Video Night in Kathmandu (49 page)

Inevitably, the great tribalism of the occasion—the ritual incantation of the massed chant, the black-and-golden regalia, the thronged partisanship—took me back to the crowds I had seen at British soccer matches. But these fans were as wholesome as their British counterparts were not. Soccer fans were all too often nothing more than unemployed layabouts with knives in their shoes and switchblades in their eyes, scrounging for a fight; the Tiger supporters, by contrast, were uniformly well dressed and well behaved; they would rather, I imagined, switch than fight. Indeed, they presented a virtual model of an ideal social order. For even in the bleachers, there were no bums, no drunkards, no necking couples or unruly kids. Four children in front of me tidily poked at four tidily boxed meals of noodles and rice, while their mother anxiously snapped photos of them. Pairs of teenage girls whispered to one another and giggled. Senior citizens looked on with serenity. When the Tigers scored, everyone turned around and shook hands with everyone else, decorous as parishioners at an Easter service. And when their moment came, everyone joined together, on time and on cue, again and again and again, in their single compact chant. Da da da, da-da da da.

As I traveled to other games around the country, I managed to register a few regional differences. At Meiji-Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, the stalls sold “Hot Man Dogs” and “Guten Burgers” (no pun, I think, intended); ivy-covered, double-decker Korakuen,
home of the mighty Giants, was ringed by an amusement park, complete with batting cages, baseball video games and a sock-hop pop group in pink-Cadillac suits singing “Route 66.” The Giants had two pom-pom girls in every row, and a scoreboard that told the fans when to clap by flashing an image of mechanically clapping hands. Supporters of the Taiyo Whales struck up the Notre Dame fight song, greeted a Hispanic star with a jaunty rendition of “La Cucaracha” and serenaded another favorite—almost too perfectly, I thought—with the Mouseketeer chant. Fans of the Seibu Lions traveled to every home game en masse, in a specially decorated train (a show of unity encouraged by the stadium’s policy of providing no parking places). Whenever an opposing pitcher was yanked from the game, Tiger fanatics cried out
“Sayonara, sayonara,”
and then launched into a remorselessly poignant version of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Yet for all the minor variations, the ritual was effectively everywhere the same: the same chants at the same time, begun before the game and continued for ten minutes after the final out. (Equally punctual, television broadcasts of Japanese games traditionally lasted for exactly one hour and twenty-six minutes. No more. No less. No matter the context or the occasion: one hour and twenty-six minutes.) Every now and then, I was told, all the feeling that was so scrupulously contained would suddenly erupt, and the fans would go berserk, in what the Japanese call a fit of “temporary insanity,” storming the field or pummeling an umpire. But that was only the exception that proved the rule. Generally, the control at the games was as regular, as rhythmic, as relentless as the chanting. Da da da, da-da da da.

And every time I saw ten thousand fans filling the air in unison with black-and-yellow bullhorns, I found myself shuddering a little at the militarism of the display—and at its beauty. For the rites of Japanese baseball, however orchestrated, were lovely in their lyricism. When the fans scattered pieces of colored paper or rice into the night air, it looked as if fireflies were lighting up the darkness. In the middle of the seventh inning, the crowd chose not to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” but let off flares, scarlet and mysterious, into the sky. And after the final out, spectators sent rainbowed streamers fluttering out onto the field that streaked the air with their brightness. The teams in the Japanese leagues were not called Dodgers or Expos
or Astros; they were Dragons, Swallows and Carp. And the song the Tiger fans were singing was called, quite beautifully, “When the Wind Blows Down from Mount Rokko.”

IN ORDER TO
get closer to the heart of the sport, however, I decided one day to pick up the English-language autobiography of Sadaharu Oh, the Babe Ruth of Japan and the country’s unquestioned king (in symbol-perfect Japan, even his name meant “king”). The classic works of American baseball reminiscence—Jim Bouton’s
Ball Four
, for example, or Sparky Lyle’s
The Bronx Zoo
—are, famously, gossip columns crossed with jokebooks that throw open the doors on a madcap whirl of cokeheads, birdbrains, rakes, flakes and lovable bumpkins; Oh’s book, by comparison, ushers his reader into a world as hushed and solemn as a monastery.

