Rumble at the Yomiuri Giants and Most (But Definitely Not All) of the Media Goes Bananas

…It’s about time, so why not reboot here…

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You know that anyone who's looking for proof of Japanese media bias need only look at the Yomiuri sports pages and how they basically serve as the baseball powerhouse Yomiuri Giants’ fanzine. (Actually, I welcome media bias because it takes less time to go through them when you more or less know where they are coming from. They also give you media-driven baselines from which to make guesses at how public opinion will be trending, particularly on those rare moments—say, Kim Jong Il's admissions regarding the abductees—when Yomiuri and Asahi angles converge.) Well today, there was an incredible diatribe released by the representative/GM of the Yomiuri Giants (a former Yomiuri reporter proving that not all amakudari’s are necessarily handpuppets), who, if his lengthy statement (full text starts here is to be believed, apparently refused a bribe from powermonger and all-around meddler Tsuneo Watanabe in the form of more power and a promise of eventual elevation to CEO in exchange for going along with Watanabe's lies—not the rep/GMs words, but there’s no other way to put it—around his attempt to overturn Giants personnel decisions to which he had already given consent.

The late afternoon-early evening news broadcasts all appear to be featuring the story prominently—all, that is, except Nippon TV. I’ll give you one guess which media group owns Nippon TV.

But what am I doing watching TV when the rest of the Japanese world is working? Actually, this is relevant to my line of work, as it should spell the end of Watanabe's role as political fixer—anything fixer, really. If Ichiro Ozawa had held any hope that Watanabe could reprise anything like his 2007 role as go-between for an aborted deal between Ozawa and then Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda for a Grand Coalition, it’s gone now. This diminishes the LDP's old guard as well, since Ozawa was their most familiar and likeminded interlocutor. An era is passing, and this incident is part of it.

Let’s see what if literally anything tomorrow’s Yomiuri has to say about this.

It’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T with Shaq

Conventional wisdom has it that the causes of Shaquille O’Neil having a problem with finding a team for the upcoming season other than a chance at another NBA championship are money and playing time. Really? I haven’t exactly seen reports of Shaq declaring bankruptcy anytime soon. And if he can’t secure significant playing time competing against the likes of Miami Heat centers Jamaal Magloire, Zydrunas Ilgauskus, Joel Anthony (who?), and Dexter Pittman (who?)…

As important as if not more so than the material pleasures they bring, money and playing time are measures of your alpha-maleness. In Miami, Shaq would merely be a sideshow to the LeBron-Wade-Bosh AAU All-Star Tour. Boston may not be able to offer the money. And when Kendrick Perkins comes back, his minutes are likely to shrink dramatically, since he cannot slide to the four spot. But the Celtics can offer dignity. Everyone, from the aging future hall-of-famers to the towel waver at the end of the bench (and Brian Scalabrine on the bench) is treated right—by Danny Ainge, Doc, teammates, the fans, the Boston media…

Boston will not shell out the big money, Boston does not offer good prospects for serious playing time. But the Celtics will give its players respect. Speaking as a guy, it makes sense for Shaq.

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I just learned that Shaq is working toward his PhD. Do I hear R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

A Quarter of South Korean Households with TVs Watch Late-Night Japan-Cameroon Match

According to this Kyodo report courtesy of the Japanese tabloid Sponichi, the South Korean equivalent of the Nielsen TV ratings reached 24.1%* for the 14 June Japan-Cameroon game in the World Cup in South Africa—a match that began at 11PM Seoul (and Tokyo) Time. Two questions came to mind: First, what was the percentage of the Japanese TV audience that watched South Korea thrash Greece? Second, what was the percentage of the South Korean audience that rooted for the Japanese side?

That is about as good a snapshot of the asymmetry in the cross-straits relationship as there is.

* It peaked in Tokyo at 49.1%, just before the match eneded.

Legea Is Not Planning to Sell Any Sportswear in Japan Any Time Soon

Oh…kay… Legea has also signed up the Zimbabwean and Iranian national teams as well, according to this Yomiuri report.

So I guess my question is, what do they have that Myanmar doesn’t? Explain it to me, Legea.

Iwakuma Is “as Thin as a Flag Pole”? That Got Me to Wonderin’

The rivalry between Japan and South Korea extends a lot deeper than who scores the most runs in a game. There is still lingering friction between the countries because Japan invaded Korea and officially annexed it in 1910. The Japanese did not leave until after World War II ended in 1945.

Although Japan left more than six decades ago, there are still Koreans who remember those years or who have been told stories about the experience. The countries have a relationship, but it is more a grudging association than a friendly rapport.

Now the Japanese and the South Koreans will have to wait four years before they potentially meet in another Classic. The wait will undoubtedly feel much longer for the South Koreans. But the Japanese will savor every day between now and then because they can call themselves the best in the world. Suzuki made sure of that.

This story implies a symmetry that isn’t there. If you don’t believe me, here’s a thought experiment: Which would have been more satisfying to the average Korean/Japanese fan, beating the Japanese/Korean team for the championship or the U.S. team?

