You Gotta Have Wa Book

"This isn't baseball - it only looks like it," Reggie Smith said after his after his first year with the Yomiuri Giants in 1983. Reggie was right.



Legendary Japanese coach, Suishu Tobita (1886-1965) said much the same thing, though in loftier tones: "The purpose of [baseball] training is not health but the forging of the soul, and a strong soul is only born from strong practice.

To hit like a shooting star, to catch a ball beyond one's capabilities….Such beautiful plays are not the result of technique but the result of good deeds. For all these are made possible by a strong spiritual power.

Student baseball must be the baseball of self-discipline, or trying to attain truth, just as in Zen Buddhism…In many cases it must be a baseball of pain and a baseball practice of savage treatment. Only with the constant cultivation of tears, sweat and bleeding can a player secure his position."

Baseball fans will love this rollicking road trip through the world of besuboru. Whiting has spent much of his life in Japan and clearly loves the game and the country; the insights he shares into Japanese culture and character are as interesting and entertaining as the baseball tales.
Americans played ball. Japanese worked at it. There was nothing mellow or laid back about [Jim Horner's] host. They were unremittingly formal, disciplined, cerebral, and incredibly uptight (at least when they were sober). The standard look was Military Grim. Only in Japan, he discovered, did both company workers and kindergarten students alike take medicine for stress.

In Japan surrendering the first run in a game was considered so psychologically damaging to team mood that defeat was almost inevitable...They talked about pressure as if it were a disease: the pressure of falling behind; the pressure of a one-run lead...

They played the game as if there were no tomorrow, using starting pitchers in relief, pinch-hitting in early innings, and sacrificing bunting at every conceivable opportunity.The Japanese system builds players with a near-superhuman ability to endure pain, which can do more harm than good. Choji Murata was among the many pitchers who subscribed to the Japanese notion that you should pitch till your arm fell off--a hundred pitches in practice, and then even more in the game. He continued to pitch with a ruptured ligament in his elbow for a year and a half!

Said Warren Cromartie about his Japanese baseball experience, "It makes boot camp look like a church social."

Leron Lee played for over 10 years in Japan and holds the Japanese career batting average record (.320) for players with a minimum of 4,000 at-bats. Lee credits the Japanese training regimen with honing his skills: "I did a lot of (batting practice) when I was in the States--a couple of hundred balls a day. But in Japan we were hitting 500 to 700 balls a day," Lee said. "… Over the years, all the practice turned out to be a blessing. It made me a more consistent hitter because my swing was fixed. As the years went by, I realized that kind of spring training was exactly what I should have been doing here in the States." Lee would go on share his knowledge with the Oakland A's as batting coach in 1989--the year the A's claimed their wildly improbable World Series title.

You Gotta Have Wa was written in 1988, a point at which the US-Japanese trade frictions were at a peak, the Japanese economy was booming, and there was plenty of money and national pride to go around.



Since then much has changed. Japan has been in a prolonged economic slump and baseball has suffered economically. More players in Japan are opting to play in America'some even right out of college. These days the best ballplayers from Japan, like Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui and Hideo Nomo, are as good as any players in the MBL.




Even this Red Sox fan has to marvel at these Ichiro moments.

The enthusiasm with which America has welcomed Japanese stars like Ichiro has been something of a balm to Japanese pride and there are encouraging signs that the xenophobia and outright racism described by Whiting in You Gotta Have Wa is less overt these days.

But the tough, even grueling training hasn't altered and probably never will'and for some American transplants, that's a lesson well worth learning.

Content rating PG for crude language--both Japanese and English, and for racial epithets.