Video Night in Kathmandu (52 page)

ONE WEEK BEFORE
I arrived in Tokyo, the New York
Times
had chanced to run a front-page story on Japan’s National Intercity Amateur Baseball Tournament, in which fifty of the country’s leading companies annually field teams to fight it out for baseball supremacy. The corporations, said the article, take these games very seriously: they sign up the finest amateur players in
the country and subject them to eighty games a season and eleven months a year of practice. This year, the finals of the competition were to be held before a sellout crowd at Korakuen Stadium on August 2, only four days after my arrival. Clearly, this was something altogether different from the intramural Softball leagues that bring Manhattan professionals out to Central Park on lazy summer afternoons for halfhearted swings and barrels full of beer. Clearly, this was something I had to see.

On August 2, therefore, I made my way to the stadium. As soon as I arrived, at four o’clock, my heart quickened. Brown boxes were lying along the walkways, piled high with Toshiba cowboy hats. Regulation businessmen, in ties and glasses, were marching around in platoons, jackets slung over their shoulders and, in their hands, matching bullhorns through which they could shout out the verses of their company song. In one spot, twenty-five Nissan cheerleaders had gathered in a circle, and were dancing, dervishing and chanting in a whirlwind show of team spirit. Players were being tossed into the air by their fellows. All about, there was shouting, singing, pep-rally frenzy. The tension was palpable, the excitement mounting. Both teams were clearly ready to go.

And so indeed they were. As I stood around the Nissan circle, scribbling frantically, a man stepped over to ask what I was doing. Auditing the pre-game excitement, I replied. He looked a little embarrassed, and I went back to writing. After a few more moments, we exchanged more pleasantries, and then our business cards. Miyaoka-san, I discovered, was a Special Planning Division Manager of the stadium. But when I asked him to explain the niceties of the pre-match routine, he looked almost inconsolable. Well, he began reluctantly, to begin with, the game had finished. The final had started at one o’clock, Nissan had won by a score of 4-3 and they were now in the process of celebrating their victory. The stadium was empty. The tournament was over.

I felt a little like Wordsworth, in Book 6 of
The Prelude
, when he learns that the crossing of the Alps, the highlight of his trip to Europe, has come and gone without his noticing.

Yet my new friend seemed ready to do almost anything to assuage my disappointment. Abandoning the boss who was waiting to take him home—a breach of duty that could, I imagined,
lead to ritual suicide—he led me briskly into the stadium. We passed through Gate Number I, the Oh Gate (in which Oh’s achievements are inscribed in English, and only in English: 868 home runs! Not just a Japanese, but a worldwide record! Take that, America!). Then he led me onto the hallowed turf itself, the most sacred ground in Japanese baseball. He urged me to join the stadium workers enjoying a picnic on the tarpaulin. He offered me a glass, and poured out some beer. He offered me some more beer, and then some more (half Japanese, perhaps, I did not have the heart to tell him that I didn’t drink). Then he hurried off to get a schedule. Please, he said, would I tell him which team I would like to see the Giants play? Naturally, all the games were sold out months in advance, but I could have tickets to any one of them I chose. He himself would be away next week (inspecting stadia in America), Miyaoka-san explained, but he would organize a free tour, a VIP seat, anything I wanted to make up for my loss today (caused, after all, by nothing except my own inefficiency). With that, he bundled off to tend to his (doubtless furious) boss.

It was, I thought, a typical show of Japanese kindness beyond the call of duty, a routine extension of hospitality the likes of which I had never found anywhere else. But at the same time, I was sure, the charity was prompted by another conviction—that this bewildered
gaijin
should not on any account leave Japan without seeing the Giants, Japan’s team, in action. Foreigners must see Japan in its best condition.

At the heart of Japan’s relations with the outside world, then, stood a paradox as large and implacable as the Sphinx. The Japanese might study and imitate all things Western, but they did not really like Westerners (in much the same way, perhaps, as they had liberally borrowed from the Chinese during the Nara period without ever acknowledging much fondness for the Chinese people). In answer to a 1980 poll, 64 percent of all Japanese had claimed that they did not wish to have anything to do with foreigners. In ancient times, people who committed the crime of being foreign were beheaded; nowadays, they were simply placed before the diminishing eye of the TV camera (entire
shows were devoted to portraying the stupidities of
gaijin).
In the Japanese context, imitation was the insincerest form of flattery.

