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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
More Japan than Baseball, March 9, 2003
On the surface, this is a treatise about baseball in Japan. Only slightly underneath, it's a fascinating work on the difference between Japanese and American culture. The title word Wa comes from the Japanese word for team unity, as opposed to the American interest in individuality.The book goes through both a history of baseball in Japan, as well as challenges American's deal with over there. It covers the trials and tribulations of Americans like Bob Horner, who thrive on the diamond, but struggle off the field. It covers the adverserial relationship between Japanese coaches and their foreign (Gai-jin) charges. Any American going to work in Japan is well advised to pay attention! How is Japan changing over time? Compare how the approval of "different" antics of foreigners changes over time. Learn how some Japanese players follow the model, but as the exception and not the rule. Is the Japanese culture changing, or a surface appearance of change part of the Japanese character? Read the book to find out. Again, it's only about baseball on the surface. How does training differ? The American model suggests individuals can improve, but only to the limit of their ability. The Japanese model in both the field and the office is that there is no limit - strength and success is limited only by effort. This drive leads to a 10-11 month season counting training camp, as well as several hours of strenuous exercizes every day before practice. This is essential to developing the fighting spirit. Again, someone travelling to Japan for business is well advised to understand this. The book is a must for baseball lovers as well as people interested in learning more about Japan. The book is a fascinating work that hides great learning behind Japan under the story of America's pastime.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Is It Really About Baseball?, February 27, 2000
I have had the fortunate experience of visiting Japan twice and seeing some Japanese baseball. It was an experience I shall never forget. Curious about the subject I picked up and read this awesome book. However, as much as this book is about baseball. And it is filled with some great stories and information. I wonder how much this book is really about the cultural differences between the United States and Japan. Using the history of Japanese baseball and the rough experiences of many of the American players who have tried to play in Japan, the author does an awesome job teaching about Japanese culture. This is much more than a baseball book. Its about baseball and culture, and cultural diffusion, and the differences between Americans and Japanese. This is a funny book, a fun to read book, but you will learn alot about Japan by the time you are done. I have even assigned this book to my students. This book is worth it. An unforgettable read.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting Book About American Ballplayers in Japan, May 24, 2000
In describing the Japanese game of baseball and the problems it has caused Americans attempting to play that game, Whiting succeeds in painting a vivid picture of the differences between the American and Japanese cultures. After reading this book, I came away feeling that both countries could learn from each other: by learning about how the Japanese live their lives, Americans could become more dedicated to their jobs and less self-centered; meanwhile, the American way of life could teach the Japanese to be more independent and less willing to always sacrifice their own well-being and that of their families for the good of their teams (or companies). A happy medium between the two extremes of the cultures would result in better environments for everyone. In reaching these conclusions about the two countries, I realized that this book was much more than just another volume on baseball. If you're looking for a pure baseball book, you may want to try something else; however, Whiting's effort is a memorable one and I would advise that you don't pass it up. The stories of Americans trying to play baseball and acclimate themselves to the new, strange environment of Japan are both humorous and unsettling at the same time. Because these players are foreigners -- and especially because they are American foreigners -- they receive a special stigma and must deal with much more pressure than a normal Japanese player. The Americans are usually paid a lot of money to play in the land of the rising sun, which only adds to the widespread belief in Japan that these players are primma donnas who care more about the money than they do about winning. Some of the Japanese training methods will strike American readers as bizarre, if not completely ridiculous. Subjecting players to the thousand-fungo drill and making tired starting pitchers throw 200 pitches on their off-days are just a couple of the off-the-wall ideas championed by Japanese baseball's greatest thinkers. These methods may seem more harmful than beneficial, but one has to respect the work ethic and the dedication of the Japanese players. Even if you are not a baseball fan, you will probably find this book interesting. One of my only beefs with it is that there is no index. That may seem nit-picky and it obviously has nothing to do with the actual content of the book, but once I'd finished the book, I wanted to go back and read about certain incidences that occured with specific players. It would have been nice if I had been able to refer to an index to find the stories about these players instead of having to skim several pages trying to locate those stories. Oh well, it's still a great read.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Same, but Different, January 22, 2001
Baseball is baseball, right? Not when it's played in Japan, it seems. Pitchers pitch "until their arms fall off." Fielding practice is done until players drop from exhaustion. Fans chant highly organized and rhythmic chants at the same piercing volume, all game long, regardless of the score. It's not "play ball" in Japan, it's "work ball." And into this arena come the foreigners. Often bench-warmers and minor leaguers in North America, they are expected to become instant stars in Japan. The pressure and the intense work ethic drive many away after only a few weeks or months. Others, like Randy Bass, become national heroes, appearing on TV commercials nightly. However even Bass must have felt his outsider status when he was intentionally walked for the rest of the season when he challenged Sadaharu Oh's single-season home run record. If you are interested in baseball, or in what happens when Japan meets the outside world, this is the book for you.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Baseball and much more, April 12, 2005
Longtime Japan resident and journalist Robert Whiting's classic book on Japanese baseball is as fresh today as when it was published. The book begins with the arrival of Bob Horner, a 29-year-old bonafide all star who was still in his prime when he arrived to play for the Yakult Swallows. Waiting for him when he landed at Narita Airport were 200 journalists, a team owner who confidently predicted--and expected--that the overweight Horner would hit 50 home runs (Horner was assigned the number 50 on his uniform as a not so subtle reminder), and a year contract worth $2 million. What Horner did not know was how different yakyu (literally, field ball) would be from the baseball he knew in America. The regimentation of Japanese teams, the rules governing many aspects of life both on the field and off--and the adjustment of moving around the world to live in a very different culture--had been and still is the undoing of many players. Whiting's work is about more than baseball and sports; it is about how Japan and Japanese approach things, how that which is imported must first be Japanized. Highly recommended.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Japan 101, January 26, 2000
If I were teaching a college course on Japan, this would be my text book. Readable, funny and right on the mark. The way Americans and Japanese approach baseball provides an excellent illustraion about how we differ in our approach to work and life in general.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
You don't even need to know baseball..., September 28, 2005
but it helps. I'm not the world's biggest sports fan, and while I could get the gist of some baseball specifics like sacrifice bunts from context, some more esoteric points went over my head. Not many, though, certainly not enough to significantly diminish my appreciation of this book. Anybody (well, anybody American) looking for an entertaining and accessible introduction to some major differences between Japanese and American culture could do a lot worse than "You Gotta Have Wa". Managerial styles, notions of work versus play, team spirit, and many other topics of broad interest that transcend baseball are touched on in this book and used to illuminate the differences between our cultures.
