On August 5, 2021, legendary baseball writer and Tokyo native Robert Whiting joined JapanBall’s “Chatter Up!” to discuss his new book: “Tokyo Junkie,” detailing his life and times in the constantly growing city. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics continuing on outside, Whiting took a critical look at his work, the present issues facing Tokyo, and, of course, Japanese Baseball. For a recap of the discussion, check out our Chatter Up! page, or watch the full discussion for yourself on our YouTube channel.
Shane Barclay:
I just want to give an introduction to Bob Whiting, our guest, [and] give a little quick bio on him for those of you who don’t know his background… So Bob was born in New Jersey, [and] raised in Eureka, California – which is true Northern California, unlike where I am in Cupertino, which we call Northern California – but that’s a pretty rural area, which means it was quite a change when, in 1962, he enlisted in the Air Force and was sent to Tokyo. After his Air Force stint, he enrolled in Sophia University in Tokyo, and became an encyclopedia editor, if I’m not mistaken. That first stint lasted 10 years in Japan, and then he moved to New York, where he wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: Baseball, Samurai Style. The book was the first of its kind, [as] it described the Japanese national character through baseball. Time Magazine named it its “Sports Book of the Year,” [and] more importantly, it set the groundwork for Bob to become the most renowned English language author on Japanese baseball. I’ll add here – on behalf of the JapanBall community – can you please re-release that book for all of us? Thank you. The Chrysanthemum and the Bat kind of launched Whiting into a full-time baseball writer. He wrote a bunch of columns for Japanese publications and newspapers, but of course, we all know him for You Gotta Have Wa which came out in 1989. I’m guessing probably at least three-fourths – if not more – of the people on this call have read that book, so I won’t talk too much about that. Of course, it received much acclaim and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. I just learned that it’s a staple in lots of academic and even some political institutions. Bob has done a ton of other books, Tokyo Underworld, The Meaning of Ichiro, but of course, the most recent one is Tokyo Junkie: 60 years of Bright Lights, Back Alleys, and Baseball. We’re going to talk a little bit about that book today. It’s a memoir that I really couldn’t recommend enough, if you haven’t picked up a copy yet. It kind of captures the parallel journeys of Bob’s 60 years in Japan – 60 years in Tokyo, specifically, off and on, at least – and Tokyo’s growth over that same time. It’s an awesome book, with characters and history and lots of baseball too. Bob’s influence and contributions to the English-speaking community of Japanese baseball fans are immeasurable, and I think I’ll speak for a lot of us here when I say, thank you for encouraging our interest and knowledge of the Japanese version of baseball, and thank you also for joining us today. So that’s my long intro, but good to see you Bob.
Robert Whiting:
Thank you very much for the kind introduction. I recognize a lot of names on the list here; Leon, Marty Kuehnert, Sanjay, Scott, Yuriko.
Shane:
Yeah, we’ve got a great community here of like-minded people; curious, adventurous baseball fans. Okay, so we’ll start with the questions; like I said, if you have questions, you can go ahead and raise your hand now, and I’ll get to them soon. But I wanted to start going all the way back to 1962. You dropped off into Tokyo from Humboldt State University in Eureka, California. What were those first days and weeks like, and when did you begin to envision maybe a long term future in Japan?
Robert:
Well, my first impression of Tokyo was just total chaos. They were tearing the city apart and putting it back together for the Olympics, and the crowds were enormous. They had a train going into Tokyo Station. There were platform pushers. The trains got so crowded at rush hour time that people in uniforms were pushing people into the cars because the doors wouldn’t close otherwise. Construction was everywhere. You could stand on one side of the street, it seemed anywhere in Tokyo, there’d be a building being torn down, and across the street there’d be one being put up. You stayed in the city overnight, and you needed black curtains to block out the construction lights, because they were all over the city, all night, 24-hours-a-day construction. And you needed earplugs because of the piledrivers and the heavy machinery that was going on all night. They were tearing up the streets and building new subways. They put up eight expressways, 10,000 new buildings. When Japan got the [Olympic] bid in 1958, there was only one five-star hotel, and that was Imperial, falling into disrepair. They put up five new ones, including the Otani, and the Hilton. There were only narrow roads and low buildings, so the Otani, at 17 stories, was the tallest building in Tokyo. The infant mortality rate was high, there were rats everywhere, the average life expectancy of a Japanese was 62 years old. Now it’s around 85, I think. So in that span, by the time the Olympics had started, they put up eight overhead expressways, and finished most of them anyway. 10,000 new buildings, five five-star hotels, a monorail going from Haneda International Airport into the city, and the bullet train – the Shinkansen – the fastest train in the world, which cut the time to Osaka, 300 miles away, in half. So it was really a dramatic transformation. You know, I use the term Tokyo Junkie, and one of the reasons is the city was addictive. There’s something about it; you have all this energy in the air, it really addicts you. You just don’t want to leave it. It’s just an electric atmosphere. Plus, the fact that Tokyo had more bars and restaurants per square kilometer than any other city in the world. You couldn’t get them all, because by the time you finish, there’d be a whole new group of bars and restaurants that had sprung up, and it was just exciting. In the span of six years. Japan went from a polluted backwater that hardly anybody wanted to visit, to this high-tech megalopolis that everybody wanted to visit, and became the location for the James Bond film “You Only Live Twice.” Tourism spiked, then the city went on this enormous – to the end, the country – went on this