More Early Morning Baseball Adventures

It soon became clear why I was able to hook on with the Wakakusa team just by asking. We were very bad. Half the team was over forty, the right fielder looked as if he had never played a game of baseball before (because, as it turned out, he hadn't), the third baseman (one of the better players) never bothered to go to bed the night before the games, and each week we struggled to put nine players on the field. I don't recall winning any games in the year and a half I played for Wakakusa, but this was a familiar feeling for me, having been on an 0-17 team during my senior year of high school.

But playing for Wakakusa was fun and full of adventure.

Often, the fun started the night before. Saturday nights were usually spent drinking with friends, though I imposed a midnight curfew on myself to make sure I had at least four hours of sleep before the alarm rang at 4;30 am. However, during the warm months, at about 2:30 am each week, I would be awakened by the bosozoku -- the "speed tribes" -- teenage motorcycle gangsters who would cruise the streets of Tokyo, blocking traffic, gunning their engines, and generally irritating everyone within earshot. Bosozuku were the minor leagues for the yakuza gangs, and they didn't care who they pissed off. The cops were scared of them and did nothing about them, just happy to see them pass off into the next police box's district. But, the bosozoku were nothing if not punctual, and they followed the same circuit each week, which brought them to the intersection of Yamanote Road and Inokashira Road, perhaps 100 meters from my apartment, where they would stop and gun their engines for several minutes, at precisely the same time each Sunday morning. Each week, upon being awakened, I would lie in my futon fuming and fantasizing of revenge: spreading nails and broken glass across the intersection, or of stretching piano wire at neck height between the pillars of the pedestrian bridge crossing the intersection. I'd fall back to sleep to the comforting thought of bosozoku bloodily wiping out as their tires shredded or slicing their own heads off on piano wire they couldn't see in the dark.

As the first gaijin in the league, I became a local celebrity. Word about me spread throughout the league, and members of the other team would often introduce themselves before the game. They all knew my name, and it was very disconcerting. As I warmed up, I'd hear them talking about me:

He's got a good arm.

Can he hit?

Look! He does have a big ass, just like the major leaguers.

I started out as our team's catcher, forming a battery with Umezawa-san (or "Ume-san"), a sidearmer who like most Japanese pitchers threw mostly breaking stuff but could also get a surprising amount of zip on the fastball for a 47 year-old sushi chef. Even though catching had been hell on my knees since the tenth grade, when I had to give it up, I enjoyed catching more than any other position. It allowed me to see the whole field, to be involved in every play, to be in control of the game, and to talk to the batters and the umpire. On one particularly bright Sunday morning, the rising sun bore directly at the batter's box from center field. At "balls in!" the umpire and I stood behind the plate, shielding our eyes as we waited for the first batter. "Sure is bright out," I said. After a pause the umpire hesitantly responded, "Oh, is that so?," as if this was new information that he wasn't sure how to address.

Later, I replayed the exchange in my head. All I had said was, "Mabushii desu ne . . ." ("Sure is bright out"). Why had he answered, "Oh, is that so?" when it was obviously so bright out? And what was he so sheepish about? Only much later did I realize I had made an ever so small, and ever so important error. I'd replaced the "bu" in mabushii with "zu." So, I had told the umpire, out of the blue, "Mazushiii desu ne . . ." ("You know, I am very poor. [I don't have any money].") No wonder he had responded the way he did.

After a few weeks, my knees were aching beyond my capacity to endure it any longer, and I told my manager that I could not catch any more. He asked if I could pitch, and I told him I had pitched in high school. I should have known better, because saying you played high school baseball has an entirely different meaning in Japan. Rather than shabby uniforms and games no one attends, high school baseball conjures up images of the nationally televised national high school baseball championship, known informally as "Koshien," after the famous field on which it the final games are played, the hallowed home field of the Hanshin Tigers. Koshien is a single-elimination tournament played by teams from all over the country before capacity crowds. The final is often an epic extra-inning marathon in which both starting pitchers -- who have started every game of the tournament -- throw goose eggs at the other side for 16 innings. Many players, like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui, go directly from Koshien to Japan Professional Baseball. So, when one says, "I played high school baseball" in Japan, people are impressed.