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Incidentally, Iwakuma is listed at 86 kilos, or about 190 pounds, not the “169 pounds” that made “Iwakuma [look] as thin as a flag pole as he stood on the mound.” He’s thin, but no one actually watching the game would have mistaken him for a flagpole, or even Randy Johnson. This is but a small example of the dangers of replacing real journalism with your imagination.

Is an Obama Presidency Good for Japan?

I give it a qualified yes, but I doubt our loveable Governor Ishihara was happy to hear the news.

The Supplementary Budget: Remind Me Not to PUI, and Odds and Ends

I write a Most Likely Budget Scenario where the DPJ rejects the supplementary budget in the Upper House, so of course the next morning, the newspapers announce that the DPJ is going to vote in favor of the supplementary budget. Ichiro Ozawa apparently saw little harm in letting the LDP have their way on a measure that Prime Minister Aso and his people had already discounted as inadequate. Some parts of the media are also reporting that the DPJ is inclined to let the legislative bill to extend the JMSDF refueling operations in the Indian Ocean pass the Lower House quickly, but generally speaking, the media are all over the place on the ultimate outcome of this and other issues, including the timing of the Lower House election. This no doubt reflects the state of play.

Mr. Ozawa has been hospitalized. Given his long-standing health issues, this might have merited an inch on the front page on a slow news day. However, the three Japanese Nobel Prize winners—physics—has wiped everything but the supplementary budget off page one of the Yomiuri. In fact, they have been given five out of the 32-page edition, and that’s not counting the one-sheet extra Yomiuri handed out last night at major train stations. Most of the non-baseball sports news also got wiped out. Totally. I also saw someone with an Asahi extra on the train. We take our Nobel Prizes seriously. What’s it like in your country? Do U.S. winners, for example, receive invitations to the White House, like major team sports champions and Olympic Gold medalists?

But going back to Mr. Ozawa’s illness, this brings up the question hovering in the back of many people’s minds: Will he serve, if elected? Will he turn out to be the Moses of Japanese politics?

The Big Oh Retiring as Softbank Manager…Can WBC Manager Announcement Be Far Behind and Other Thoughts

Sankei is first with the news that Sadaharu Oh has decided to retire after this baseball season. This may be just the answer to Japan’s most recent baseball woes.

Mr. Oh is a national icon In 1977, he became the first recipient of the People’s Honor Award (Kokumin Eiyo Shou) for breaking Hank Aaron’s lifetime home-run record with his 756th home run*. (Where that left Josh Gibson’s even longer if less-well-recorded string of home runs, we Japanese preferred not to dwell on.) Much later in 2006, he led the Japanese national team to the first World Baseball (Instant?) Classic championship and enhanced his already godlike status. In fact, after the Beijing Olympics debacle, where the Japanese team failed to win even a bronze medal against a motley crew of American minor leaguers, he is probably the only man who can lead the Japanese team during the second, 2009 WBC games in the United States and be forgiven in case our team fails to win a medal.

One thing stood between him and a repeat performance: his health. Noticeably frailer from his bout with cancer—now in remission—and battered by family issues, he is in no shape to manage the Softbank Hawks full-time then shoulder the burden of assembling a Japanese WBC squad including some genuine major-league all-stars and taking them half way across the globe under the watchful eyes of an expectant Japanese public to compete against the best that the United States, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic (not to mention those pesky South Koreans and Cubans) have to offer . Leaving the Hawks clears the way for an international farewell tour that would tug at the hearts of the Japanese public and put a capstone on his career and not so coincidentally provide more than a boatload of stories for Yomiuri—he made his reputation as a slugging first baseman for the Yomiuri Giants—and the rest of the Japanese media.

Mr. Oh also happens to be a citizen of the Republic of China/Taiwan/Chinese Taipei. His mother is Japanese, but that was not enough in those days for him to retain Japanese citizenship. For your reference, our first post-WW II national sports hero, the professional wrestler Rikidozan, happened to be a North Korean national. Think about it.

On the other hand, we Japanese don’t really talk about these things. In fact, the public was mostly in the dark about Rikidozan’s nationality. Think about that, too.

* For the record, Mr. Aaron was very gracious with regard to Mr. Oh’s achievement and the Japanese celebration thereof.

Violence in Sports

Janne brought up a couple of interesting points under the more general issue of special treatment of sports under the law in his comment here. I wouldn’t be surprised to find plenty of blogs and websites on both of them created and maintained by professionals. But I don’t have the time to go look around just now. In the meantime, here’s my own two cents’ worth on one of them.

Violence is a formally accepted element of many, but not all, spectator sports: First, there are individual sports* like boxing, wrestling and contact martial arts, where brutal, if not brute, force is the point of it all. Next, there are the various forms of football ranging from American football to soccer, where force is an inevitable element of the game but is not directly connected to the objective of the game itself. Third, there are team sports such as cricket, where physical contact is in principle forbidden. Baseball, though a similar sport in form, probably falls in the second category, since base running can and sometimes does result in violent physical contact. Fourth and finally, there are individual sports where physical contact is in principle forbidden (or unthinkable). The other side of the coin for the sanctioned violence are the forbidden kind that occur in the follow of the game, subject to a variety of penalties, ranging from losing field advantage and/or the ball to suspension (itself ranging from minutes to entire games) to advantageous scoring opportunities (penalty shots). In my view, it is the existence of these penalties and the rules to impose them that internalizes the violence as an accepted element by the parties to the game and gives it de facto immunity from criminal prosecution. Treat them as any other acts of violence, and the sports themselves would become unplayable.

