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Signed and Personalized by the Author: The Chrysanthemum and the Bat by Robert Whiting
$35.00Acclaimed author Robert Whiting is best known for his bestseller You Gotta Have Wa!, published in 1989. And he burst back onto the Japanese baseball scene with 2004’s The Meaning of Ichiro. But it all started with The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: The Game Japanese Play.
We are working with Mr. Whiting to make this book available to you with a personalized messaged in your name (or whatever name you request) and signature from the author!
Whiting moved to Japan in 1962 and found that whenever he talked to his friends back in the U.S., they always wanted to hear more of his stories of Japanese baseball. Nothing about the country’s fascinating history of rulers, the rapid transformation of Tokyo, or the perfect balance between Buddhism and Shinto – just baseball. But Whiting found that baseball was actually the perfect vehicle to talk about Japan’s unique national character.
Motivated by a $500 bet that he wouldn’t write a book within a year (as explained to JapanBall’s “Chatter Up” audience in August 2021), Whiting compiled his observations of Japan’s culture- exemplified through baseball – into this wonderful book that TIME named its 1977 sports book of the year.
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The Chrysanthemum and the Bat by Robert Whiting (Personalized Signature fom the Author)
Acclaimed author Robert Whiting is best known for his bestseller You Gotta Have Wa!, published in 1989. And he burst back onto the Japanese baseball scene with 2004’s The Meaning of Ichiro. But it all started with The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: The Game Japanese Play.
We are working with Mr. Whiting to make this book available to you with a personalized messaged in your name (or whatever name you request) and signature from the author!
Whiting moved to Japan in 1962 and found that whenever he talked to his friends back in the U.S., they always wanted to hear more of his stories of Japanese baseball. Nothing about the country’s fascinating history of rulers, the rapid transformation of Tokyo, or the perfect balance between Buddhism and Shinto – just baseball. But Whiting found that baseball was actually the perfect vehicle to talk about Japan’s unique national character.
Motivated by a $500 bet that he wouldn’t write a book within a year (as explained to JapanBall’s “Chatter Up” audience in August 2021), Whiting compiled his observations of Japan’s culture- exemplified through baseball – into this wonderful book that TIME named its 1977 sports book of the year.
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The Meaning of Ichiro: The New Wave from Japan and the Transformation of Our National Pastime
I’m sure that many fans felt that Robert Whiting just had to write this book, and I’m sure glad that he did! In this unofficial sequel to You Gotta Have Wa, Whiting flips the script tells the fascinating stories of the trailblazing players that were part of the wave of Japanese players coming to MLB that started with Hideo Nomo in 1995. Whiting puts Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Irabu, Alfonso Soriano, and Hideki Matsui under the microscope, exploring each of their unique backgrounds and personalities and how they contributed to creating the star player you see on TV and in MLB stadiums.
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Tokyo Junkie: 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys . . . and Baseball
40+ years after The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, which TIME Magazine named the best sports book of the year in 1977, and 30+ years after You Gotta Have Wa, an absolute must-read for any baseball fan, Robert Whiting is at it again. The original English-language written voice of Japanese baseball now has a lifetime’s worth of perspective, wisdom, and observations from straddling the American and Japanese cultures, and this book encapsulates it all.
Read our review of the book here.
As Whiting puts describes it in the book’s prologue, the “story is part Alice in Wonderland, part Bright Lights, Big City, and part Forrest Gump, among other things. It is a coming-of-age tale as well as an account of a decades-long journey into the heart of a city undergoing one of the most remarkable and sustained metamorphoses ever seen.”
Arriving in Tokyo in 1962, Whiting entered a metropolis that was on the cusp of bursting onto the world stage, most visibly via the 1964 Olympics. Since then, the city has flourished and grown almost exponentially in so many ways, but not without its share of dark secrets and growing pains.
Whiting’s unique perspective as a curious, thoroughly-adapted foreigner who also happens to be a critical observer and world-class writer makes him the perfect person to document the city’s modern history.
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You Gotta Have Wa
This is the book that really opened my eyes to the uniqueness of Japanese baseball. It is the definitive book on the subject in the English language; a must-read for anyone that wants to learn about the intricacies of the Japanese game. Acclaimed author Robert Whiting put it all in here, from the very beginning of Japanese baseball to the international powerhouse that it is today. The book’s most entertaining chapters are told through the wide-eyed – and often frustrated – perspective of gaijiin (foreign) ballplayers that played professionally in Japan.