enormous economic expansion that lasted for over a decade, right into the trade disputes with the United States and Europe. So it was just so exciting, and my enlistment expired at the beginning of 1965, and I just couldn’t imagine leaving, I just couldn’t. It was like asking a heroin junkie to give up his drugs. I guess that’s a bit extreme, but I just couldn’t imagine going back to the States, because it was just such a knockout place. Of course, I stayed. I worked for a Japanese company, Encyclopedia Britannica. They were selling encyclopedias, it was a Japanese company was owned by more than 50% Japanese ownership, and I worked with Japanese staff, and my boss was Japanese. I was hanging out with gangsters, which is another long story. They’d come by my second floor apartment, they would get on my street and yell my name at two o’clock in the morning; I’d actually get out of bed and go drinking with them. So it just reached a point where I had to get back; I had to get away, and also, I wanted to see what I was made of. I’ve never really had to pit myself against my fellow Americans, so I wanted to see what I was capable of. So I moved to New York. There’s no place on earth that’ll make you feel less important than New York City. That’s where I went. But it all worked out in the end because I wound up writing Chrysanthemum and the Bat, and then everything changed.
Shane:
Wow. That’s great. So during that time, before you moved to New York and wrote the book, what was your exposure to Japanese baseball?
Robert:
Well, in the beginning, I couldn’t speak Japanese. The only thing I could understand on television was Japanese baseball. They had a Yomiuri Giants game on every night, whether they were at home or on the road, it was broadcast nationwide from seven to nine. A lot of the words were in English, or English-derived words, like a home run, safe or outu, or modu or covabu for curveball. And there were a couple of Americans on each team. I remember Jim Marshall, Don Blasingame, Darryl Spencer, people who had major league careers, whose names I knew growing up in California, so that made it interesting, too. I started to read… they have sports dailies in Japan, there are several of them, like Nikkan Sports. It’s a broadsheet and it has a circulation of a million. So I used to get up in the morning and buy a copy and take my dictionary and go to a coffee shop, and try to read an article. One headline would say, “Oh and Nagashima Hit Home Runs, Giants Win.” And abeku would be written in katakana, and I discovered that came from the French word avec, which means with, so it means they each hit home runs – they hit home runs together, with each other. Then you’d see the kanji characters, the Chinese characters for Kyojin, which would be “big” and “person,” so another way of saying “Giants,” and the character for wimp. I would read the article and the quotes, and so that’s how I learned to read Japanese and then just speak it. You could walk into a bar any night of the week during baseball season, or a restaurant or izakaya, and strike up a conversation with somebody just by saying, “How are the Giants doing?” because everybody was watching. Every place you went in had a TV on the wall. So you could make friends with Japanese people by asking, “Did the Giants win today?” “Did Oh hit a home run?” that sort of thing, and then it was quite enjoyable. So that’s how I learned to read Japanese, and learned and speak it. And then, later on, I put two and two together, and realized that you could see that the value system that went into Japanese baseball was the same value system that was used in the school system and corporations, the sumo world, even the underworld. This whole idea of endless training, development of spirit, total dedication, obedience, self-sacrifice – you saw it everywhere. So that’s what led to The Chrysanthemum and the Bat.
Shane:
I read that there was something to do with a bet in that book. Can you talk about that?
Robert:
Well, when I moved to New York, I didn’t think I was ever going to go back to Tokyo. I thought I was just going to stay in New York, find a job somewhere. People asked me what Tokyo was like, and I would talk about the political system or the labor unions, the salarymen… in university, my major was political science, so those subjects I knew about. But nobody was interested. When I started telling them about Sadaharu Oh, who would practice every night with a Samurai sword, slicing strips of paper, suspended from the ceiling, in half – something which is very hard to do, you have to break your wrist at just the right time, because the force of the air, from the swing of the sword, blows the paper out of the way – how they would have drills and start spring training right after New Year’s in freezing cold. They had a drill called the “thousand-fungo drill” that you fielded ground balls until you drop from exhaustion, two or three hours later, which is not a fielding drill or a conditioning drill, but a drill to develop spirit. How this all originated from the martial arts in the 19th century, and it’s a philosophy that Japanese applied to all imported Western sports: rugby, soccer, they all approach it the same way as baseball. So if you played baseball in junior high school, high school or college, you had to play it all year. It wasn’t just a spring and summer sport like it was in the States, you played and practiced 365 days a year, you had to dedicate yourself completely to several hours of training. And so I would tell people these stories – I lived on the Upper West Side, 82nd and Central Park West, and all the people that I associated with in that neighborhood were involved in publishing, it seemed, editors or editorial assistants, whatever, fairly young people – but they pushed me to write this book. He said, “Oh, this is a great way to see the national character of Japan.” I was reluctant to do it because I had never written anything before, and it just seemed like an overwhelming task to actually sit down and write a book. So then this one guy, after he kept bugging me and bugging me, and then finally he said, “Well, I guess you don’t have what it takes to do it anyway, to write a book.” And that’s what did it. I said, “Okay, I’ll bet you 500 bucks, and I’ll have a book done within a year.” It just pissed me off so much that he said that. So I went to Barnes and Noble, and got a book on how to write non-fiction, and then, six months later, I had a draft.
