily gamecast from “Major League Baseball” to “The Ichiro Show.”

The telecast of the 2001 All-Star Game by the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), a major commercial TV network, represented
a new high in such narcissistic reporting. It marked the first time in history that two Japanese players had appeared in a
Major League Baseball All-Star Game and a bevy of Japanese TV personalities appeared on the program to offer color commentary
on the newest hero. When Ichiro was taken out of the game in the early innings, a luncheon show featuring guests singing Ichiro’s
praises came on to occupy all but a small corner of the screen, where the All-Star telecast continued. It stayed that way
until the other Japanese participant, Ichiro’s teammate Kazuhiro Sasaki, was called into the game to pitch the ninth inning.
Then, suddenly, the live full screen baseball telecast resumed. The priorities could not have been clearer.

A similar, although lesser, media display had occurred when Hideo Nomo first entered the major leagues, pitching every fifth
day. But Ichiro was the first to appear front and center every single day—a slender Japanese among pumped-up musclemen, sparking
his big American teammates to victory—and the public could simply not get enough of this delectable sight. It was an unprecedented
opportunity to massage the national ego and the press took full advantage of it.

There was no small degree of irony here, because, outside of the BlueWave home city, hardly anyone had watched Ichiro play
in Japan. He had been the country’s premier player, with a string of batting titles under his
obi,
and owned the highest paycheck in either league, not to mention his own clothing line, numerous endorsements. His face adorned
billboards all over Japan. Yet he nearly always played to half-empty stands, in games that were almost never telecast nationally.
This sorry state of affairs was largely due to the existence of the Tokyo Yomuri Giants, Japan’s oldest and winningest and
most beloved franchise. The Giants are owned by a puissant media conglomerate that includes the largest daily newspaper in
the world, the
Yomiuri Shimbun,
with an average daily circulation of about 13 million including morning and evening editions, and the largest commercial
television network in the land, Nippon Television. They were the only baseball organization so blessed.

The
Kyojin
(Giants) were the living definition of the term “wretched excess.” Thanks to their habitually winning ways (31 pennants in
their first 70 years) and the fact that they had always attracted the best players in the land, they drew capacity crowds
to nearly every game they played, attracting over three million fans a year. Tokyo Giants primetime telecasts had enjoyed
consistently high ratings, which peaked in 1982 to a nationwide Nielsen rating of 27.5 percent for the season. Surveys regularly
showed that one out of every two persons who followed baseball was a Giants fan, which meant that no matter where the
Kyojin
ventured, legions in the stands were rooting for them.

They were in the forefront of the nation’s consciousness for so long that, cynics argued, the country had essentially been
brainwashed into following them. Even when the team finished in last place in 1975, or in the second division as they did
in 1991 and 1997, far out of contention, they still outdrew
all
the pennant contenders. Indeed, many viewers complained of suffering withdrawal symptoms if a Giants game was rained out
and there was no nightly fix available—no matter where the team was in the standings.