The story of the star’s ascent unfolds, in fact, like nothing so much as a Japanese
Pilgrim’s Progress
, with its author a kind of earnest Zen Everyman bumbling along an archetypal obstacle course of pitfalls and temptations. Instead of accounts of key games or late-inning heroics, Oh devotes most of his space to chronicling his “fatheaded clumsiness” as a youth, his typical off-field errors in the entertainment districts of the Ginza, his sense of obligation to the fans. “Outside the world of baseball,” he matter-of-factly reports, “I was a fairly boring fellow.” And instead of dwelling on his greatest hits, he concentrates on the stages of his often painful quest for spiritual maturity. The stars of this morality play are Providence and Time; its protagonists a strange, half-magical group of spirits and forces and guardian angels that seem to govern Oh’s destiny much more than the man himself.

Thus everything in the player’s life takes on an almost mystical glow. When the fledgling star was still in his teens, he records, he consulted a soothsayer for advice. Keep always the image of a dragon in your mind, said the sage, and change your name for a year. Oh did so, and became a star. When the schoolboy pitcher developed a blister on his finger before a crucial game in the High School Championship, while far from home in a dingy boardinghouse, a man suddenly appeared at his door. It was his father, there to proffer an ancient medicinal cure of ginseng root mixed with Chinese wine, before vanishing again
into the night. Many years later, when he was struggling to beat Hank Aaron’s world record of 755 home runs, Oh was in desperate need of help. The more he pressed, the less he achieved. The less he achieved, the more he pressed. Days passed, the record remained unbroken, camera crews and police escorts dogged his every move. The star tried everything he knew to break the slump. He stood on his head, he held his breath while swinging, he practiced
kiai, a
special Zen method of shouting. All to no avail. Then, one day, as he sat in the clubhouse before a game, his mother abruptly materialized, as from a mist, before him. In her hand she carried a bag full of apples and a box full of crickets. The apples, she explained, were for Sada’s teammates, the crickets for his daughters. With that sibylline utterance, she disappeared again. Mysteriously strengthened by her appearance, Oh went out and broke the record.

As befits such an unearthly history, Oh’s story, subtitled
A Zen Way of Baseball
, was not only shot through with poetry; it was also steadied by a temple of oracular aphorisms (“In combat, I learned to give up combat. An opponent was someone whose strength joined to yours created a certain result. Let someone call you enemy and attack you, and in that moment they lost the contest”). Whenever he was asked for an autograph, the slugger copied down, next to his name, the characters for “patience,” “spirit” or “effort.” He never once asked for a salary raise. And the glossary at the back of his volume does not explain such terms as “goof off,” “gopher ball,” “beaver shooter” or “bonus baby,” but Japanese phrases that connote “the path of an echo,” “tender feeling” and “internal or spiritual balance.”

Remarkably too, everyone else in Oh’s world seemed to move within this same high realm of rarefied abstraction. A member of the star’s fan club used to express his devotion to his hero by visiting the grave of Oh’s sister whenever Oh could not make the trip himself. The Giant manager prepared for the season by purifying himself at a Buddhist retreat, and after disappointing showings, he delivered public apologies to the fans. The man who made the slugger’s bat wandered through a forest in search of a tree whose soul would match the soul of the hitter. And perhaps the closest thing to a hero in the story was Oh’s
sensei
, Hiroshi Arakawa, the batting coach who trains him in aikido,
Zen, Kabuki and, ultimately, the traditional arts of swordsmanship, teaching him how to hit by showing him how to wait.

Ghostwritten, so it seemed, by a samurai monk-poet, Oh’s book was in many parts movingly beautiful. Closer in spirit—and “spirit” was the word that tolled through the book like a prayer bell—to
Waiden
than
The Mick
, it transported one from the beer-stained bleachers of the American game to a shrine in the mist at the top of a mountain. Suddenly, baseball was seen from a great and cloudless height, sub
specie aeternitatis.
Indeed, the game seemed only to interest Oh as a model of man’s larger universal striving. The diamond was just a reflection of the diamond path, the base path just a narrow road to the deep north within. The game was taken seriously only because it was not in itself taken seriously. Baseball, I thought, was back in proportion.