Shane:
You got $500 too?
Robert:
I got my $500, and I finished it within a year, and I actually got it published, after being turned down by 14 or 12 publishers in New York. I finally got a contract. I said, “Well, maybe I can get a chapter published.” And so I went to Sports Illustrated, and this young woman, who is an editor, looked at it and called me back and she said, “We want this second chapter, chapter two, we think it’s really good.” And she said, “I know you’re having a hard time selling this book and getting a contract, so why don’t you go talk to this guy over at Dodd, Mead [& Company ] tell him Patricia Ryan sent you, and that Sports Illustrated has purchased first serialization rights.” That was on a Friday, and by Monday, I had a contract. That woman, she was my age at the time, but she went on to become the first managing editor of People Magazine. This was a nice thing that she did. She didn’t have to do it, but she was just a kind person. So because of her, I launched my career as a writer.
Shane:
I’m grateful for her as well. One more question, then we’re gonna get some audience questions. So 17 years pass between the publishing of that book and You Gotta Have Wa How did your perception of Japanese baseball, or the story you wanted to tell as it relates to baseball, evolve during that time?
Robert:
It was 12 years. The Chrysanthemum and the Bat was 1977, You Gotta Have Wa was 1989. Chrysanthemum and the Bat was written from the perspective of a fan. I was sent back to Tokyo by Time Life, and the Japanese translation came out in Tokyo when I was there, and it became a bestseller. So the phone started ringing, and I started getting a lot of offers to write, and I honed my craft. I learned how to write. Malcolm Gladwell has this thing about if you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you become proficient at it, which is what I did, because I really didn’t know how to write when I wrote “The Chrysanthemum and the Bat,” so I learned by doing this every day, I’ve learned the ins and outs. I spent a lot of time interviewing the players, going out to the ballpark, and by the time the opportunity for You Gotta Have Wa came around, I really knew my subject. It wasn’t just from the perspective of a baseball fan, sitting in the stands or watching on TV, I knew everybody involved; I interviewed all the managers and the top players in each team. I knew the history, going all the way back to the late 19th century when baseball was introduced. I was much more equipped to do a book than I was when I did “Chrysanthemum and the Bat.” And also, the fact that the United States and Japan were involved in this huge trade dispute elevated interest in Japan, so “You Gotta Have Wa” became a bestseller in the States because of that.
Shane:
Got it. Alright, well, we got a couple questions here, so I’m gonna jump to Paul, you’re up first.
Paul:
Bob, it’s nice to meet you virtually. I actually just finished the book. Started on Monday and finished it this morning. I found it a very, very compelling read. But, my question is, I appreciated it because you got into how the city transformed around the leading up to the Olympics in ‘64, and there was a part of the book – and maybe you sort of allude to it and I’m misreading what you’ve written or the intent – but you talk about some of the warnings with the petty crime and whatnot, the pickpocketing and things like that, that people were warned about leading up to and during the ‘64 Olympics. And then, right at the end of the book, you’re talking about how honest the society is and how money is returned frequently, particularly after the Fukushima disaster. That’s the only Japan I’ve ever known, the honesty and the cleanliness and so forth, because my first trip was in 2010. So, was there a cultural event or something that happened to sort of transform the crime or the crime rate, from pre-Olympics to what it is now, where it’s inherently clean and very honest and helpful?