And then there is fighting. Fighting among the players routinely breaks out in professional team sports in North America (though rarely, if ever (if I understand correctly) in soccer). In fact, it’s even part—implicit, true—of the attraction in ice hockey. They are almost always touched off by play action, but are themselves not part of the flow of the game. Indeed, the fights themselves interrupt play. Here again, though, the sports authorities are generally allowed to manage their affairs, usually by way of suspensions and fines, free of criminal prosecution. The players, by submitting to the authority of their respective sports bodies, accept this state of affairs. If this type of violence is accepted by the parties, if only implicitly by way of accepting a set of rules that impose penalties on aggressors, then it is difficult to distinguish it from that which occurs within the flow. More generally, note that the law recognizes a range of acts of violence that results in physical harm when there is consent, such as tattoos, body piercing, and some forms of cosmetic surgery. There is no inherent difference between the consent in these activities and consent, if somewhat implicit, in sports.

Of course de facto immunity does not provide an absolute shield from criminal prosecution. It goes without saying that spectators are not bound by this state of affairs beyond the wayward foul ball or hockey puck. And the authorities do go after particularly egregious cases. North American authorities have sought and won conviction of players committing violent fouls within the flow of the game that resulted in serious injury.

The third category falls somewhere between the second and fourth categories, and so let’s skip it for this post. It does pose an interesting question, but I don’t feel competent to attack it unless I am aware of the case law. (Do cricket players “fight” during matches at all? Is that “cricket”?)

Then there is the fourth category. In tennis, if a fist fight broke out between Roger Federer and Raphael Nadal after a hard-fought match, I am sure that it would be treated like any other fight such as one between, oh, you and me. There is no implicit acceptance of violence here. That does not, of course, mean that it would immediately result in criminal prosecution. The authorities in liberal democracies often will not go after simple assault and battery cases if there is no injury and no one files a criminal complaint. Even if there is some physical harm, they will sometimes let the case go if the victim has settled with the assailant and has agreed not to press charges. It should be no different in tennis, or any other sport in the fourth category. Unfortunately, with John McEnroe long retired, we shall never have the opportunity to know.

* For the purposes of this argument, doubles (think tennis) and series of two-player games (think team tennis) shall not be considered a team sport. Why this should be so deserves to be explored on its own, but I’ll reserve that for another occasion since it requires more thinking than I can afford at this moment.

Baseball, Human Rights, and the Media as a Marketing Tool

While sumo is being inundated by big, athletic Eurasian and East European wrestlers making their bids for big bucks, baseball is seeing its biggest draws plucked away by MLB in the cash-rich, professionally managed U.S. sports market. Either way, Japanese sports are at a crossroads. Here, I take up baseball, where the trickle of Japanese talent started by Hideo Nomo’s one-man rebellion threatens to pass another milestone, from a media watch angle.

Junichi Tazawa is a 22-year old right-hander who currently pitches for the corporate amateur team fielded by Eneos. Although this ESPN report does not give him rave reviews

"His fastball is 88 to 93 [mph]," said a scout for one team who declined to be named. "He has a forkball, a curve, but the command of his fastball is so-so. His lower body is stiff."

he is considered a top prospect in Japan and would be one of the first to go in the first round of the Japanese pro baseball draft. However, ENEOS faxed the twelve professional baseball teams (NPB) with the request that they do not name Mr. Tazaki in the draft since he intends to throw his baseball cap into the U.S. major league baseball draft. This has understandably thrown the NPB, at a substantial cash disadvantage vis-à-vis the U.S. major league baseball (MLB) into a tizzy and the Japanese sports media, including the mainstream dailies, is abuzz with the story. My interest in this issue is mainly in the way it illuminates the role that mainstream dailies play as marketing tools of their non-media holdings.

All the twelve NPB teams have second squads, where the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time mingle with rehabbing veterans and malingering oldsters, but that’s it. There’s no minor league system to speak of*. So high school and college graduates who go undrafted by choice or against their will but want another chance to turn pro (or just to play baseball under a less stressful environment for a few more years) hone their skills in one of the corporate amateur teams, which give their corporate patrons cheap publicity when tournament season rolls around, as well as serve as a focal point for company solidarity for their regular employees. It is also good for community relations. The corporate amateur teams are nowhere near as popular s they used to be, and their ranks have been diminished by corporate cutbacks during the fallow, post-bubble-economy years. But there still is plenty of room there for athletes like Mr. Tazawa who bide their time before attempting that leap to the next level.

The next level, until now, had always been the NPB. True, there have been exceptions, such as Mac Suzuki, who dropped out of high school to join the U.S. minors and eventually had a brief, journeyman sort of career in the majors. But MLB, in the interests of international comity, respect the Japanese draft and will only go after undrafted amateurs, and Mac was just such a one. Until now.