My manager told me I was starting that morning. At least for that game, he was onto something. The slightly smaller Japanese baseball made it much easier for me to throw a curveball, and for six innings, I throw no-hit ball. We lost in the seventh (we played seven inning games) when I walked a batter and then, with two outs, the batter hit a routine pop fly to our right fielder, who, playing as if he'd never played the game before (because he hadn't), dropped it and then kicked it into foul territory, allowing the only run of the game to score. But my manager was beaming with the thought that he now improved the team's chances considerably. In future games, though, my pitching did not live up to the early promise. A player on another team told me I had a good fastball, but I was telegraphing when I was going to throw the curve.

That did not stop me from making two all-star game appearances during my time on the team. Wakakusa's manager managed our division's all-star team both years, and he selected me both times. I always assumed that it was because I was the league's only gaijin, but I enjoyed playing in the games nevertheless. The first year, I played right field, and made a nice play to double a runner off first base on a line drive that I had to run some distance to catch. The second year, I started the game as pitcher and, against the best players from the other division, got lit up like a string of red plastic chili lights. It was a very, very long night. But, these games were in the evening, under the lights at a good university baseball field, and a lot of my friends came to see me play.

Playing baseball was one of the best experiences I had in Japan. I got to meet real salt-of-the-earth, every day Japanese people, who were more fun and easy-going than most of the people in the button-down places I worked, where everyone had graduated from Tokyo University and took himself very seriously. I made some good friends, particularly Ume-san, whose sushi shop I used to visit even after I stopped playing for the team. And, I hit my first home run since Little League -- a dinger into the Tama River on the fly that I knew was gone the minute I made contact.

Japanese Baseball

While working at Look Japan, I discovered that my boss, editor-in-chief Nishimura-san, shared my love of baseball. During the year we worked together, we went to numerous baseball games.

Mostly we went to see the Yakult Swallows play. Japanese baseball teams are usually named for the corporation that owns them. In the Swallows' case, that was the Yakult yogurt company, which is famous for its miniature bottles of sweetened liquid yogurt drink, meant to be consumed as a health supplement, which are delivered by "Yakult Ladies" -- lime green moped-driving, uniform-clad women who bring your daily or weekly supply of yogurt directly to your house or office, just like the milkmen of yore. Like the Swallows, most Japanese baseball teams do not include their home city in their names, although the most popular team, the Yomiuri Giants (for the Yomiuri, a large circulation newspaper in Tokyo), do put Tokyo before their name, and the Yokohama Baystars don't have any corporate moniker cluttering up their uniforms. Perhaps the most confusing thing resulting from the use of corporate names is the Fighters, who are owned by Nippon Ham. Seeing the team's whole name in print -- Nippon Ham Fighters -- has led many a foreigner (including myself) to wonder what the hell a "Ham Fighter" is. I've never understood why Nippon Ham did not hyphenate its name.

Nishimura-san and I regularly saw the Swallows because they played at Meiji Jingu Stadium, right in central Tokyo, which was easy to get to, and because they were not as popular as the Giants, so tickets were easy to score. Jingu Stadium, unlike the Giants' home ground, the Tokyo Dome, is also an outdoor venue, with real grass, and as far as I am concerned, a much better place to watch baseball.

The atmosphere of a Japanese baseball game is very different from that of a Major League game. You are not harassed by security to see if you are bringing in outside food and drink, which means that there is a lively market for yakisoba (stir-friend noodles), yakitori (grilled chicken), various kinds of o-bento boxes, and beer outside the stadium, mostly sold by low-level yakuza. Once you get inside, rather than hot dogs and popcorn, the vendors bring around sushi and grilled squid. Rather than being restricted to whatever beer brand sponsors the team, you can wait for your favorite brand to come around. Or, you can get a whiskey-and-water, made in front of you by a vendor carrying a bottle of whiskey, a bucket of ice, and on her back a huge chrome tank of water with a small rubber hose and spigot.