Robert:
Well, there was a lot of crime in Japan after the war. When the war ended, the Americans came in, and occupied Japan for six years, and several hundred thousand Japanese soldiers came back to Japan, and there were no jobs, so people gravitated towards the black markets. And so the gangs, like the Sumiyoshi gang – which is the largest gang in Tokyo – before the war was just a small gambling gang that only had a few thousand members, and now all of a sudden it had, like eighty or ninety thousand. The same with the Yamaguchi-gumi. There was no food, people were selling their heirlooms to rice farmers, they’d take the train out to the country and sell these expensive heirlooms just for a bag of rice. So there was a lot of crime in the 50s, just because the city was so poor. During the 40s a lot of people starved to death; if it wasn’t for American help, a lot more would have died. There was a lot of disease, the radios made periodic announcements during the 50s for people to hide their butcher knives in the kitchen, so if robbers entered in the middle of the night, they couldn’t use it as a weapon, that sort of thing. There was this priest, a Catholic priest that I knew, who told me when he first came in 1958, he and the other priests were warned not to walk across Ueno Park at night, because it was so dangerous, there were so many robbers. But the Olympics sort of purified all of that, Japan became an economic superpower after the Olympics, and people had money. There was this income doubling by the end of the 60s, double the GNP and double the personal income, so crime wasn’t necessary to survive, for the average person not to steal. I don’t want to go over the occupation era again, but when the Americans came in on September 1, 1945, half of Tokyo was flattened, burned to the ground. There were people living in these big holes in the middle of the street, made by the B-29 bombs, and then got some big metal sheet and put it over the hole, and that’s where people lived; it was really, really bad. The Olympics marks not only the physical and economic recovery of the Japanese, but I think that the spiritual, psychological recovery. There’s a law, and I’m not sure when it started, but there’s something called a loss of goods law. In Japan, if you pick up something – whether it’s cash or anything, somebody’s wallet – you’re required by law to take it to the nearest koban – a police box. Of course, if nobody sees you and there’s 10,000 yen laying on the ground, nobody is around, you pick it up, put it in your pocket. But the education system in Japan, the primary school teachers will tell the kids, “Well, maybe somebody had a sick cat and he took the cat to the vet, but he dropped 10,000 yen on the way, and so the cat died, and that’s your fault because you took his 10,000 yen;” that kind of thing. So there’s this awareness, and even now, every year it’s like 30, 35 million dollars’ worth in lost cash is turned in in Japan. It’s amazing. Does that answer your question?
Paul:
Yeah, yeah, that’s sort of what I expected, but I like to hear it from somebody with a lot more experience in the country than me. Thank you.
Shane:
Thanks Paul. Appreciate it. Alright, Charlie, you’re up next.
Charlie:
Thank you Shane. Hi, Bob. I’m really glad that you discovered your writing destiny, because I really enjoyed the books of yours that I’ve read, especially You Gotta Have Wa That was my introduction to Japanese baseball. That was very educational and entertaining. I also just finished Tokyo Junkie, and that was an absolutely great, fun read. I found your life to be absolutely fascinating. It would be great if they made a movie about your life, and your opportunity to view the incredible transformation of Tokyo over that span, because I think it’s an incredibly unique perspective. I have a question related to more recent topics about Tokyo. Earlier this year, you know, with the Corona[virus] and everything, of course, the Olympics got postponed. And earlier this year, I saw especially on overseas media outlets, there was a lot of reporting that “all of the Japanese citizens are against the Olympics, they want them cancelled” and you know, I saw numbers of, like, over 80% of Japanese want the Olympics canceled and all of that. I live in Japan, I’m in Saitama, but I never got that sense. I always sensed, like many things here, more apathy than anything else. If the games move forward, that’s great. If they don’t, that’s great. We’ll get by either way. You’re in the heart of Tokyo, I wanted to get your opinion. Did you think that type of reporting, that storyline, was overplayed? Or do you think that there was some accuracy to those reports?
Robert:
Well, there’s been a lot of surveys leading up to the Olympics, and anywhere from 60 to 80% of the people wanted games either postponed or canceled outright, because people are upset that the government imposes this state of emergency and tells them to stay home, and closes the bars so you can’t you can’t get a beer anywhere in town, but at the same time they’re hosting Olympics, when you don’t know how many… tens of thousands of people, 11,000 athletes, 8,000 workers – I’ve seen different numbers – 60, 70,000 people are coming, auxiliary staff or whatever. So that’s why people are upset. I thought [it was] interesting how the government, the LDP – the Liberal Democratic Party – just ignored all that. It tells you who’s really running the country and who’s running the country is the Dentsu, the Kaidan ren, the Business Association; the people who came up with this, “Go to Travel and Go to Eat” program, which exploded the Coronavirus cases. And the Nippon Kaigi, the crazy right-wing group, that doesn’t want Japan to suffer humiliation by having to cancel the games. Even the Emperor voiced concerns about holding the Olympics, but the LDP said, “Sorry. Can’t do it.” It’s amazing. The Olympics are interesting. The competition’s always fascinating to watch, and you get hooked on it, so that’s what’s happening in Tokyo right now. But they just set an all-time record for Corona[virus] cases just two days ago, 3,800, and the government officials are only talking about possible cancellation of the Paralympics because of this Coronavirus. People are happy to see Japan succeed in the Olympics – they were leading the gold medal count the last time I saw – but they’re really not happy about the state of emergency, and the government is really dragging its feet on these vaccinations. And I think that’s because of the influence of the big pharmaceutical companies in Japan, they want in on the action, they want their own vaccine. I think most people think like me. I really like watching the Olympics, I’m really mad at the government, because they allowed the Olympics to continue, without vaccinating the nation.