Of course a Japanese team can draft Mr. Tazawa regardless, but its negotiation rights will expire in a year, so it is likely to end up having wasted its own top draft pick just to make a point for NPB. Barring unforeseen events, Mr. Tazawa will wind up in the 30-team MLB draft, if not as a top-ten pick, surely somewhere in the first two or three rounds. MLB is surely at another level, if the drop-off in the performance of Japanese superstar crossovers like the two Matsuis, Hideki and Kazuo, Tadahito Iguchi, and even the magnificent Ichiro (Suzuki) are any indication. Still, these and lesser players with the right tools have shown that Japanese player can hold their own with hungry Latin American and other more exotic imports to the majors.

Yes, the Japanese pro leagues may suffer if this opens a floodgate. But hey, the Japanese Constitution that says, “Every person shall have freedom… to choose his occupation to the extent that it does not interfere with the public welfare [and that the] [f]reedom of all persons to move to a foreign country… shall be inviolate”, right? Well, it depends on which newspaper you read.

A Mainichi reporter goes to bat for Japanese (professional) baseball. The headline itself is telling:

Tazawa’s Major League Challenge: Urgent Need for New Rules

The report quotes a top baseball executive:

Masatake Yamanaka, a managing director at Yokohama points out, “Each country should have priority rights (to get [the players]).”

The article concludes:

If “it is difficult to legally bind the United States by the agreement between Japanese professional baseball and its amateur counterparts” (Hidetoshi Kiyotake; Yomiuri Giants representative), then “there is no alternative but to hurry and establish new rules between the Japanese and American professional [leagues].”

If you’re wondering where the media’s well-established concern for human rights have gone, don’t go looking for it at Asahi. Asahi appears to be taking a detached, just-the-facts-ma’am approach to the issue, here and here.”

Look no further than the liberals’ bugbear Sankei Shinbun to find the most balanced coverage of all, where this typical article talks not unsympathetically about the difficulties that this turn of events poses for NPB, but points out that “from the point of view of the ‘freedom to choose one’s occupation’ there is no way that the NPB can stop this’”. It also cites a claim from Yomiuri Giants representative Hidetake Kiyotake that “Japan has its hands tied and MLB is free [to contact prospects and pay draftees whatever they want to]. It’s unfair.” The article concludes that “[a]lthough it is undesirable to create rules that bind payers to Japan, there is a need to coordinate with amateur baseball and put Japanese and American baseball on an equal footing.”

Yomiuri shows little if any of the heavy-handed boosterism and editorializing that permeates its usual baseball reporting. True, Takuo Takihana, the Yomiuri Giants “owner (surrogate for parent company)” is seen in this Sankei article as being pissed off at Mr. Tazawa for having the gall to tell NPB not to draft him. But Yomiuri itself has been taking it relatively calmly, here, here (a Tazawa interview transcript!), and here.

The media outlets’ respective relationships with NPB shed some light on these different reporting angles that they have adopted with regard to Tazaki’s prospective defection to America.

There’s a reason why Yomiuri insists on an equal footing with MLB but little else. This has nothing to do with human rights and much to do with the fortunes of the corporate jewels, the Yomiuri Giants. The Giants are the one true national institution in Japanese professional baseball. Every baseball fan in Japan is either pro- or anti-Giants fan, and even a greater proportion of baseball players would love nothing more than to play for the Giants. If the Giants had their druthers, the draft would be abolished, leaving it to pick off the cream of the crop, with all the cash, public acclaim, and air time (TV loves the Giants) at its disposal to lure top prospects and free agents to its clubhouse or force desirable trades on its competitors. It also wants to be on the good side of MLB; it has cornered the market on MLB exhibition games in Japan, many of which are played against… you guessed it, the Yomiuri Giants.

Mainichi’s stance appears to have a business motive as well. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember the Seibu Group playing a crucial role in the 1070s Mainichi bailout, and that this led to a special relationship with the baseball team Lions, when the Seibu Group later purchased it from its previous, ailing corporate owner. The Lions have seen many fat years on the baseball diamond, but unfortunately belongs to the poorer Pacific League.

Asahi can play it cool because it doesn’t have a baseball team to push. Sankei doesn’t have a stake in pro baseball either. Both these dailies are part of media groups that have an interest in broadcasting Japanese baseball games. But with the Yomiuri group’s Nippon TV claiming dibs on the cash cow Giants, there’s much less incentive for these two dailies to report it as anything other than just another baseball story.

All but lost in all this, except with Sankei, is the human rights angle. I stand ready to be corrected.

Michael Phelps’ Feat Exposes Structural Flaw in Composition of Olympic ™ Events

I don’t understand the attention given to Michael Phelps’s eight gold medals. The feat only highlights a serious flaw in the composition of speed swimming events in the Olympics ™, the fact that the crawl and butterfly (as well as the backstroke) are so dominated by a single factor—namely the idiosyncratic hydrodynamic characteristics of the individual human body—that one athlete close to the human ideal in that one aspect can dominate across all the disciplines in all their distances. It’s like rewarding superior twitch-muscle endowment among competitive runners by having gold medal competitions for 100, 120, 140, 160, 180 and 200 meters.