The biggest difference, however, is how the fans follow the game. Just as at a college football game, the hometown fans sit on one side of the stadium and the away team's fans -- if any -- sit on the opposite side. The fans take turns cheering on their own team when it bats, while the other side stays silent, awaiting their team's turn at the plate. The cheering sections are led by professional cheerleaders, who stand atop their team's dugout, waving huge team flags and blowing whistles. They are often accompanied by a drummer and a trumpeter to help lead the cheers. Each player has his own special cheer made up by the cheerleaders, which all the fans chant in unison while clapping the designated rhythm that goes along with it. Often the fans use "cheer bats" -- hollow plastic miniature baseball bats -- to amplify their clapping sound. (The inflatable cheer sticks that you can now get at sporting events in the US were invented and marketed by an American baseball player who played in Japan and got the idea while playing there.) The cheering has nothing to do with what is going on during the game. It just continues relentlessly (although it is always done with a bit more enthusiasm when your team is winning). The purpose of cheering is different there -- it's not to express an opinion about what's happening in the game, it's to encourage your side with the knowledge that the fans are behind them, no matter how the game is going.

Each team's fans also have a special seventh-inning stretch ritual. Perhaps the most famous is that of the Hanshin Tigers' fans, who blow up 5-foot long balloons with a whistle attached, and then all release them simultaneously when the top of the inning ends, filling the stadium with flying, whistling balloons. Tigers fans are unrivaled for their passion and even conduct this ritual at away games. The Swallows' fans had a distinctive, if less amusing, ritual of waiving green vinyl umbrellas (of the kind that you buy for 100 yen at convenience stores) in the air during the seventh-inning break.

The actual baseball itself was a reflection of Japanese culture too -- extremely well-executed fundamental baseball on a very high level of play, but lacking a certain excitement and passion. Most Japanese teams play relentless "small ball" -- if there is a runner on base with less than two outs, the batter always, always, ALWAYS sacrifice bunts, regardless of whether it's the pitcher or the cleanup hitter batting, and without consideration for whether the score is tied or the team is behind by 10 runs. Nevertheless, I always enjoyed the whole experience at Japanese baseball games, and I have Nishimura-san to thank for being my baseball companion.

(By the way, Nishimura-san, I still have those cheer bats you bought me!)

My Brush with Sumo Greatness

Who remembers the great Saturday afternoon sports show, ABC's Wide World of Sports? In the days before cable TV, ESPN, and multiple 24 hour a day sports channels, WWS offered a rare glimpse at sports from around the world that Americans infrequently got to watch on TV, like skiing, rugby, rodeo, and swimming. In the 1970s, with the rise of the first American sumo wrestler, Takamiyama (Jesse James Wailani Kuhaulua, from Hawaii), WWS exposed Americans to sumo for the first time. While my friends made fun of the "fat guys pushing each other around," I was fascinated and watched sumo every time it was on WWS. Naturally, ABC's coverage focused on Takamiyama, with his trademark mutton-chop sideburns.

Watching sumo did not lead to an interest in Japan. After WWS stopped showing sumo, I forgot all about it and Takamiyama. And when I suffered an upset stomach after a school trip to a Japanese steakhouse in fourth grade, I decided that I hated Japanese food and all things Japanese.

I didn't see another sumo match until shortly after moving to Japan in 1991, when I watched sumo on TV with my dorm-mates at the First Canon Fujigaoka Dorm one Saturday afternoon. It was then that I remembered Wide World of Sports and Takamiyama, and recalled my childhood fascination with sumo. My interest deepened when I started hanging out regularly with my mother's former student from Wisconsin in the 1960s, David Benjamin ("Benjie"), and his wife Junko Yoshida, who were living in Tokyo at the time. As it turned out, Benjie and Junko were sumo aficionados, and Benjie was then writing a book on sumo, The Joy of Sumo (soon to be republished in an updated edition under a new title). Sumo tournaments (basho) take place in odd-numbered months, last for fifteen days, and culminate in a final day when the championship (yusho) is often decided (by total number of wins). Benjie, Junko and I developed a custom of having an early dinner together at their house while watching the final day of the tournament.