Sanjay:
Hi Bob. You’ve given me a chance to go back and read all your older books as well. So it’s been a lot of fun during the pandemic, really. Thank you for that. My question is, you alluded to Tokyo Junkie being maybe serialized on TV or something of that nature in the little chat before we started officially. But I’m wondering, do you have any plans for it to be translated into Japanese? Because my wife won’t read the English version…
Robert:
Well, when it started out, I did the Japanese first.
Sanjay:
Oh really?
Robert:
I wrote a series in 2014 for the Japan Times called, “About the Olympics.” 25,000 words [on the] ‘64 Olympics for the run up to the 2020 games. And Kadokawa asked me to turn it into a memoir, which I did, and it turned out to be really, really hard – a very difficult undertaking. I think it’s the hardest kind of writing to do, the memoir. Anyway, I wound up with 177,000 words, which was twice the size of a normal book, twice as big as You Gotta Have Wa or Tokyo Underworld. They published it as-is. And then, when I talked to the American publisher, they said 100,000 words is the limit. So I had to go back and redo it and cut it and change some things for an American audience. So the name of the Japanese version is, “Tatsuno Olympikhu” – “ Two Olympics” [by] Kadokawa publishers. You can get it online. It’s a big, big, thick book. It’s expensive.
Sanjay:
That’s awesome, I wasn’t aware of that. Thank you, I’ve written it down and I’m going to get it in Japanese as well.
Robert:
Okay. Thanks.
Michael:
Good to see you again Bob, I saw you when we were living in Japan. I want to turn maybe more directly to baseball and how it stands currently in Japan. You mentioned that the Giants were everything in Japan for many, many years, but it seems like they’ve been displaced by the [Fukuoka SoftBank] Hawks. Is [it] that they’re the new dominant team in baseball in Japan? Or is this just part of the ebb and flow?
Robert:
Well they’ve won – what is it – the last five or six Japan Series?
Editor’s note: the Hawks have won six of the past seven Japan Series, with only a 2016 win by the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters interrupting the streak.
The record is nine, held by the Giants. I think [the Hawks] just have a better, more sophisticated organization. Marty Kuehnert is [with] this group tonight, he could probably give you a better answer. I just think there are smarter people running the organization. Sadaharu Oh has been their top guy for a long time in the front office, and plus I think they have a better scouting program, player development program. Yomiuri has always been able to take advantage of the free agent system. Domestic free agency ends after eight years now, so they’ll always sign the top free agents, guys in their later years of their career, around 30 or early thirties. That’s what they relied on to keep their franchise going, but it hasn’t worked very well. I think they need a better player development system. But you know, Japanese baseball has disappeared from primetime television in Japan, that’s one big thing with the new generation of people. It started to happen back during the 90s. When I was going to school and living in Japan in the 80s, there were something like 25 million people watching the Yomiuri Giants’ games on TV every night. That’s a 20, 25% share, or something like that. Now it’s down, it dropped down to single digits in the 90s, and the younger generation doesn’t have the patience for it. Once a week or something like that – I haven’t counted – but occasionally you can see primetime baseball on NHK and Yomiuri television, but it’s mostly moved to cable and they don’t have the audience like ESPN has, or the Dodgers or the Yankees and the YES network – they don’t have anywhere near that kind of audience. It’s only a few, maybe a few-hundred-thousand people. But the interesting development is, in recent years, the attendance has gone up. [They] used to have 23 million people a year, now it’s 20, up to 26, and people like to go and, and sit in the ouendan – the cheering groups – and yell their heads off. The ouendan, the cheering groups, have expanded. It used to be just in the outfield, now you see them in part of the infield as well, so it’s an interesting development.
Shane:
Thank you. Thanks, Michael, for that question. I guess you kind of alluded to it in that question, but I want to ask you to expand; what do you view as the health of the Japanese game and the outlook on it? I know you said it’s kind of struggling in some ways. Do you foresee that continuing? Or is it always going to be around and potentially go back to its past status?
Robert:
I think the success of Ohtani and Darvish, Tanaka in the big leagues keeps interest in baseball alive in this country. High school kids see that, or kids starting out and approaching Little League age, they see Ohtani on TV, and they want to be just like him. It’s healthy for the development of the game. The problem with Japanese baseball is that the teams are run by corporations. They don’t approach them as profit-making businesses like the Americans do, it’s just a PR vehicle for the parent company. The Nippon-Ham Fighters exist to basically promote the sales of pork, the Yomiuri Giants to promote the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, that kind of thing. So they don’t have the minor league development system that the Americans do. So that’s always been the difference between the two, but they have really healthy high school and college baseball systems, so they’ll always be generating good players. I think it’ll just go on like it is now, I don’t think it will change much.