For all that, however, the Japanese were still determined to impress
gaijin
, and they still coveted the foreigners’ lifestyles. In the flesh,
gaijin
might strike many Japanese as freakish, foul-smelling and crude; but as symbols—of prosperity and progress—they possessed a glamour to which few Japanese were immune. Thus blue-eyed blondes were still much sought after for commercials and regarded almost as trophies—walking advertisements for the Good Life—to be shown off to the neighbors, even as they were giggled at by schoolgirls and inspected by toddlers with fearful fascination.

When it came to baseball, of course, this already vexing double standard grew even more vexed. For the Americans, as the creators of the sport, were generally assumed to be its masters; yet the Japanese could not, would not, be content with being number two—they were determined to try harder and try harder and try still harder until they were the best. Unlike, say, the Filipinos, who play basketball, or the Latin Americans, who have taken up baseball, the Japanese refused to accede to Americans the home-team advantage.

This insistent desire to escape the shadow of Big Brother had begun to haunt every aspect of the game. During my visit, I heard much lamentation about the eclipse of the traditional
obento
box lunches at baseball games by American fast-food imports—Korakuen, the National Shrine of Baseball, was appointed with a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, a Mister Donut store and, of course, the Golden Arches. I read a column in the
Japan Times
that grimly debated whether foreigners should be admitted to the
meikyukai
club, the country’s unofficial Hall of Fame, reserved for players with 200 wins or 2,000 hits. The anxiety had even, by now, seeped into the trade war: Washington had persuaded the Japanese to accept U.S.-made aluminum bats, and Japan had accepted, but then had quickly modified its rules so as to make the bats effectively illegal.

Yet in typically contradictory fashion, the Japanese had also sought to reverse the supremacy of the American leagues by importing American players. And as I followed the major leagues at home, I noticed, every now and then, that a onetime
star, now in his early thirties perhaps, and three or four years away from his last All-Star appearance, would suddenly vanish; he was reborn, I gathered, across the Pacific. By now, Don New-combe, Frank Howard, Clete Boyer, Joe Pepitone and a hundred other stars had jumped to Japan. And when I attended my first Giants game, I was startled to see a familiar form standing in front of me in center field. I looked a little closer, and saw that it was Warren Cromartie, who, when last I looked, had been leading the Montreal Expos to one near-pennant after another. Old players didn’t die; they just went to Japan.

American baseball, of course, takes great pride in its role as a model of the melting pot, a happy community of integration. Black-dominated basketball is often shadowed by the prospect of racism, inverted or otherwise; football coaches still tend to give the most cerebral positions to whites, the most athletic to blacks. But baseball ideally presents a rainbow coalition of Hispanics, blacks and All-American boys, integrated as slaphappily as a prime-time platoon. Willie Mays has become as much a part of the pantheon as Mickey Mantle, while the Minnesota Twins boast a pitcher who last went to bat for Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard. A single small town in the Dominican Republic, San Pedro de Macorís, is the birthplace of fourteen current major-league players.

In Japan, however, the incorporation of foreign players was an altogether trickier proposition. For one thing, Japanese baseball turned all the values of the American game on their head, imposing on every alien an entirely new set of values. Thus the recently arrived American had to learn to be as obedient and well disciplined as a child. He had to agree not to show off his talent, not to seek out flashy statistics, not, in short, to become a star. He had to recall that unity came from unanimity, that his identity lay only with the team. When one player made an error, all his colleagues hit one another so as to share the responsibility. And strategic decisions were reached, not by the pitcher and catcher alone, but by huge consensus (in the first two innings of a 1-0 game, I saw seven different board meetings on the mound, many of them attended by a full quorum of nine). In Japan, players were nothing more than verses in a single poem.

In a system in which everyone was everyone else’s peer, moreover, peer pressures were unavoidably intense. Thus
gaijin
had
to submit to fifteen-hour days and backbreaking workouts. Sometimes, they had to live with their fellows in a collective dorm and observe an unyielding 10 p.m. curfew. In the off-season, they had to accompany the team as it toured remote areas to play exhibition games for those who would not otherwise be able to see professionals; almost immediately thereafter, they had to report back to training camp in time for the next season. “In my country,” writes Oh, “it is impossible to play just for oneself. You play for the team, the country, for others.”

