Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introducing Hanshin Tigers Baseball
"Sports is the toy department of human life," quipped the famous New York City sportswriter Jimmy Cannon (Popick 2012). They are entertaining breaks from the struggles of everyday demands and from the serious business of politics and the economy. Sports are games, and we play them and watch them for fun and relaxation.
We scholars seem to have taken Cannon's remark at face value, judging from how little attention we have paid to sports as an object of study. Perhaps we have failed to notice how firmly his tongue was planted in his cheek. Sports are fun, sports are games, but sports are far more than fun and games, as Cannon and much of the rest of the world have realized for a long time.
Most of the organized sports we play today took their present form in the nineteenth century, and they have shaped and reflected our modern life for 150 years. Sports are big business and patriotic pursuits. They have profoundly influenced our mass media;, our science; our daily language; and our feelings about equality, race, gender, conflict, and character. Sports as activities range from our own daily workouts at the neighborhood gym or friendly matches at the local tennis court to the world's largest gatherings of humanity at the quadrennial Olympics. They are at the heart of what it means to be modern.
Cannon chose an insightful metaphor of sports as life's toy store because just as a toy store is a serious business that indulges our fancy for playthings, sports are profound anomalies. They are serious fun — pleasurable recreation that can require hard work ("going for the burn" in aerobics, "hitting the wall" in running a marathon, or "maxing out" on a skateboard). Sports are intensely physical activities that also demand mental focus, emotional commitment, and spiritual drive. And professional sports present the starkest contradiction of all: playing for pay seems to violate our cherished distinction between paid labor and leisure play. More than a century of debate about sports and amateurism testifies to our unease about the propriety of professional sports.
This is certainly true for Japan, where one sport — baseball — has been the center of the national sportscape throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. As the premier sport in secondary schools, baseball has been the model for adolescent masculinity. As a staple of media promotion and in huge stadiums of urban leisure, baseball has been among the most popular forms of metropolitan entertainment. As Japan's dominant professional team sport, it has been a template for corporate organization. As a league sport of local teams, it has been a vehicle for regional loyalties and rivalries. And with its imagery of samurai with bats, baseball has fostered a continuing sports nationalism in US-Japanese relations. This book explores the forms of baseball in modern Japan and how and why the sport has held such a central place in the society.
It does so by focusing on the world of a single professional team, the Hanshin Tigers, whose features and fortunes reveal much about baseball in modern Japanese society. For the last half century, the Hanshin Tigers have been the second most popular professional baseball team in Japan. They are based on the edge of the country's second-largest city, Osaka, and over those decades, their rivalry with the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, the most powerful and popular team in Japan, has carried the frustrations of regional subordination to the national center. The team's corporate owner has been a small parent company that has constantly intruded in team and front office affairs. The team has had the added pressure of playing on the "sacred ground" of Koshien Stadium, revered throughout Japan as the permanent site of the annual national high school baseball tournaments (see figure 1). The Tigers have long been scrutinized by a voracious, local sports media, even more than the home press attention to the sports teams of New York, Boston, Barcelona, and other passionate sports cities. The team is followed rabidly by organized, independent fan club associations, which rock the stadium at every home game, and by knowledgeable and concerned fans across the Kansai region.
The Tigers' popularity, however, has not been based on strength and success. In over a half century, from 1950 to 2003, they won only three Central League championships and but a single Japan Series. Most painfully, in the twenty years from 1983 to 2003, they finished in last place ten times and only managed a winning record three times in those two decades. It was in spite of — and in no small way, because of — five decades of loss, frustration, and perennial infighting that they remained the overwhelming sentimental favorite in the Kansai region. This book analyzes the Hanshin Tigers baseball world and offers an account of why it is so compelling and instructive.
This was not quite the book that I thought I would write when I set out on this research back in 1996, over twenty years ago. I knew then that baseball was crucial to understanding the social and cultural significance of sports in modern Japan, and I thought it was important to move away from Tokyo and particularly from the Yomiuri Giants, Japan's most famous professional team, based in the nation's capital and the focus of most Japanese and foreign attention. What was baseball like away from its ground zero? To find out, I chose to go to Japan's second region, Kansai, which is essentially the sprawling tricity conurbation of Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto, and which was then home to three of Japan's twelve professional baseball teams. The Kintetsu Buffaloes (Kintetsu Bafarozu) were based on the east side of Osaka; Hanshin played at Koshien, just to the west of Osaka city center; and the Orix BlueWave (Orikkusu Buruwevu) played in Green Stadium, in the northwest corner of Kobe (see map 1).