Yuriko:
Kind of adding on to what you’re talking about, but it sounds like the younger generation is maybe losing patience for baseball, which is, of course, happening here too. Mashi always talks about how he thinks it’s disappointing in Japan, because there’s not the kind of respect paid in Japan to the history and the legacy of baseball as there is here. I saw and I was heartened that during the torch ceremony, they had Sadaharu Oh and [Shigeo] Nagashima and [Hideki] Matsui together, being part of the legacy, and I thought that was nice. So I’m curious about your take on this, because apparently, during the broadcast, they basically just do the play by play, and they talk about “the player that just made the hit” or whatever, and there isn’t the tendency where they might say, “Oh, so and so just made a hit that looked just like Nagashima” or that “Someone’s pitching exactly the same way as somebody.” There isn’t that connection to the past, and Mashi thinks it’s kind of disappointing. It sounds like there’s a lack of cultural connection through the generations, looking back to the history of baseball. Apparently, that is also somewhat true with the parent-child generational thing, although I would imagine that if someone is a really big baseball fan and raising your kids, you might bring up certain players. I’m curious what you think about that, and about how much that does or doesn’t play into the growth of the sport ongoingly.
Robert:
Well, the high school baseball tournament in the summer, the National High School Baseball Championship Tournament held at Koshien Stadium, two weeks, 49 teams, single elimination. That’s telecast live, every day, from morning till night – and everything stops. You see the support groups travel to Koshien Stadium – when there’s no COVID, anyway. It’s like a big national festival, everybody stops and watches the semifinals and the finals. You can see lots of documentaries during that time about the Koshien heroes of the past – Ota Koji, [Japanese names], Masahiro Tanaka, Yuki Saito – people know these names, and everybody knows who Sadaharu Oh is. There are periodic documentaries on television about baseball and the history. So it’s the younger generation that doesn’t have the patience – because they’re raised on video games, and they want something that’s really fast-moving and fast-paced – so that, I think, has accounted for the disappearance of professional baseball on network television. The Yomiuri Giants used to make $100 million a year just on TV telecasts of Giants games. That’s basically gone. On the other hand, there’s an increase in physical attendance at the games; people like it, it’s like going to your neighborhood festival, go to the ballpark and sit there in the ouendan and yell your head off for two hours, scream as loud as you can. That’s one way this society in Japan releases all this emotional energy inside. A Japanese baseball game is a little bit different than going to Dodger Stadium or Yankee Stadium, where everybody has his own individual stick, and you’re sitting in the infield, and you can stand up and yell “kill the umpire” or whatever, and nobody thinks anything of it. In Japan, it’s considered bad manners, and you’re disturbing the peace of the people around you, so if you want to scream and yell, then you go out where the cheering group is, and you become part of that and yell all night. I don’t see baseball dying out. I think it’s healthy. It’s not like it used to be, but it’s still there. If you see these periodic surveys about the most popular sport in Japan, professional baseball is still up there, around 60%. Maybe it used to be 70%, but still, 60% is pretty healthy, and 40% would say high school baseball is their favorite sport, and then after that, it’s soccer. Sumo looks like it might be making a comeback after this last tournament, but baseball is still alive and well, relatively speaking.
Yuriko:
Are the younger people also attending the games?
Robert:
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, they do. It’s a good place to take your girlfriend on a date, I’ve been told. I live in Toyosu, right across the way from a baseball park – a park where baseball is being played right now, as I’m looking out the window. There are two games going on – two little league games – and they do this all year. They start right after New Year’s, around January 4th; every Saturday and Sunday, they’re out there playing all day. So it looks okay to me.
Steven:
Sorry, I joined a little bit late, so forgive me if this question has been asked already, but I think just speaking to the live element of the game and how it’s becoming more popular, attendance is rising. I’m just curious, Robert, from your perspective – and I know Shane’s the expert here, leading people on tours across Japan to see baseball games – but of all the of all the different stadiums that you’ve attended, and the live baseball events that you’ve been to, what stands out as a memorable one for a Westerner, and getting the full experience? I suppose the Tokyo Dome is sort of the centerpiece of baseball, but there’s all sorts of great stadiums and unique experiences. So just curious of your take on that.
