26 March 2008

Puro Yakyu

I always thought that living in San Diego was about as good as it gets. Monday night football is over by nine at night, and all the decent sports are wrapped up in plenty of time to get a good night's sleep. I often think that re-locating to the Golden State would solve most of the real problems in life, but the last two mornings I have not been sure.

Maybe the answer is for me to stay put in Washington and re-locate major sports to Japan.

The last two mornings have been just about perfect. The defending World Champion Boston Red Sox are playing the Oakland A's in the Tokyo Dome. First pitch is at six am local time, and it is just about perfect. They went ten innings yesterday, Boston edging the A's in about three-and-a-half hours.

That meant I was only a little late for work, and not that drunk.

There were nearly 45,000 fans at the game, and the combined television audience in Japan and the US was significant everywhere except the West Coast, and it is about time they got a taste of their own medicine.

The interest was hyped in Japan because of the appearance of some home-grown talent in the American Big Leagues. Daisuke Matsuzaka started on the mound for the Sox. He might have had a case of the butterflies, since he struggled early, but settled down for a five-inning performance.

You can't blame him for a shaky start. It is eighteen hours on the airplane, after all, regardless of which way you are going, and there have been cameras flashing in his face since he landed at Narita.

Game Two is in progress now, It is top of the third, Oakland up by one, and another sell-out.

The Japanese are a little nervous about the reception that the Japanese stars get when they return to the home islands. Brand loyalty is a precious thing, and Japanese professional baseball- Puro Yaky_- is linked not so much by location as by sponsor. Most of the teams play on the Kanto plain, the sprawling mega-city of forty million people jammed into the flatland that includes Tokyo and spreads, shoulder to shoulder, down through Yokohama to Yokosuka.

The two American games are happening during opening week for Japan's Pacific League, and the Americans are diverting attention. I am not the only one watching- ratings are down for the Tokyo Giants since they started broadcasting American games in the morning in Japan.

I don't care that much- the Giants were a Yokohama team when I lived there, and sometimes we would take the black diamond train out of Yokosuka-Chuo station and go to a game. I was a Ham Fighter fan because I liked the way they carried themselves.

This goes back a long way, and I have Tom's stack of old pictures on my lap as I watched the high-definition picture broadcast from half a world away.

You could say that Baseball in the national pastime in Japan, certainly more than it is in America. We have drifted off to football as the national sport, since it seems to reflect a fondness for gigantic things crashing around, which has been our recent history.

In Asia, baseball is still as Japanese as apple pie. Which is to say it has been imported, transformed, and completely internalized.

If you thought this was a product of the great defeat and the imposition of an alien culture you would be wrong. The Meiji Restoration is responsible for baseball in Japan, as it is for so many Western customs adopted with such fervor in the late 19th century. The logical continuation of them, industrialization coupled with Japanese energy, got us to the point where the society had to be destroyed to survive.

But baseball pre-dated it, and the formal version is almost as old as the American version that flourished after the Civil War. A Yank from Goreham, Maine, named Horace Wilson organized the first baseball games in Japan in 1872 or 1873. He was a professor of English at Kaisei Gakko, which is now now Tokyo University.

By 1896 the Japanese were good enough to trash an American team from the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club, 29-4.

As a result, baseball first became popular at Japanese universities, a demonstration of the progressivism of the Meiji ideal. In the early 1900's, the Big Six University League was the "Major League" of Japan. Up to 1930, 21 American college teams would come to Japan and Japanese teams frequently traveled to the U.S.

The pros toured Japan as well. I have a picture of Ty Cobb in a Tokyo uniform; Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx and The Babe all played demonstration games in Japan in 1934, winning 17 games.

The tour had a huge impact on the Japanese. A month after the Americans left, the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants were formed as the first professional team. By 1936, six other teams had followed and the Japan Pro-Baseball league (JPBL) made its debut.

War in Manchuria was also in progress, and the militarists rightly considered baseball to be an alien distraction from Empire building. Eventually games were suspended completely because all men were enlisted in the military. The stadiums became ammo dumps, or were converted to agricultural uses.

No one had time to play in 1945, and the situation was so grim in the early years of the Occupation that anything but survival seemed frivolous.

I wish I could have been to the staff meeting in GHQ when some earnest Americans blue-skied ideas for remolding society. They had a blank slate and limitless possibilities. Baseball, with a recognized history and ties to America, was a natural avenue to build the public confidence, and play was encouraged at all levels.

In 1949, the San Francisco Seals' goodwill tour to Japan effectively restarted trans-Pacific baseball interaction. I realized that my associate Tom had arrived in Japan in 1950, just as the rebuilding of the Japanese professional game had begun. Two of the Daibatsu corporations had agreed to sponsor teams, and the JPBL was revived, which an eye to forming two leagues, just like back in the States.

The game had quite a history in America, too. As a demonstration that life continued despite the global conflict, Major League Baseball continued to be played through the war years.

It was even played in the internment camps for Japanese Americans. Baseball was the only avenue to counter the enforced boredom of life in confinement. At the camp in desolate Gila River, for example, there was a year-round league with 32 teams and the championship games drew thousands.

A guy named Al Shimisaki worked for my Dad in the 1960s. I remember him as a young and enthusiastic guy, and he had a mysterious past. He was a car designer then, but in the war years his family was relocated to one of the camps. Baseball was the only bright spot in his days as a kid. He eventually joined Army Counter-intelligence, and his service in Tokyo was at the same time Tom was running detectives in Yokosuka.

Al gave me a samurai fighting-knife when I was a kid that dates to the time of the Meiji Emperor. When I found out how much it was worth I stopped opening letters with it.

It is a curious thing. I sat down to write Tom about his experience with baseball in occupied Japan, and wondered if my Dad knew how to get hold of Al. They must have some fabulous stories about gangsters, and ball-players.

Neither Tom or my Dad can do much with the internet, so I had to actually write the letters and put a stamp on them. It will take a few days for the turn-around, but I expect that it will be worth the time.

The regular season is just getting started, after all. Shoot, top of the seventh in Tokyo, and I have to get to work.

Copyuright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com