The Meaning of Ichiro (13 page)

Shoriki, who carried a 16-inch scar on his skull from the broadsword that the Warlike Gods had buried into it, was thus persuaded
to establish his own professional team, the
Dai Nippon Tokyo Yaky
Kurabu
(The Great Japan Tokyo Baseball Club), which later became the Tokyo Giants, to promote his newspaper.

Sawamura was among the first amateur stars the club signed up. Another was a high school pitching sensation named Victor Starfin,
the stateless 6′4′′ son of Russian aristocrats who had taken refuge in Japan at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Then
there was a pair of infielders—Keio star third baseman Shigeru Mizuhara and second baseman Osamu Mihara, a Waseda stalwart—who
would both achieve lasting fame in their later years as pro baseball managers.

The Dai Nippon squad celebrated their founding by touring the United States in 1935, where, billed as the team that had faced
down Ruth and company behind Sawamura, they won 93 of 102 games against various semipro outfits and minor league teams and
drew enthusiastic crowds.

The success of the Tokyo Giants abroad prompted the Hanshin Railways and six other major companies to organize their own professional
franchises and, in 1936, the Japanese professional league was born—under a charter that outlined the goals of fair play and
improving the national spirit. The league’s director general pledged that the new pro game would “purify the baseball world”
and lead to a real world series between Japan and the United States.

Pundits like Tobita charged that the professional game—which began as autumn and spring seasons starting in the fall of 1936,
before moving to a regular one-season format in 1939—was sullied by monetary considerations and the inability of the players
to resist the temptations of the flesh. The pros, in fact, however showed abundant fealty to the concept of
seishin yaky
,
as witnessed by the memorable training camp held by the Giants to prepare for the 1936 fall season. The Giants had lost a
spring tourney and numerous summer exhibitions in dismal fashion. Tokyo manager Sadayoshi Fujimoto had determined that the
galling defeat was the result of his players’ spiritual weakness. “These guys smoke and drink too much,” he said, “they’re
always out at night chasing women. No matter how much I complain, they don’t listen.” To rectify this unendurable situation,
he devised a special pre-autumn-season camp to toughen them up.

It was held at a remote practice field near Morinji Shrine in the town of Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, a rickety, teeth-rattling
three-hour train ride from Tokyo. It was not an ideal site for honing one’s baseball skills. The infield was strewn with rocks
and pockmarked with potholes, the outfield was a sea of weeds. However, to Fujimoto, who had played at Waseda in the immediate
post-Tobita era, that was irrelevant.

“The purpose of this camp is not to improve our fielding or our hitting,” he declared at the outset, “but to hone our fighting
spirit. It will be a battle between me and the players and only one side will prevail. The players won’t like it, but this
is necessary in order to build the Giants.”

For nine days in boiling early September heat that reached 94 degrees that year, beginning at seven each morning and lasting
all day, Fujimoto put his charges through Torquemadan workouts, making them chase after hundreds of flies and grounders, an
exercise which left their bodies covered with raw bruises and abrasions from the irregular bounces batted balls took on the
uneven surface. Not a few players, their uniforms torn and ripped from diving into the ground, were seen vomiting on the sidelines
from the exertion.

A number of young players were singled out for special ordeals including an untested 19-year-old shortstop candidate named
Shiraishi. Shiraishi was subjected to the infamous exercise the “1,000-fungo drill,” in which he was made to dive for ground
balls until he collapsed from exhaustion. After an hour of this punishment, Shiraishi, his face covered with welts from the
cascade of balls, was on his hands and knees, holding his stomach and gasping for breath. Still the drill continued, a coach
peppering his body with sharply hit balls. Afterward, for good measure, he was put through a lengthy run. At the end of the
day, the teenager was so exhausted, he lacked even the strength to hold on to the straps on the train taking him and his confreres
back to the team
ryokan
and collapsed on the floor instead.