Robert:
I always liked Meiji Jingu, that’s an outdoor Stadium, and it’s got history; Babe Ruth played there in 1934. It dates back to… I forget the exact year, but the late 1920s, or something like that, or early 1930s. It has a long history. I don’t like the Tokyo Dome. It’s like watching baseball inside a jumbo jet; there’s something wrong with the air. I have a long history with the Tokyo Dome, the Giants. Whenever it was first opened in 1987, the Giants claimed it had a capacity of 56,000 people, and they would announce capacity crowds every night; they’d flash it on the scoreboard, and this would be shown on television. I was asked by the editor of the Shukan Asahi magazine, where I was writing a column, to check the attendance. So I counted the seats, and there were 42,761 seats, and I counted the standing crowd with another Japanese reporter, and there were 3,300 people standing, so that’s about 46,000. As a matter of fact, in the lower basement of the dome – the third level of the basement in the dome – there’s a sign put up by the fire department that says the capacity: 46,134. So here we have the Yomiuri Giants, who are owned by the world’s largest newspaper – dedicated to truth and justice and objectivity – lying about the attendance every year. They did this until 2004, when the [tax] laws were changed and the teams had to start paying tax on the attendance they announced, not what they really had. So suddenly, the Giants’ attendance went from 56,000 to 46,000. When I wrote an article about that in the Shukan Asahi, I was banned from the stadium for writing that. So, I have some mixed feelings.
Shane:
That’s amazing. Thanks, Steve, for that question… Bob, I wanted to ask you a question that’s a theme that we bring up on most of our calls. A lot of your work is through the eyes of import players in Japan, and you’re an import player of sorts, in your own way. What have you observed to be the common traits of those who thrive in Japan in baseball and otherwise. As a foreigner, I should clarify.
Robert:
It helps to learn the language. You really should learn to speak Japanese, learn to read it… if not write it, learn to read it, at least. I don’t know if there’s any magic formula. Perseverance, humility, a sense of humor. If you want to live in this country for the long term, it’s imperative to get out every year. My wife and I have a house in California, and we spend six weeks in the winter and six weeks in the summer, and I’m always happy to leave Japan and get back there. After six weeks, I can’t wait to get back to Tokyo. I periodically go to New York for long periods… We would rent an apartment in Paris, so I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe and in New York City, and I can say without a doubt that Tokyo is the best of all. It’s a civilized state, it really is, with civilization, crime rate, all the metrics. Tokyo is number one in like so many different metrics. It’s got the highest GDP, the largest population, more Fortune 500 global headquarters here, more Michelin starred restaurants, twice as many three-star Michelin restaurants as Paris, lowest crime rate, fashion-conscious, highest life expectancy, highest literacy rate, blah blah blah. Global Finance rated it the most livable city in the world last year, in November, amid the COVID crisis. So it’s a really great city, and I’m really happy I’m here. I don’t know if there’s a formula for success. It’s like anything: you just have to keep at it. Don’t give up. Pick something out and go for it, and just don’t give up until you reach your goal. I always liked Jim Lefebrve’s advice to people who come to Japan to play baseball: “Forget you ever played in the big leagues, just pretend you’re a rookie at Dodger camp, and go from there. Just do everything they do.” Or Darryl Spencer, who said, “To succeed in Japan, you have to learn to think backwards. Just do everything the opposite of what you would do in the States. That means arrive early for practice. Don’t argue with the coaches. Never complain. Never swing at the first pitch, and don’t play practical jokes on your teammates. Do that and you’ll be fine.”
Shane:
Good advice – from them and from you. Clearly you have a love affair with the city, the persistence you mentioned, keeping at it to make it successful. But why now, to write a memoir, after all this time?
Robert:
I didn’t think I was. I never thought about writing a memoir, Kadokawa just asked me to do it. This big Japanese publishing editor who published my other books, “Tokyo Underworld,” and You Gotta Have Wa It was really, really hard. It took like four years to do it. The problem with writing a memoir is you’re basically interviewing yourself, and you don’t know whether you’re asking the right questions, or getting the right answers for yourself, because your tendency is to make yourself look good, and you have to fight that. And also, you don’t really know what’s interesting. If I’m writing a straight nonfiction book, I know what readers will respond to and what they won’t, but when it comes to my own life, I have no idea what is going to attract the reader. So that’s why I wrote twice as much as any other book, because I figured that the editors would take out the stuff that wasn’t interesting and leave me with a normal sized book, but then they faked me out by publishing the whole thing. I wouldn’t do it again. It’s too hard. Glad it’s out of the way.
Shane:
Got it. What would you have said, if I told the 19 year old Bob Whiting that, over 60 years later, he would be writing a memoir about his six decades in Japan, and many books written about his time in Japan?
Robert:
I wouldn’t have believed you. I figured that after the military, I would go back and resume my college education, or go to some State University in California and either become a sportswriter for some newspaper or maybe a computer programmer or something like that. That’s what I envisioned for myself; it just worked out completely different.
Shane:
I’m glad it did. I want to go back to You Gotta Have Wa When you were working on that, I know you said you felt like you had refined your writing style. Did you know when you were writing it that you were onto something good? And did its success – and has its staying power – caught you off guard at all?