My guess is that it all began in the early days of the modern Olympics ™, when they had to find a way to balance the number of track and field medal on one hand and that for natatory events on the other.

Sports: Two Round Balls, Here and There

Japanese soccer teams (and their fans) keep cleaning up on Fair Play Awards. Now if only they could trade up…

But wait, the women’s team won both. Granted, it’s an East Asia (de facto) four-nation tournament. Still, it counts. And the Urawa Reds won both in the Asia Championship League (yes, there is such a thing). Let's hope that this is a trend.

The Celtics have hit a rough patch. Even on the road, they have shown that they can handle second, third-tier teams. But the Best of the West are on another level. I hope that this is only a temporary hitch, as everyone readjusts to life with Kevin Garnett.

On the Sports Scene in the JMSM…

Cosplay rules the Tokyo Marathon, while third-place Miki Andō is the people’s choice in the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships. The bootylicious Ms. Andō (imagine Tonya Harding, albeit more Japanesy, without the crowbar) in jet-black short shorts and fishnet tights from the exhibition skate-offs is prominently featured in the photo accompanying the article, which currently ranks no.1 in popularity on the Sankei website. Plenty of other short shorts/ fishnet tights photos are also plastered on the webpage*. Maio Asada may have won the real event, but she barely rates mention in the article and just one two-shot portrait, with Ms. Andō, naturally. Daisuké Takahashi, the Japanese winner of the men’s program, fares even worse.

Japanese media groups routinely stage sports and other events and promote them through their commercial outlets. The Yomiuri sports pages, for example, reads like a Yomiuri Giants fanzine. The media can be a harsh taskmaster as well. The rapid deterioration of the Yomiuri-to-Kawasaki-to-Tokyo Verdy soccer team is directly traceable to the Yomiuri family’s decision to drop the team when the J-League did not allow them to use it as a promotional vehicle for their commercial interests.

The Fuji-Sankei Group is no exception. In this particular case, Fuji TV, the crown jewels of the Fuji-Sankei multimedia group, held Japanese broadcasting rights to the Four Continents 2008, staged in Seoul, South Korea. Yomiuri did cover the competition itself, but ignored the exhibition altogether as a non-event, which, for them, it was exactly that.

* The (mostly) Andō photos are currently ranked nos.1 through 9 among the most popular images on the Sankei website.

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Seriously, I can’t help repeating: Sankei has hands-down the most reader-friendly media website in Japan. In fact, with all the accompanying visual bells and whistles, it’s better than its hardcopy version. I don’t understand how this is driving revenue, though I suppose fourth-place Sankei has less to lose. Still, I’d like to see how Asahi, Yomiuri and Mainichi respond (or not). They’d better hurry up; are they trying to make a Japaneo-con out of me or what?

Dangnabbit, You Dastardly (South) Koreans!

Turning to sports, to stop the replay of the Asia handball qualification finals for the Beijing Olympics, Sheikh Ahmed Al Fahad Al Sabah, the Kuwaiti President of the Asia Handball Federation, tried to bribe Japan with support for the Tokyo bid for the 2016 Olympics, but Japan has gone ahead with it anyway. The muslim countries that had played in the original qualification finals that were canceled by the International Handball Federation are boycotting the replay, so it's being played between Japan and South Korea in Tokyo.

Now that’s thirty Middle East votes out the window right off the bat for Governor Ishihara's* Olympics bid. Since both the men and women’s South Korean handball teams are a notch above the Japanese teams, in effect, the Japanese world of sports is taking a huge hit for South Korea's sake. This must have been a factor when the South Koreans decided to intiate the challenge.

So South Korea, you owe us one. And what do you do?

This. Isn’t. Fair. I mean, how could you expect us to root for the home team against this?

You want home court advantage, pay for home court advantage. Sheesh.

* Our Governor Who Can Say No must be thinking, So much for the 9 billion dollars to pay for the Gulf War. Next time, Kuwait, don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Ichirō Ozawa: Trickster and Guy Thing

Kankichi Ryōzu, Ryō-san to his friends, is hands-down the worst policeman in Japan. For Ryō-san is a selfish, stupid scofflaw and egomaniac, whose every scheme that he hatches on a near-weekly basis* (while lurking in the Kameari Kōen-mae mini-police station where he has been permanently exiled) seems to end in mayhem and chaos, harming everything and everyone in the process.

Ryō-san is also the most popular policeman in Japan. In fact, he is so popular that not only has his antics adorned the pages of Shūkan Shōnen Jumpu (literally, Weekly Boys’ Jump; the Microsoft of manga comic books) uninterrupted since his first guest appearance in its 1976 June 22 edition and subsequent appearance three months later as a regular feature, he has been honored by two life-size bronze statues of him at the JP Kameari Station near his fictitious mini-station, and a group of best-selling novelists got together to celebrate Ryō-san’s 30th year in print by producing an anthology featuring Ryō-san and their own highly popular characters together. And these are just a few of the many ways that his multitude of admirers has chosen to honor him.