However, the young infielder returned for more the next day and was afforded a vivid opportunity to demonstrate his newly
acquired fighting spirit. While taking batting practice, he was hit in the temple by a routine
shooto b
ru
that broke in too far. The ball collided with Shiraishi’s skull with such a sickening thud that the BP pitcher later confessed,
“I thought I had killed him.” But Shiraishi, against all expectations, did not collapse. His face rapidly swelling, he stood
there swaying and making threatening gestures toward the mound. Teammates tried to take him back to the bench, but he pushed
them away. “I’m still hitting here,” he growled through clenched teeth. It was only when his manager ordered him out of the
batter’s box that he finally staggered back to the dugout. With wet towels applied to his head, he implored his manager to
let him return to the batter’s box once more, before passing out on the bench.

Daily practice was followed by a baseball workshop each evening to study rules and strategy, as well as blistering speeches
by the manager in which he warned his players that they would have to try harder and sacrifice their egos and individual statistics
for the team. All in all, it made what the New York Yankees went through in the preseason look like a Disney vacation.

Osamu Mihara, the team’s star second baseman (and former Waseda player under Tobita) recalled in a memoir years later, “The
Giants, at that time, did not resemble a professional team. Therefore, there was no other choice but to mold them into one.
Shiraishi, Horiuchi, Ito and the others never stopped practicing. They did not have a moment’s rest. They were near tears
because the training was so hard… .” Even national hero Sawamura, who had been confidently relaxing off to the side in the
shade much of the time, was ordered to participate. When he saw how hard his teammates were working, according to Mihara,
he confessed he was deeply moved. “I’ve never seen people training like this before,” he was quoted as saying, and vowed to
redouble his own efforts in pitching practice.

Fujimoto’s training, which was appropriately dubbed “vomit practice” and continued for four more days after the team returned
to Tokyo, proved fruitful. The Giants went on to compile a 27-18-9 record and seize the fledgling Japan league crown. It was
the first of many national championships for the team, and fans as well as players would look back at that memorable Morinji
camp as the one that started it all. As one Giants historian would later write, “It was from the mud and sweat of the training
at Morinji that the soul of the Giants was born.”

Able to attract the game’s brightest stars, like bespectacled line-drive-hitting first baseman Tetsuharu Kawakami, who went
on to become known as the “God of Batting,” the Giants succeeded in capturing the imagination of the public from the beginning,
drawing tens of thousands of people to some of their early games. Emphasizing
konj
and the idea of team harmony, they became the focus of the pro game for decades to come.

A succession of managers expanded and built on the Morinji camp. After the single-season system was instituted in 1939, tough
preseason camps became more common, eventually, as did the “autumn training league,” making baseball the year-round profession
that Suishu Tobita had envisaged. Players recalled sessions in which they were forced to perform their daily drills with heavy
kanji
dictionaries strapped to their backs. Shigeru Mizuhara, the former Giants third baseman and manager of the team throughout
the ‘50s, instituted taxing spring camp exercises like the “100 fly ball drill,” where an outfielder was made to chase fly
balls barely out of his reach—to his left, to his right—until he collapsed; it was designed to teach the players that baseball
was “not an easy game.” Tetsuharu Kawakami, who took over in 1960, ushered in his famous system of
“kanri yaky
”
(controlled or managed baseball), taking collective discipline (he forbade his players to read comic books in public for
fear it would hurt the image of the team) and commitment to practice to a new level, mirroring the corporate management practices
that were leading the resurgent Japanese economy to worldwide success.

Many teams copied the Giants in various forms (and Fujimoto went on to manage five other clubs). Although some organizations
like the Nishitetsu Lions of the ‘50s and ‘60s were known for their relative lack of rules—the Lions were managed by Osamu
Mihara, an opponent of
seishin yaky
(who nevertheless wore out his starting pitchers with horrific overuse)—a basic pattern of boot-camp-style programs emerged,
much as Ichiko style baseball formed the basis for most big-time high school programs and Tobita’s system was a model for
many top university teams. Demanding postgame and off-day practices during the seasons became routine.