Ten+ years after the Japanese economic bubble burst, the book does occasionally seem dated. Assumptions about inevitable Japanese global domination common to much of the writing from this period do occur, but don't significantly detract from the book.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
It gets a little repetitious, August 30, 2005
The author covers the differences between Japanese and American baseball, but sort of goes over and over certain things, with little regard to chronological order--Americans in Japan, Japanese in Japan. But the difference between the Japanese and American point of view, personality, and tradition is very interesting.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Hiliarious! Very entertaining!, April 24, 2003
This book is fun to read even if you are not into baseball, but if you are, then its awesome! Its mainly made up of many different stories and experience from American baseball players who played over in Japan. The stories are about the clash in cultures whether on or off the field and most of them are really funny and you could just picture it happening. I feel that the book is more about the cultural differences between east and west and they are just using baseball as a vehicle to illustrate them. There is a movie starring Tom Selleck called Mr. Baseball that I think is a take off from this book. It is also very fun to watch.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Take Me Out to the Ball Game, December 31, 2008
It is said that the UK and the US are divided by a common language. As veteran journalist Robert Whiting shows, the United States and Japan are divided by a common sport. Judged by American standards, Japanese baseball is a totally different world with its own set of assumptions and values. As foreign players who are lured into one of the twelve Japanese professional teams soon discover, it takes a special kind of person to play in Japan. A man has to deal with a different type of pitching, a wider strike zone, and unpredictable umpires. The life of a ballplayer is regimented by detailed club rules, strict discipline, and endless training sessions. The goal is to increase the fighting spirit and team cohesion. There is a belief that if a man tries hard enough, he can do anything, and players are taught to "pitch through the pain" until their arm aches so badly they can no longer raise it.
People who have worked in a Japanese environment will recognize some familiar traits. There are the incessant meetings, for example: daily pregame preparatory meetings, impromptu midgame strategy sessions in which the players huddle around their manager in front of the dugout, and nightly postgame conferences to review the team's mistakes. The game requires total concentration and is played with dreadful seriousness. Japanese bring to it their sense of organization and attention to detail. There is a rigid sense of hierarchy, and a player never questions a coach's decision. As the history of the game shows, there is a desire to learn from outside but also the imperative to adapt a foreign import to Japanese mores.
According to Whiting, baseball's grip on Japan's collective psyche is due, ultimately, to the fact that it suits the national character. Introduced to a people whose very identities were rooted in the group but who, oddly enough, had no group sport of their own--only one-on-one competitions like kendo and sumo--, baseball provided the Japanese with an opportunity to express their renowned group proclivities on an athletic field. Unlike other group sports, baseball also comes with a built-in individual confrontation--a test of wills--which also gave it its initial appeal to fans of the martial arts and sumo. The "get-set" ritual in sumo, for example, with its squatting, stomping, and fierce glaring, has its equivalent in the war of nerves the pitcher and the batter wage, which involves delaying tactics like calling time and cleaning spikes.
Perhaps another reason for baseball's attraction for the Japanese is its relatively slow pace and frequent pauses. The natural break between pitches and innings allows ample time for long strategy sessions, responding to the need to fully discuss and analyze a problem before reaching a decision. Baseball is a commentator's sport, suitable for discussions that provide a wealth of detail on each player or each team. The use of ma, or time interval between two actions, is not unlike a Kabuki performance.
But baseball has also transformed the Japanese and introduced a kind of American way of life in everyday Japan. Like American military bases, it has reinforced the umbilical link to the US and perpetuated an American presence on Japanese soil. American ballplayers, most of them refugees from the major leagues, have been an active part of Japanese baseball since the postwar era. Baseball has brought to the Japanese language a rich vocabulary of borrowed terms and metaphors. Knowing the rules of the game is often a requisite for participating in discussions about politics or business, and media commentators are as keen as their US counterparts to interpret current events in baseball terms. This adds another cultural barrier for foreigners who do not share Japan's or the US' enthusiasm for and familiarity with a sport which, unlike soccer, has never commanded a global audience.
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