Now, Ryō-san is not without some redeeming traits. For one thing, he loves kids. In a way, he is a kid himself. He’s also a sucker for sad sack stories, though his help often winds up being worse than the problem. In fact, it’s probably his saving grace that his schemes almost always fall through. Oh, and one more thing. Ryō-san will say he’s sorry under pain of death, but for not much else. Does that sound familiar?

Kazuhiro Kiyohara is a blockhead. In the straight-laced (some will say hypocritical) world of pro baseball in Japan, the often-boorish Mr. Kiyohara is the guy who stretches the rules till they snap, shows up on game day with a hangover, picks fights with the coaching staff, and lords it over his lesser teammates. Though more successful in his chosen profession than Ryō-san in his, he has never realized the enormous potential he showed straight out of high school, winning Rookie-of-the-Year honors as a .304-31 slugger and third baseman with a cannon-arm; and at age 40, injury-riddled and long past his physical prime, he never will.

Yet teams are still willing to pay him millions (dollars, not yen) to make him come and play for them, or at least DH. For Mr. Kiyohara was and still is one of the most popular baseball players in Japan, one of the biggest draws for just showing up, especially now that the best players (and not a few lesser players) routinely leave in their prime for the Major Leagues, with their bigger stadiums and bigger bucks. The colorful Kiyohara is Japan’s answer to Jose Canseco, a Bizarro Nagashima** if you will.So it will be a sad and sobering day when he leaves the ballpark for good. The weeklies and “sports” dailies will be sorry to see him go too, when he takes his bagful of tabloid fodder and fades into the background.

And we love these tricksters. Ryō-san is an extreme case, but manga heroes (the male heroes anyway) usually follow the same pattern. They are outsiders, rogues, misfits. They don’t need the mainstream alter egos of a Superman or Spiderman, the Amecomi superheroes; they are just being themselves, one-face-fits all characters. And even as the media heap scorn on a Kiyohara, the salaryman, the shop attendant, all of Japanese guy nation seeks vicarious glory in his antics c’mon, you can get away with it, one more time. (Yes, he aims to please.) It's a guy issue, really..

This is nothing new. In fact, an entire genre of classical theater, the Kyōgen, grew up around Tarō Kaja, a non-lethal Loki character if ever there was one. We’ve got to be free, and admire those that are.

Ichirō Ozawa is the Loki of Japanese politics. He was never so Ozawa as when he yet again snubbed his nose at pleas from his domesticated deputy Yukio Hatoyama, for an apology for his absence from the anti-terror bill revote, and the entire media, tabloid and non-. It can be no coincidence that the DPJ polls better among men than women.

Mr. Ozawa being who he is also renewed his pledge to put his career on the line on beating the LDP in the next Lower House election. To that end, he has led the DPJ away from the tightwad fiscal policies of the wonks and has steered it towards a strategy that aims to beat the LDP at their own (bribe them with their money) game. Barring a couple of LDP disasters, though, I’ll be highly surprised if the DPJ gains more seats than the LDP*** (let alone the coalition as a whole). And I’ll be sorry then, because we’ll see the most compelling political figure of our times leaving center stage.


* the Kochikame has featured the same main characters, including superheel Ryō-san, over the years, and the stories usually end with that issue, the longest story arcs lasting a few weeks at most. This contrasts starkly with most other long-running manga such as Dragonball or JoJo Bizarre Adventure. It is more reminiscent of the four-frame daily comic strips than the usual long-running manga. Gorgo 13 offers a parallel of sorts.


** Shigeo Nagashima has always been more popular than the more successful (baseball-wise － he was also the first recipient of the Kokumin Eiyo Shō, or People’s Honor Award) Sadaharu Oh. Although the fact that Mr. Oh is not a Japanese citizen probably has figured in this, it is clear that Mr. Nagashima’s exuberance and glamour (college baseball star, beautiful, accomplished wife, the ability to make the simplest plays look difficult, etc.) and spontaneity on the field in contrast to Mr. Oh’s staid, often dour demeanor and no-pain, no –gain approach to the game were by far the biggeest reason for the popularity gap. You respected Oh; you loved Nagashima.

*** I’ve written about this before, and I would be happy to take a bet, where the loser shaves his head. A bald guy must wear a wig for the time it would take his hypothetical hair to grow back.

Fragmentation in a Global Society as Seen through the Eyes of a Soccer Near-Great

The great paradox of the world today is that as individuals transfer more of their social, economic and cultural identities from sovereign states to a trans-statal community with increasingly permeable borders populated by para-statal institutions of public and (increasingly) private origins, the same individuals use the Internet, telecommunications and other contemporary media to coalesce in smaller, intimate, (often) largely virtual communities. Globalization and fragmentation go hand in hand.

No, that doesn’t sound right. In fact, it sounds awful. I think that I should be talking about the Evangelion community and neo-Nazi websites and Daily Kos and Rush Limbaugh and what have you. But I don’t have the time or energy to do it. So I’ll just link to the this article on Brazilian soccer players, which started me on this jag a week ago.