Or was it? The single great problem with the Japanese game, I was told by Robert Whiting, the longtime American expat who has become the foremost Western expert on Japanese baseball, was that, in truth, everything—absolutely everything—was deadly serious. Everything was pitched at the exalted, almost dizzying heights inhabited by Oh. Poker-faced committee men thrashed out the implications of the game’s minutiae. Managers and fans pored over statistical breakdowns of every single pitch thrown by every single pitcher. Editorials in the
Japan Times
solemnly deliberated over the pros and cons of aluminum bats (which increase the potential for home runs, but break all too easily: progress has its price). Teams, above all, were managed like Marine camps, in which players had to run endless, mindless exercises in order to toughen their “fighting spirit.” Some managers determined the marriages of their players; one had recently slapped his shortstop and kicked his catcher. “It’s almost a military-type discipline,” Dennis Barfield, a U.S. import, said on TV, explaining how the teams had to perform their wind sprints together, chanting the same slogans and running in formation like a squadron. Players had to be as relentlessly well drilled as their fans.

In America, the special charm of baseball had always seemed to lie in its casualness, each game and season drifting past with the rhythm of a lazy daydream. Baseball was full of spaces,
interstices, silences for Memory or Fancy to fill. And since every team played 162 games in a year, very few individual contests greatly mattered; a trip to the stadium was really a leisurely outing on a spring afternoon, a prolonged seventh-inning stretch, a languorous distraction. The game offered none of the jazzed-up jive and nighttime ghetto fire of pro basketball, nor the power-politicking head games of football. It flowed instead like a family picnic. Basketball was about drugs, football about sex. Baseball was good clean fun.

So too, the whole mythos of American baseball had to do with summertime flights of whimsy and wackiness, red herrings and gentle amusements. The game was the domain of screwballs who came out of left field. Its most cherished figures were not such superstar exemplars of decency and hard work as Dale Murphy, Steve Garvey or Rod Carew, but Characters—Tommy Lasorda, for example, the pasta-eating Italian with a joke for every occasion, or “Spaceman” Lee, the dope-smoking free spirit beloved of rock stars, or Gaylord Perry, gray-haired master of the illegal spitball. The Marvelous Mets, slapsticking their way to last place season after season, had gained much more attention than the routinely successful Orioles; the oral history of the game lay not with Lou Gehrig or Ted Williams, but with salty curmudgeons and masters of the malapropism like Casey Stengel and Leo Durocher.
Baseball Is a Funny Game
was the title of Joe Garagiola’s first book, while Jay Johnstone’s autobiography reveled in precisely the element that the Japanese generally preferred to forget:
Temporary Insanity.
True, Bill Freehan’s seminal book of memoirs,
Behind the Mask
, did enjoy the perfect title for a study of Japan—and one that had, in fact, been used for a book on Japanese subculture—but the Detroit catcher had meant the phrase in only the most literal of senses.

In Japan, however, baseball was not a funny game. Oh rarely cracked a smile in his book, and the fans I saw never guffawed. There was no time—or room—for folly in the Japanese game. Watching the high school contests on TV, I told Whiting, I was much impressed by how expertly the teenagers mimicked all the moves and mannerisms of the pros—were it not for the scoreboard, I would not have been able to tell whether I was watching a major-league game or a high school one. That, said Whiting, was no surprise. Many high schools were in fact nothing more
than baseball factories, set up for the assembly-line production of pros. The boys had to practice 350 days a year, and often through the night. Each of them had to shave his head as a sign of devotion to the team, and each was likely to get slapped if he did not chant in harmony with the team. In the stict
kohai senpai
hierarchy that governed these squads, every freshman had to dance attention on his seniors. The bullying that resulted could make even the fagging of British boarding schools sound benign by comparison; recently, said Whiting, a freshman had died at the hands of a senior.

In the professional ranks, of course, the regimen was even more tyrannical. Before every single game of the season, whether in midwinter or 100-degree heat, the players had to practice for four hours and run three miles. One team did a daily “Death Climb” that included twenty sprints up and down the 275 steps of a Shinto shrine; others did “1,000 ground ball” drills, performed 500 “shadow swings” daily, or ran sprints with weights tied to their backs and tires attached to their legs. A laggard player was routinely humbled by having balls hit directly at his body for hours on end. In the United States, star pitchers are handled like precious objects who need at least three days of rest between appearances; in Japan, a successful pitcher is made to appear day after day after enervating day, until he virtually collapses into retirement in his mid-twenties. “American players start spring training on March 1, Japanese on January 15,” Whiting explained succinctly in a television interview. “American players spend an average of three hours a day on the field, the Japanese spend eight. Americans run one mile a day on average in camp, Japanese run ten.” In 1987, even Lou Gehrig’s seemingly unbreakable record of playing in 2,138 consecutive games had been shattered by Sachio Kinugasa of the Hiroshima Carp, who had appeared in every game for 12 years.