Kansai offered a splendid opportunity for a controlled comparison of three cases in a single region, and during my first month there I went around to all three clubs with introductions and began attending their practices and games. However, I immediately discovered that no one else but me was paying equal attention to the three teams. No matter whom I met — journalists, shopkeepers, fellow public transit passengers, or other ordinary folk — no matter which daily sports newspaper I read, and no matter which television sports show I watched, throughout Kansai, everyone was far more consumed by the Hanshin Tigers than by anything that happened with the Orix or Kintetsu teams. To an outsider, they were playing the same game, fundamentally, in all three stadiums. What was so distinctive about the game at Koshien that it drew such disproportionate attention? This question, at once quite local and specific, turned out to be conceptually challenging and analytically productive. This book is my answer.
FIRST ENCOUNTERS
Although I did not appreciate it then, hints of Hanshin's exceptionalism revealed themselves to me at the very beginning of my fieldwork. In the space of three months, from July through September 1996, I had three sets of experiences that redefined my research and reshaped its analysis: watching the disciplining of a player and the firing of the team's manager, tracking the club's coverage by the daily sports newspapers, and experiencing the raucous irreverence of the stadium fan clubs.
I arrived in Osaka in July 1996, at a moment of intense club controversy and media scrutiny for the Hanshin Tigers. A firestorm was brewing around a Tigers infielder named Kameyama Tsutomu, who was then in his eighth year with the team. Kameyama had been wildly popular and moderately promising in his first years with Hanshin (he even made the Central League all-star team in 1992), but by the mid-1990s he was plagued by injuries and was bouncing back and forth between the main team and the farm team. His behavior was increasingly erratic, and he had a penchant for attracting sensationalist media coverage as yet another Hanshin "troublemaker" (a translation of osawagase otoko and mondaiji, which were the Japanese terms used by both the coaching staff and the media). Earlier in the spring of 1996, he had persuaded the club to send him to the United States to be treated for an Achilles tendon problem, but when he returned, the media speculated about whether he had actually gone through with the procedure while he was there. He was then sent down to the farm team to rehabilitate, but throughout May and June he was chronically late for daily practices, failed to show up for several of the team's games, and had a habit of running off to the toilet in the middle of games. The club was concerned enough to have him undergo psychological testing and angry enough to sentence him to a kind of house arrest. These and other developments (e.g., early in the season he separated from his wife, and they began divorce proceedings in July) earned him constant coverage in the daily sports newspapers and special attention from the Tigers main team manager, Fujita Taira. Fujita himself was so hot tempered that he was known as the "devil manager," and by midseason the team's woes left him beleaguered by increasing front office and media criticism.
Matters came to a head just at the moment of my arrival in mid-July, when Kameyama was late yet again for morning practice at the farm team's facility near Koshien. When he did show up, around noon, he was called out onto the field by the farm team manager, who loudly berated him in front of everyone. Kameyama was then ordered to sit cross-legged in the middle of the outfield in Zen meditation style for several hours in the withering sun of a brutally hot Osaka July day, while practice continued around him and the media took photographs and filed dispatches.
Trying quickly to learn more about the Hanshin situation, I was brought up to date by the team's beat reporters about other recent turmoil, including the reassignment of the number two executive in the front office (Sawada Kuniaki) in June and Fujita's disciplining of other players, including the team's flamboyant star, Shinjo Tsuyoshi. Fujita had abruptly released the team's two American players in early June, then quickly signed two replacements, neither of whom was contributing successfully by late July. Hanshin languished near the bottom of the standings, and fans began to protest, throwing megaphones onto the field after games, refusing to cheer, taunting the team bus, and accosting players on road trips.
Hanshin's difficulties continued as the season wore on, and Fujita himself came under attack. Kuma Shinjiro, the chairman of the parent company and the longtime designated "owner" of the club, voiced confidence in Fujita in late July, but the team's extended August road trip was a disaster. In a five-hour meeting on September 2, the club's board of directors (dominated by Kuma and other parent company executives) decided informally that Fujita had to go (as reported in the article in figure 2).