The transplant had also to pledge lifelong loyalty to his squad. In Japan, a baseball team does not represent a city, but a company; team spirit is thus indistinguishable from corporate loyalty. Players in Japan, moreover, are good company men; they do not, as a rule, offer their talents to the highest bidder, or negotiate with owners; their reward is simply the support of the corporate clan (while a World Series winner in 1984 received $50,000, a Japan Series winner made only $2,500). Comfort, in fact, is almost regarded as a handicap. (“He has big salary, he has good family,” a Japanese colleague of mine once complained about a star. “He has no fighting spirit.”) And as with any other Japanese company, the team becomes for its employee family, home and religion (if marriages in Japan often seem like corporate mergers, jobs often resemble surrogate spouses). “I guess [my colleagues] have girlfriends,” said Dennis Barfield, the first American to live in a team dorm, “but I don’t see them.”

Many onetime American stars were little disposed, however, to check in their individualism at customs. They were accustomed to arguing and bartering and basking in the limelight. They talked back to managers and haggled with owners. They led their own lives and battled with their teammates. They even—and this was heresy in the Japanese game—showed emotion. In Japan, a player smiles when he strikes out and does not try to break up double plays. After every one of his home runs, Oh had circled the bases without a trace of emotion, lest, in exulting, he humiliate his opposition. What, then, could the fans of the Yomiuri Giants be expected to make of such imported stars as Clyde Wright, a fallen California Angel? On being taken out of a 1-1 game one day, as Robert Whiting tells it, Wright did not calmly hand the ball to the Giant manager, the revered Nagashima. Instead, he flung it into the stands, stalked into the
dugout, tore up his uniform, threw it into the team bath, kicked over a trash can and threatened to leave Japan—all before 25-million stunned citizens on national television! In panic, the Giant front office instantly laid down a formal series of 10 Commandments which every
gaijin
was expected to obey. The list made specific the need for obedience, discretion, tidiness and teamwork. (“Do not severely tease your teammates.” “Do not return home during the season.” “Take good care of your uniform.” “Do not scream or yell in the dugout or destroy objects in the clubhouse.”) The only thing the elaborate battery of rules did not address, however, was the most basic problem of all—the reluctance of American players to adhere to rules in the first place.

Sometimes, Japanese teams tried to solve the problem by simply jettisoning American players who would not play by Japanese rules, while keeping those who would (the Chunichi Dragons recently got rid of the American who was their leading home-run hitter, while hanging on to a less troublesome
gaijin
who was hitting .190). Yet even that did not get around the most difficult problem of all: that many American imports, however accommodating and acclimatized, were simply too good for the league. Cromartie, for example, had won over many Japanese by graciously giving his newborn child the middle name of “Oh”; yet still the fact remained that every time he came up to the plate, it looked as if he could hit the ball into the next prefecture, almost at will. The first three times I saw him hit, he smashed three solid singles without even appearing to exert himself; over the previous six games, he had hit five home runs. Another American, Boomer Wells, had been virtually pushed out of the Minnesota Twins organization and forced against his will to move to Japan. A failure at home, he had won the Triple Crown in his second season in Japan.

In 1985, in embarrassing fact, the list of statistical league leaders was a virtual roll call of American names. Randy Bass, who had distinguished himself with all of seven home runs in his first five years in the United States, made mincemeat of the pitchers in Japan’s Central League, hitting a remarkable 54 home runs in a 130-game season, and coasting to the Triple Crown (a feat he repeated the next season too). In the Japan Series, Bass helped the Hanshin Tigers to victory by belting homers in each
of the first three games; inevitably, he was voted the Series’ Most Valuable Player. The winning pitcher in two of the three Tiger victories was Rich Gale, in his first season away from the Kansas City Royals. And the star of the Tigers’ opponents, the Seibu Lions, was a former Chicago Cub by the name of Steve Ontiveros. By 1987, the crisis was becoming even more acute, as Bob Horner, a superstar still in his prime, came over and clouted four home runs in his first two games.