Random Firings of the Synapses on the New Fukuda Cabinet, Factions, Reformist Prime Ministers and Stuff

Got a long email from Mentor, gave a shorter response. Lightly edited and excised of personal stuff, here it is:

- Yasuo Fukuda takes over from Shinzo Abe, and there's only one new face in the cabinet. Is there anything that better symbolizes the LDP? Shoichi Nakagawa could take over one year from now and, if he could stay away from the Yasukuni Shrine, I don't think we'd notice the difference.

- habatsu; or, faction: a Japanese sport, played mainly by LDP men. Most cognoscenti of the sport consider the heydays of the SanKakuDaiFuku League the Golden Age of competitive, full-contact habatsu, when the weakest teams usually had at least one superstar and a legitimate chance to win it all.

Contemporary habatsu is an intramural-recreation game. After the game is over, all the players on all the teams get together and throw a big karaoke party. What can I say, it serves a useful objective. If nothing else, it proves that man is a social animal.

The DPJ plays a more primitive, freestyle game, but the objectives seem to be converging. The DPJ players want a big fat karaoke party of their own, and are beginning to smell the fried chicken and beer.

The problem is, there's only one karaoke set, and the LDP and DPJ are now too big to fit into the one karaoke room at the same time. This, I think, is a variety of the two-party political system that allows small floaters to play both sides of the game. Let's call it, meta-habatsu.

Sorry, that's about all I can say now on habatsu. I'll see if I can come up with some meaningful thoughts on dissenters and discontents, and their effect on team cohesion.

- I've long believed that Ryutaro Hashimoto has been underrated. In terms of potential, I rank him up there with Yasuhiro Nakasone. And I'm not saying that because he came to love METI. But that's what happens when you lose. Twice. People think of Noboru Takeshita as a pol of pols. But he got the consumption tax done. Gave me hope for the entire LDP with that too.

A true reformer would have to overhaul the entire FILP from head to tail, and that means that he has to redo the Post Office thing. As for the highways – Junichiro Koizumi really botched that one; maybe he was no better than that – Mr. Fukuda has said stuff that suggests, hints, that he'll backtrack on that. Politically, it would make at least as much sense as throwing money at 90-year old small-plot farmers; as statecraft, it would leave something to be desired. But let's keep hoping.

Updates on Media Treatment of the High School "Payoff" Scandal and Prime Minister Abe's "Masakaki"

Shukan Shincho and Shukan Bunshun, two popular weekly magazines, are slamming the Japan High School Baseball Federation for its crackdown on the widespread practice of giving scholarships and other incentives to high school varsity baseball players in their May 17 issues with multi-article features.

In Shukan Shincho, "Stupid Idiots JHSBF" shares top billing with "The White House Astounded by 'Wrongheaded Akki' [the media's nickname for Prime Minister Abe's wife] Running Amok". (No, Shukan Shincho is one of the more reputable weeklies.) Shukan Bunshun leads with "The Rasputin Who Lopped the Heads off '8000 Scholarship Students'"; the theme of the feature is "The Interest Groups that Feed off Koshien". (Koshien is where they hold the two national high school baseball tournaments). Interestingly, both launch broadsides against Asahi Shinbun, Shukan Shincho with "The 'Director of the Sports Department at Asahi' Who Wrote an 'Article in Defense [of JHSBF]' Is a JHSBF Board Member", and "Shukan Bunshun with "Asahi Reporter Writes a Suck-Up Article: Actually a JHSBF Board Member" and "The Root of All Evil Was Asahi Shinbun's Claim that Baseball Was Harmful". (You may or may not be aware that early in the 20th Century Asahi Shinbun ran a huge campaign against baseball before it made a turnaround and not coincidentally inaugurated the summer version of the two main high school baseball tournaments that have become the staple of the Japanese sports calendar. You also may or may not have noticed that the Japanese media loves quotation marks.)

Shukan Shincho and Shukan Bunshun are general interest weeklies published by Shinchosha and Bungeishunju respectively, both venerable, major publishing houses. They land somewhere between the sedate, boring magazines published by newspaper companies that you typically find lying around in bank lobbies and the racy, bloodcurdling scandalmongers that rely heavily on photos of young females in states of extreme undress.

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What really matters politically with Prime Minister Abe's offering to the Yasukuni is, of course, how Beijing reacts. So, here's a translation of a Yomiuri article, since it looks too small to make it into the English version.

"China Expresses Concern While Avoiding Direct Criticism

"Concerning the fact that Prime Minister Abe had made an offering of 50,000 Yen at the annual spring festival at Yasukuni in late April, China's Foreign Ministry Deputy Spokesperson Jiang Yu on 8 May, after mentioning that "the Yasukuni issue is a serious and politically sensitive problem", stated that "both China and Japan already agreed to overcome the political obstacles that affect the bilateral relationship and promote the development of a healthy cooperative relationship. This common understanding should be protected appropriately," thus expressing concern while avoiding direct criticism.

"China would like to continue to put the mutual visits such as [another] trip to China by Prime Minister Abe to China and a trip to Japan by President Hu Jintao on a steady course. It seems that this day's statement by the deputy spokesperson reflects the feeling that they do not want to have the improving trend of the Japan-China relationship to be affected."

Let's hope, for China's sake as well, that Mr. Abe knows what he is doing. I'm sure Mr. Hu does, since China is the grandmaster of this thrust-and-parry mating game.