Robert:
No, not really, because it was grounded in history, for one thing, and about half the book had already been published in Sports Illustrated… [They had] published two or three of those chapters at various times, and the Smithsonian, something in Time Magazine. So I knew from their response, from the editors at Sports Illustrated, and the people who write letters to the editor, that this stuff was good. So when I finished, all I had to do was basically write six new chapters, so I just had to make those as good as the others, the best I could. I wasn’t sure it would be a bestseller, no. That was just luck, I think, because the trade dispute had really heated up, and Japan was buying up Columbia Studios in Rockefeller Center, so it just came out at the right time. I’d always thought that You Gotta Have Wa was the best book out of all the books that I’ve done. Until this one: Tokyo Junkie. Not sure, I’ll have to wait a little while and see; gain some perspective.
Shane:
Well, I know that in promoting this episode, at least more than one person has said that they thought this most recent one was the best one, or at least their favorite. So there’s some good early feedback for you. Sanjay wants to know, when are you coming to Honolulu?
Robert:
When am I getting out of Japan? I’m trapped here.
Shane:
Yeah, you’re trying to get out, and we’re trying to get in.
Robert:
Yeah, I don’t know. We had an all-time high of 3,800 cases in Tokyo. So I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I was going to go back in September, but now this Delta variant…
Keith:
I just wanted to say, during the break, I ran upstairs to my study and found my copy of “The Chrysanthemum and the Bat.” I purchased this paperback in 1983, I think I’ve read it three times over the years, and go back to it periodically. I’ve enjoyed all your writings. I’m curious what your future plans are? Do you plan to stay in Japan? Or do you have any other book projects in mind? I’m just curious, as a member of your reading public.
Robert:
My wife and I will just continue our routine when this COVID pandemic passes, which is winter and summer in the States or Europe, and spring and fall in Japan. I’ve finished the draft of another book, It’s called “Tokyo Outsiders;” it’s the sequel to Tokyo Underworld. And it’s about a lot of nefarious underworld creatures that I’ve met over the years. I handed that off to an editor to see if they can fix some of the problems, so we’ll see what happens. But I think that’ll be out next year sometime.
Keith:
Very good. I’m curious, are you able to get vaccinated in Japan as a foreigner? Is that a problem?
Robert:
No, I’m a resident. I’m a permanent resident, so my wife and I got vaccinated last month; we got our two shots. We got the Pfizer shots.
Keith:
I might say, I agree with you. The first game I ever went to in Japan – I haven’t been to very many – was at Meiji Jingu Stadium, and I went as just an adjunct to a regular Japanese tour I was on. They had asked whether or not anyone had special requests, and I had looked up and saw there was a game there on Sunday when this tour group was in town. My wife and I and one other couple went to the game there. It was the Hiroshima Carp versus the [Tokyo Yakult] Swallows. I didn’t know what to expect. I will always remember, it was like the seventh inning or so, all of a sudden these thousands of umbrellas appear out of nowhere, and these folks did their song. I had never seen such a thing before. It just blew me away, and I’ll always remember that as my first, and sort of my epiphany of what goes on in Japan. I thought that was just beautiful.
Robert:
What year was that?
Keith:
That was about four years ago. I hadn’t seen one umbrella, and all of a sudden, there’s just thousands of them around me, all different sizes, and they’re all singing together in unison. You’d never see that in an American game, It just caught me completely off guard. And it was just wonderful.
Robert:
Yeah, Yakult is famous for that, the umbrella ouendan.
Shane:
Thanks Keith. And Keith, that book, I was looking on Amazon, t’s listed for $775. You can sell that, and pay for your next trip to Japan if you want.
Keith:
It’s in virtually mint condition, except I did a lot of underlining and places where you listed the various articles, and their protocols and so forth. I underlined it like a student, so maybe I ruined the value of it somewhere. Not that I plan to sell it.
Robert:
Well, I have about 200 of these. So anybody wants one, just send me an email and address and you can have it cheap. It’s in good condition, mint condition.
Shane:
Might have to take you up on that. Alright. It looks like that’s it for the questions… so I’m going to wrap things up here. I actually have to run… but it’s great having you all on, and Bob, it was really nice to meet you. I really appreciate you answering those questions, and taking the time. We had a pretty good showing here, and a lot of people actually told me they’re going to be watching afterwards, for one reason or another. With things opening up here – in the US at least – people’s Friday nights are taken these days. But that was a real fun time… Thanks again, for joining. As you guys have seen, I do these a little bit less frequently nowadays, but as the good guests come in, I’m definitely going to be doing more “Chatter Up!” so hopefully I’ll see you on a future episode. Thanks again for joining us, Bob. Really appreciate it.
Robert:
Thanks a lot.
Check out more “Chatter Up!” and be sure to take a look at Robert’s new book, “Tokyo Junkie,” available to purchase in our shop! Please note that JapanBall receives a small commission if the book is purchased via the links in this article.