Benjie and Junko gave me an education in sumo as a sport, the kind of education you couldn't get from most sumo books at the time (other than Benjie's), because they focused on sumo as Shinto ritual and mostly avoided the fact that sumo is a sport. Benjie and Junko would explain things like how the quality of wrestlers was declining as Japan became wealthier and fewer young men viewed sumo as a ticket out of poverty, and we'd try to pick out which matches were being thrown -- which often happened on the last day with wrestlers who entered the day 7-7 and needed a win to avoid demotion in ranking and the accompanying reduction in salary. (Sumo wrestlers are paid according to rank, but only the wrestlers in the top two divisions receive salaries, and these wrestlers support their sumo stables and the lower-ranking non-salaried wrestlers.)

Between my watching the Wide World of Sports in the 1970s and arriving in Japan in 1991, Takamiyama retired from wrestling (in 1984 to be exact), obtained Japanese citizenship, and became an oyakata, a sumo stable owner and coach. In accordance with tradition in sumo and many other areas of Japanese life, upon changing status, he also changed his name -- to Azumazeki Daigoro, and became referred to by his title, Azumazeki-oyakata. He also recruited to his stable a young Hawaiian wrestler named Chad Rowan, or, as he came to be known in the sumo world, Akebono.

Shortly after arriving at Look Japan magazine in September 1992, I learned that my colleague Ann Safir had arranged an interview with Akebono and, although I did not learn until much later that Azumazeki-oyakata was Takamiyama, I asked if I could go along because I liked sumo. Ann, who wasn't that interested in sumo, told me I could do the interview if I wanted. It took place on a Saturday morning, at the Azumazeki stable in a working-class section of eastern Tokyo. Akebono was already the highest-ranking wrestler in the stable, having achieved the rank of sekiwake, the third-highest in sumo. Because his salary was the highest, and sumo stables live off the earnings of their wrestlers, what Akebono said, went. And what he said that morning was that they would hold an extra training session for our benefit.

The training area in the Azumazeki stable consisted of a dirt floor, lined on two sides by a wall with poles against which the wrestlers would push for upper-body strengthening, and on two sides by an elevated viewing platform from which the coaches could watch. The wrestlers all wore beige training belts (mawashi), rather than the colorful mawashi they wore in tournaments, and their hair was tied up in bundles on their heads, rather than in the elaborate tournament hairstyles. Because sumo wrestlers are heavy, they look short on TV, but from a few feet away, it was clear that all of these men were tall, too. (Akebono, of course, was famous for being unusually tall for a sumo wrestler, at 6'8".) They were huge, and under the fat is bulging muscle. And when they crashed into each other to practice the sumo face-off, the sound was tremendous. Anyone who thinks that sumo is just a couple of fat guys pushing each other around should see sumo up close. The face-off is like an offensive linesman crashing into a defensive linesman in football -- except that the sumo wrestlers do it without pads, helmets, or any protection whatsoever. These guys are seriously strong athletes.

After the practice, the wrestlers cleaned up, and Akebono invited us to a lunch being held for him and a few other wrestlers at a nearby restaurant. It was there we conducted the interview. Akebono seemed more interested in talking to a couple of fawning young women that someone had brought along to meet him, and it was hard to get him to focus on the interview, but we were eventually able to get enough from him for our article. Sumo also has a well-known connection with both organized crime and the revanchist extreme right wing of Japanese politics (which are pretty much one and the same), and there were a few dubious people at the lunch with us (who I think brought the fawning young women for Akebono). When Ann and I wrapped up the interview, and Ann took off, Akebono invited me to hang out with them, but feeling a little uncomfortable hanging around with people I was pretty sure were gangsters, I told him I had to get going, thanked him, and left. Of course, now I regret passing up the chance to become buddies with Akebono and see more of sumo's seamy underside, but at the time beating it seemed like the best thing to do.

I followed sumo religiously through the rest of my time in Japan, and rooted Akebono on from afar as he climbed the ranks to become the first-ever foreign-born yokozuna (Grand Champion, the highest rank in sumo) in the face of great nationalist and xenophobic opposition, but I lost touch with sumo when I returned to the US and had no way to watch the matches. However, in the last three years, since marrying Kaori and subscribing to Japan TV on cable, I get to watch most basho and have turned Kaori into a sumo fan. Benjie calls me a wimp for watching the tape-delayed matches in the afternoons, rather than getting up at 3:00 am to watch the matches live, but I think I'm doing okay. I drink Japanese beer and pretend I am back in Tokyo, watching on a weekend afternoon, as the goddess Amaterasu intended.

