Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game (review)

With Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game, Robert K. Fitts attempts to tell the story of baseball in Japan through the words of those intimately involved with the professional sport: players, managers, and one executive. Like The Glory of Their Times, a work to which it bears structural and stylistic similarities, Remembering Japanese Baseball is a collection of chronologically ordered, discrete recollections, with a foreword by Robert Whiting, himself the author of three excellent books on the Japanese game. Also included is a nice, concise history of yakyu, as baseball is called in Japan, and a separate timeline.

While the primary focus of this text, as stated, is to paint a historic picture of the professional game in Japan since World War II, it also aims at pointing out basic differences between the way the game is played in Japan and America. Of the twenty-five individual stories, only five are the recollections of native-born Japanese players. Sixteen, in contrast, are the remembrances of gaijin or foreign players, all from the United States, with the exception of Orestes Destrade, a native Cuban. Four of the respondents are Nisei, or American-born Japanese. As such, Remembering Japanese Baseball is, more than anything, the story of outsiders playing in Japan, rather than of Japanese baseball, in general. It is no surprise, therefore, what this book does best is chronicle the differences.

Fitts's respondents point to a number of ways in which the Japanese game diverges from baseball as it is played in the United States. They cite, for example, the Japanese insistence on playing for one run early in the game, as well as the absence of an established pitching rotation. What comes across most clearly, however, is not how the Japanese sport itself differs from American baseball, but rather, the ways in which Japanese and American baseball culture differ from one another. And these differences are stark. The very fact that strict distinctions between gaijin, Nisei, and native Japanese exist in the sport is telling. Major League players may divide themselves into clubhouse cliques based on race, language, and musical taste, but these divisions are unofficial and personal. There is no quota, for example, on Dominican, Venezuelan, or Japanese players. In Japan, it is a different story. Distinctions are made, and quotas of two or three outsiders per team, depending on the period, are strictly enforced.

Perhaps the most important foreign player in both Japanese professional baseball history and the culture of Japanese baseball is the Hawaiian-born Nisei, Wally Yonamine. In addition to providing his own story, Yonamine is mentioned in almost every other recollection. Credited by promoter and executive, Tsuneo "Cappy" Harada, himself a Nisei, as introducing hustle to the Japanese game, Yonamine is known as the "Jackie Robinson of Japan," a designation which may shed more light on the culture of Japanese ball than any direct statement of differences. Introducing the practice of going in hard to second base to break up double plays to Japan, Yonamine recounts, "After I started to do that, the opposing fans would throw rocks at me when I was in the outfield" (p. 24). Yonamine says of Robinson, "he had it much rougher than I did. You see, my skin is yellow, just like the Japanese"(p. 24). As Yonamine states, Robinson may have, in fact, had a rougher time of it, but, for the most part, what Robinson had hurled at him were invective, not projectiles. Eventually, like Robinson, Yonamine was accepted by his teammates. But it was also made abundantly clear to him that Japanese players held most other Nisei in contempt, no matter how talented the American-born Japanese might have been. Such is the intense nationalism, the intense insularity of Japanese baseball reflected in this text.

Given the cultural divide, the most interesting reminiscences in this volume are those by those of the gaijin, especially those who, like Orestes Destrade...