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Hey, even a broken clock gets it right twice a day.

Japan: The Newspaper War behind the High School Baseball Scholarship Fiasco

Needs a lot of editing. But life is waiting for me out there. With behind-schedule work. Corrections welcome.

Perks rampant for high school ballplayers, accuses the English language Yomiuri headline. Too bad for those of you who can't read the Japanese version of the high school baseball scholarship fiasco. There, you can see that this is the biggest sports story in Japan, except for (for the Yomiuri) the daily exploits of the Yomiuri Giants baseball team. Moreover, the Japanese language articles are highly sympathetic to the students and schools, and mostly blame the High School Baseball Association for the fiasco and urge it to reconsider its crackdown on the violators. They also point out that the board has punished the schools and the unwitting students, but has decided not to assess any sanctions on any of the national leadership, including the chairman.

The Yomiuri's anger is understandable, since (as the linked Japanese language article points out) these and other high school schools also have similar "perks", typically tuition waivers and, where necessary, free room and board, for every other sport of significance, at least to the school concerned. In some cases, the amateur associations works closely with selected high schools (and middle schools) to train and educate elite athletes in the hopes that they would go on to win world championships and Olympic medals. Professional soccer has practically adopted the varsity soccer system alongside their own youth teams, and high school players can be allowed to play for their schools and professional teams simultaneously, with no obligation to go on to play for the same teams when they graduate. All this with the blessing of the Japan Football Association.

High school baseball's Avery Brundage amateurism extends to appearance. A strict code, epitomized by the uniformly shaved heads, metaphorically puts baseball in another era altogether.

Why, then, should baseball be any different? In the first place, unlike the rest of high school sports, which come under the umbrella of the All Japan High School Athletic Federation, baseball is ruled by the autonomous Japan High School Baseball Federation.

JHSBF has 30-35 directors on its board, who are supposed to be elected by the board of councilors. (The JHSBF website says 17 have been elected by the board of councilors, 7 have been elected regionally, and 4 have been "nominated/designated" by the chairman. The chairman and the 4 vice-chairmen are also supposed to be board members, but JHSBF does not mention who elected them. It seems at first glance that the JHSBF is in violation of its own by-laws, but is likely merely reality poking its head out of the façade.) The councilors consist of one nominee each from the 47 prefectural high school baseball associations, up to 33 (currently 32) elected by the board of directors, and up to 10 (currently 9) elected by the chairman. So, once a chairman has gained control of the board of directors, it would take a near-unanimous uprising on the part of the prefectural associations on the board of councilors for anything to even begin to happen against the wishes of the chairman and his allies. (It requires a 2/3 supermajority in both boards to terminate a director before his two-year term is up.)

And JHSBF has an ace up its sleeve. Two, actually. The arrival of Daisuke Matsuzaka, former high school baseball superstar, for the Red Sox has alerted American baseball fans to the incredible popularity of high school baseball in Japan. Indeed the two high school tournaments, one in early spring and the other in early summer, are the cash cows of JHSBF and the source of its stranglehold on high school baseball. For those of you over there, think the Final Four drama being played out all day and into the night, every day, to a standing-room-only crowd of 55,000 and a national TV audience, for a whole week. Twice a year. And one is sponsored by the Asahi, and other by the smaller national daily Mainichi. In contrast, the otherwise almighty Yomiuri does not have a tournament of its own. Even more galling to Yomiuri is the fact that the tournaments are so popular, it has no choice but to give them extensive daily coverage on the sports pages and even some ink on the front page. This is in stark contrast to the ironclad editorial control it exercises in professional baseball in favor of the Yomiuri Giants. In fact, my guess is that the Giants, the first professional baseball team in Japan, was started at least in part to counteract its two main media rivals' influence over amateur baseball. (Mainichi also sponsors the once-popular, annual corporate "amateur" tournament.)

So, what does Asahi have to say for it? Good question. It has a special web page that lets you browse all its articles on the fiasco, an improvement on the Yomiuri portal, but still only in Japanese. Asahi does write about the dismay of the schools and students affected. But it comes nowhere near the virtual campaign that Yomiuri is waging against the JHSBF anachronism, nor does it take the JHSBF leadership to task for letting things slide since it cracked down on scholarships in 2005, then only waking up to the problem after a scandal over under-the-table payments from professional baseball teams to amateurs and their handlers surfaced. Go figure.

So, armed with its control over the two tournaments and influence over all levels of governance, the JHSBF leadership has been able to continue to impose a worldview that was outdated many decades ago. It remains to be seen if Yomiuri will be able to force it to come out of its time capsule.

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This leaves us with a minor question: If Yomiuri is so eager to slam the Asahi-Mainichi/JHSBF High school baseball cabal, why the Perks rampant for high school ballplayers headline? Well, the use of the term "ballplayer" and not "baseball player" is a dead giveaway that the translator/editor is an American. The US sports media teems with high school basketball stories about money and all sorts of goodies going to star players and the people around them, as well as the school hopping in search of fame and hopefully fortune. Thus, he instinctively went for the angle that he was familiar with.

At least that's my reading.