You Gotta Have Wa, by Robert Whiting, is an examination of baseball in Japan, and the difficulties that American players playing in Japan faced during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Published in 1989, You Gotta Have Wa is funny, insightful, and a great book about baseball.
I owned You Gotta Have Wa when I was a kid (my parents were very kind in indulging my passion for the Japanese concept of tsundoku from an early age) and I definitely flipped through the photo section, but I didn’t read it at the time. Don't worry, I read plenty of inappropriate books that were baseball related when I was too young. I still remember reading Billy Martin's description of losing his virginity in his 1980 autobiography Number One, and how he was screwing this woman in her belly button. I was thoroughly confused by that.
During the 1980’s, when I was growing up, there wasn’t much cross-pollination between American baseball and Japanese baseball. It was really a one-way street: American players would go to Japan when they couldn’t play in the United States anymore, but Japanese players didn’t play in the U.S.
Masanori Murakami was the first Asian player to play in the U.S. major leagues. A relief pitcher, Murakami appeared in 54 MLB games for the San Francisco Giants in 1964 and 1965. Murakami had success in MLB, crafting a 5-1 record with 9 saves and a 3.43 ERA. He also fanned 100 batters in only 89 1/3 innings. But after the 1965 season, the Murakami experiment came to an end. The 1967 United States-Japanese Player Contract Agreement meant that MLB would not interfere with players in Nippon Professional Baseball. And that’s how it remained for the next 28 years, until Hideo Nomo made his MLB debut for the Dodgers in 1995.
One of the big events of my baseball youth related to Japan was Cecil Fielder's success. He played for the Hanshin Tigers in 1989, then returned to the US with the Detroit Tigers and had a monster season in 1990, slugging 51 home runs. This put renewed attention on Japanese baseball in the United States. To have an American player become a star after playing in Japan was different from the usual trajectory.
I was a passionate baseball fan, but I didn’t know that much about Japanese baseball. I knew about Sadaharu Oh, and his 868 home runs, a record that seems unbreakable, as no one in Japan or the U.S. has come within 100 home runs of Oh’s total. And I remember reading in Sports Illustrated about how Yutaka Fukumoto had 1,065 stolen bases, which was more than anyone in the U.S. had stolen at that time. (Rickey Henderson eventually surpassed Fukumoto’s total.) But beyond these records, I didn’t know much about Japanese players.
There was a certain amount of cultural snobbery/racism in how most people thought of Japanese baseball compared to American baseball. They don't play as many games, the fences are shorter, and the pitching isn't as good. This was also comparable to how Japan and Japanese goods were generally viewed in the US in the post-war period: as cheap imitations. Eventually, this changed. The 1980's were a decade in which I think the US/Japan relationship changed a good deal. Japanese goods were starting to become more and more desirable, as consumers realized they were just as good, if not superior, to American products. For example, from 1980 to 1989, Japanese cars grew from 17.7% to 28% of all US auto sales.
My parents are a great case study in how they embraced foreign cars, and Japanese cars specifically. Prior to 1973, they had always owned domestic cars. Then along came the oil crisis. At the time, my parents owned a Ford Maverick and a Mercury Cougar. By 1976, they owned a Datsun B210 and a Saab 99. They've never bought an American car since then.
The Japanese economy was booming in the 1980's, and there was a sense of economic competition between the countries. I remember when people were nervous about Japanese investors owning so much land in Manhattan. The statistic I remember being bandied about at the time was that the Japanese owned half of Manhattan. Thanks to Google, I now know the true percentage was less than 10%, but for whatever reason this misperception was out there, and trickled down enough for a 9-year-old kid like me to hear about it. In 1989 Mitsubishi bought an 80% controlling stake in Rockefeller Center, which most likely inspired stories and set off this panic about a Japanese land grab. All of this panic became moot when the Japanese economic bubble burst in 1990.
