Customer Reviews

You Gotta Have Wa (Vintage)

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As a long-time Japanese baseball fan, I was very excited to finally receive this book and start reading it. Robert Whiting has done an excellent job of finding material that is usually not accessible for the average foreign fan of Japanese baseball, simply due to the fact that everything is written in Japanese.

Whiting has succeeded in creating a very enjoyable and very interesting "summary" of Japanese baseball as a whole, and really portrays just how differently the game is played and thought of in the East. In particular, the mentality of Japanese baseball that he describes, along with the accounts of many of the players were eye-opening.

It's just such a shame that the book is published in 1988, with no revisions forthcoming since then, because, as is inevitable with time, baseball in Japan has moved on.

In the modern game, the popularity of the "Yomiuri Giants" which Whiting talks at length in his book are declining - so much so that they have trouble filling the stadium or even getting good ratings on TV. In fact, baseball as a sport in Japan as a whole has been on a gradual decline in the face of Soccer, which, when Whiting wrote "You Gotta Have Wa", was unthinkable.

There have also been great shifts in terms of the power of Japanese baseball: away from the Giants to other teams, and the players union even went on strike in objection to the loss of player jobs following the merger of the Orix Bluewaves and Osaka Buffaloes. Whiting wrote however that the player's union would never consider striking, as that was the Japanese player's mentality. This signifies just how much the game has changed in Japan. Further, the systems have been edited to incorporate playoffs, and foreign coaches in Japan are now found at three clubs - a vastly different landscape to the one which Whiting reported on so excellently twenty years ago.

Even though the book is outdated however, it is still a very enjoyable and very thorough account of baseball and the mentality of baseball in Japan. For anyone with an interest in the sport in Japan, I would highly recommend reading it, as very little else is available which is of a similar quality to "You Gotta Have Wa".

But when reading, I just cant help but feel how worthy a book this would be if updated with information on the modern game. With stars like Matsui, Matsuzaka and Ichiro now plying their trades in the US, Whiting would have a lot to talk about.

I recommend it: Just realise that the game has moved on a little from then.

I enjoyed this book so much that I went out and did quite a bit of research on my own about the Japanese leagues. It is entertaining and at the same time you will be educated. I recommend this one to anyone who loves baseball or is interested in the Japanese culture.