Punch Perms and Umeboshi -- My First Izakaya Experience

A week or so after I arrived at Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, Arai-san, the dormitory manager, prevailed upon my dorm mates to take me out and get to know me. They asked me if I had ever been to an izakaya, and when I asked what that was, they told me it was a "Japanese-style bar." Sounded good to me. We arranged to meet one day after work at the local izakaya, which was half-way between Fujigaoka Station and our dormitory. I knew the place they described from passing it twice a day on my walks uphill both ways to and from the station.

When I arrived, most of the other guys were already there, about six in total. Like every other izakaya I have been to since, it was noisy with the conversation of customers and the shouts of the waiters welcoming guest, thanking departing customers and conveying their orders to the cooks and beer-pullers. (I call them beer-pullers rather than bartenders because Izakaya don't have bars as we know them in the US and don't serve drinks that require bartenders. The drinks menu usually consists of beer, sake, shochu (a spirit made from either potatoes or wheat), chu-hai (shochu mixed in a highball glass with some kind of flavoring), and soft drinks.) I sat down at the table and someone gave me a small glass and poured me a beer from the shared bottle.

Our waiter was a middle-aged man with what looked like a short, neatly-trimmed Afro and much tanner skin than most Japanese. He looked like one of my sports coaches in high school, which is to say, he looked black, but he was clearly Japanese. I struggled to explain his looks to myself, and then came up with a story to make sense of them: he was part African-American, and his father had probably been a serviceman stationed at one of the U.S. military bases in Japan. I asked one of the guys whether he thought the waiter was half-black, and when he asked why, I explained my reasoning. No, he told me, the waiter's hair was curly because he had a panchi paamu ("punch perm"), a permanent wave hairstyle popular in the 1980s and early 1990s with gangsters and some members of the working class, who thought it made them look tough.

The conversation alternated between my dorm-mates peppering me with questions and talking amongst themselves about topics that quickly lost me. Whenever I did understand the conversation and attempted to contribute something, by the time I had translated my comment from English to Japanese inside my head, the conversation had moved on to another topic.

At some point in the evening, the conversation turned to what would become a familiar topic over the years, my level of knowledge and/or comfort with certain Japanese foods. They wanted to know if I ate "raw fish," sushi being considered the ultimate gross-out food for non-Japanese and the real test for how far a foreigner was willing to go in Japanese culture. I told them I did. They tried a few other foodstuffs they thought would be offputting to me, and I had eaten them all. Finally, they asked me if I had ever had an umeboshi. I did not know what an umeboshi was. They tried to explain to me what it was, and even looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary, to find the translation "pickled plum." A picked plum did not make any more sense to me, so finally they ordered one to see if I would eat it.

The waiter brought a tiny round dish, about two inches across, with a single, reddish shriveled round object that did not look like any plum I had ever seen. They warned me that it was very sour. Good, I said, I love sour foods.

For some reason, even though they knew that I did not know what an umeboshi was, for some reason, it did not occur to them that I would not know how to eat one properly. Evidently, they are considered too sour to eat as-is, and you are meant to take a small piece with chopsticks and use it to flavor something else, like rice. I, however, seeing a grape-sized piece of what they said was a plum, picked up the umeboshi and popped it into my mouth whole. It wasn't that sour.

Everyone at the table gasped.

Thinking I had breached some kind of etiquette, I spit the umeboshi back into the dish.

Then, realizing I had now definitely committed a faux pas, I popped the umeboshi back in my mouth and ate it. Only then did they tell me that it was considered too sour to eat whole and explained how it was supposed to be consumed. They ordered another and showed me.

So, this day featured my introduction to izakaya and umeboshi (and punch perms). I became a huge fan of izakaya dining and would travel across Tokyo to go to a good one.

And I still eat umeboshi whole.