These are all digressions from U.S. baseball players in Japan, but it's all part of the cultural moment that was happening in the 1980's, and my memories of what I knew of Japan as a kid. You Gotta Have Wa is a very entertaining read, and I learned something new on every page of the book. The first chapter recounts the story of Bob Horner, who played in Japan in 1987. Horner had been a star in the U.S. for the Atlanta Braves, and he even hit 4 home runs in a game in 1986, becoming just the 11th player to ever accomplish this feat. Horner was a free agent after the 1986 season, and when no MLB teams came to him with offers, he signed with the Yakult Swallows. As we later learned, the reason no MLB team was willing to sign Horner was because all of the owners were colluding to not sign free agents an in effort to depress player salaries.
Horner coming to Japan was a big deal. He was not a washed-up star trying to stretch out his playing career. He was a bona fide American star who was in the prime of his career—he was 29 years old when he signed with Yakult. Horner was treated like a deity when he first arrived in Japan, and his every move was documented by the Japanese press with a fervency usually reserved for pop stars or heads of state. Yakult expected Horner to hit 50 home runs, even issuing him the uniform number 50. Inevitably, Horner fever cooled, and he finished the season with 31 home runs. Not bad, but not close to 50 home runs.
Novelist Haruki Murakami's favorite baseball team is the Yakult Swallows. I don't know what Murakami thought about Bob Horner, but I'm sure he could write a great short story about a chunky, blonde American third baseman coming over to Japan to play for the Yakult Swallows and igniting a fever throughout Japan.
Speaking of Murakami, I was delighted that there was a page in You Gotta Have Wa about the experience that Dave Hilton had playing in Japan. As Murakami fans know, it was when Dave Hilton hit a double in a game for the Yakult Swallows in 1978 that Murakami thought "What if I wrote a novel?" Modern literature fans owe a great deal to Dave Hilton for inspiring such an important literary career. Hilton had great success in 1978, his first season in Japan, but struggled in 1979, as he had to deal with the almost impossible standards the Japanese had for American players.
Whiting does an excellent job of detailing the differences between Japanese and U.S. training. In Japan, great emphasis is placed on repetition. In 1984, at the age of 38, infielder Koichi Tabuchi "capped off a day of workouts in spring camp by fielding nine hundred consecutive ground balls. It took two hours and fifty minutes before he slumped to the ground, unable to get up. Americans generally consider such training valueless." (p.65) Writer Kennichi Ishida explained the purpose behind such drills: "These drills are primarily mental. Yes, they do wear a player out, but that is necessary in order to develop his spirit. Athletics are essentially an act of will. You can always do more than you think you are capable of." (p.65)
While American society places a great deal of importance on the individual, one of the key credos of Japan is "The Nail That Sticks Up Shall Be Hammered Down." (p.70) Quite a difference. And of course, the American players stood out, since at the time there was a rule that there could only be 2 non-Japanese players on a team. (That has since been changed to 4 non-Japanese players.)
Japanese fans take their baseball seriously, as evidenced by the Seibu Lions song "Lion on the Horizon." Here's a sample of the lyrics:
"The sun rises, the wind blows hot, the sky burns.
The Lion runs on the horizon.
Fierce, brave, beautiful;
His flying mane leaves the trail of a rainbow.
Ahhh...Lions, Lions, Lions." (p.115)
I would love to hear a fan song that was so entertaining sung in a U.S. baseball stadium.
Siblings Leron and Leon Lee were emblematic of the way U.S. players were treated in Japan during the 1970's and 1980's. Both Lee brothers became star players in Japan, but they were never fully embraced by the Japanese media or by Japanese fans. Leron Lee recounted how "a Tokyo advertising executive told Lee flatly that the Japanese did not want black role models...In all his years in Japan, Lee had no commercial endorsements." (p.266) And this was a player who at the time had the highest lifetime batting average in Japan.
If you're a baseball fan, you need to read You Gotta Have Wa. It's fun, entertaining, and very informative.