The news leaked, and the meeting was headlined in the next morning's sports papers. Lengthy media analyses followed, and the five regional sports dailies immediately began speculating on (and promoting) various candidates for the job — primarily ex-Hanshin players who were then on retainer as commentators to the very sports papers that were pushing their candidacies (see figure 3).
Hanshin management dithered for ten days, until the board made its formal decision on September 13. The baseball club president told the massed media that he would meet with Fujita at 5:00 that evening to accept the latter's resignation and that he would then hold a press conference at 6:00. This proved to be an embarrassing misjudgment. The club expected Fujita, like many before him, to accept the inevitable and to tender his resignation, thus preserving the company's reputation and moving the spotlight back to the team and its prospects for the next season. But Fujita was angry and stubborn. He demanded to be fired, and he held out against the club president in an extraordinary nine-hour, closed-door session (with the press waiting outside). It ended at 2:00 a.m. without resolution — more fodder for the morning editions — but the next day Fujita finally gave in and submitted his resignation.
Such a highly public dispute was unusual, I was told, but it was only one of many well-publicized tensions on the team and among the team, the club, and the parent company that were to continue for some time, and it was a puzzling and unnerving introduction to the project. How was I to make sense of a confrontation between a seemingly troubled, immature player and a hotheaded and frustrated manager? Why did the question of being fired versus resigning lead to a nine-hour standoff? The personalities seemed larger than life — which is to say, the issues were exaggerated and the emotions blown out of proportion. And every event immediately produced multiple versions and hinted at deeper conflicts of interest lurking below the daily drama. It was like watching a soap opera version of Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon every day. What could the sequence of events in those first months mean for my understanding of Hanshin and Japanese baseball?
For some time, I was skeptical of making too much of this. Any anthropologist knows that when we begin fieldwork, we enter ongoing chains of events and sets of interpersonal relationships whose meaning and significance we seldom immediately understand, and as any follower of sports knows, this particular field of study — the stadium of professional sports — is constantly roiled by personnel frictions. By that measure, I thought that what was happening was probably unremarkable even as I stumbled to appreciate the nuances. However, as I continued to reflect back, Kameyama's shenanigans, Fujita's troubles, the club's turmoil, and indeed Hanshin's rather dismal season on the field had introduced me to several recurring themes in Hanshin baseball that became integral to the analysis I offer here and that were reinforced by two other features of Hanshin Tigers baseball that struck me forcefully in those first months: the colorful sports daily newspapers and the boisterous Koshien fan clubs.
I spent most afternoons before the evening games at the ballpark, watching the media do their work and the teams make their preparations. I began to interview the reporters and photographers, I visited newsrooms, and I spent part of each game in the press box. My introduction to the three baseball clubs had come through the Osaka Sports Department of the Asahi newspaper, one of the three major national daily newspapers, along with Mainichi and Yomiuri. All three had beat reporters and photographers assigned to each of the three clubs, and all three papers had sports sections that reported game results and some brief stories — minimal coverage compared with major papers in the United States and England, for example.
However, I soon recognized that Hanshin received far greater coverage in the five daily sports newspapers, and there was a huge readership for these garish tabloid-style papers, sold at every news kiosk and convenience store in the region. When riding the train and subway, going into coffee shops, or sitting at bars, I realized these daily sports papers were ubiquitous. And despite the presence of three baseball clubs in the region, virtually every issue of all five dailies featured the Tigers on the front page, with Orix, Kintetsu, and teams in other sports relegated to paltry coverage on a few inside pages. What was it about Hanshin that seemed to have monopolized the attention of the daily sports newspapers, andwhy were these papers, not the prestigious general dailies, the leading sports medium?
Along with the summer's turmoil in the club and the over-the-top media coverage, a third feature that struck me immediately was the intensity of the Koshien Stadium spectators. I spent a lot of time in all three stadiums that first summer (and continued to do so over the years), viewing games from different locations, and in all the stadiums there was a noisy, collective cheering, especially coming from the outfield bleachers. Everywhere, the continuous chanting, uniformed cheerleaders, blaring trumpets, and waving banners reminded me much more of European professional soccer than of American baseball. However, in this respect also, Koshien clearly stood out for the total fan involvement, the intricacy of the cheering, the irreverence of the jeers, and, as I probed, the complexity of the fan club organization. Organized fans are the active vanguard of spectators in any professional sport, but my field notes from the first few months contained many remarks on how exceptionally active the Koshien fans seemed.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers"
by .
Copyright © 2019 The Regents of the University of California.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
