Ping-Pong Diplomacy

by Nicholas Griffin

  Twenty-eight-year-old Hiroji Satoh couldn’t have had a shorter moment of fame. For two weeks he was unbeatable; for the rest of the year he barely won a game and then retired from the sport. Satoh looked like a caricature of the salarymen who epitomized Japan’s rapid rise in the postwar world. Thin, pale, bucktoothed, and wearing thick black glasses, he wandered the halls of the Bombay Sports Arena staring at the floor, carrying his sacred wooden case.

  What was so special, it turned out, wasn’t Satoh’s speed, strength, or agility, but his racquet. At every game, Satoh would walk onto the court, bow to the audience, place the case down on the table, remove the bat, and humble the best players in the world. The game had been named Ping-Pong for the simple onomatopoeia, but sound was also a way for good players to read the game; you could hear the kind of shot your opponent was making—the sharp crack of a slam, the deeper whoosh of a sliced return. But Satoh had covered his paddle in extremely thick sponge; his shots were silent. Whatever spin his opponent hit at him was multiplied by the sponge and returned. Though Satoh was accused of foul play throughout the tournament, Montagu pointed to the rule book. There were no limitations as to what paddles players could use. You could play with a shoe or your own glasses for all Montagu cared.

  Early in the tournament, Satoh came up against the aging world champion, Richard Bergmann. Unnerved by Satoh’s cushioned paddle, Bergmann lost and stormed off the court. In the quarterfinals, it was New York native Marty Reisman’s turn to face Satoh. Wearing a pair of sneakers borrowed from Montagu, Reisman soon suffered the same fate as Bergmann. He described the new sponge racquet as a form of silent catapult, absorbing all the energy of the opponent without any sound at all and converting, even increasing the opponent’s spin on the way back. “It hit my racquet in a new way and came off the racquet in a new way.” The loss burned so deeply in Reisman’s mind that while the rest of the table tennis world slowly adopted the Asian addiction to sponge, he continued to play with the same hard bat until his death sixty years later, like a sixteenth-century archer who detested the smell of gunpowder.

  Satoh’s entirely defensive game captured the world title. For a country still reeling from World War II, it was heady stuff. The unmanly game of table tennis was suddenly a way to prove Japan’s internationalism and innovation.

  Japan swept both the men’s and women’s titles. Ogi knew that the country’s past and its resilience were personified by one of the women’s gold medalists, twenty-four-year-old Shizuka Narahara from Hiroshima, a tiny woman five feet tall and weighing ninety-nine pounds.

  On August 6, 1945, Narahara had packed her schoolbag and walked to Hiroshima Station. A tram was about to leave, but it was packed. She decided to ride the tram by hanging from the outside. As a freshman at a new high school, she didn’t want to be late. Five minutes later, she stepped off the tram, “when suddenly everything was lit up by a strange greenish flash. Then the houses began to fall around me.”

  That was Little Boy, the first uranium-based atomic bomb, dropped from 27,000 feet at the cost of around 100,000 lives. The Hiroshima Station, which Narahara had just left, was leveled; hundreds died inside. But Narahara was doubly lucky. First, she was facing away from the blast. Second, despite wearing the dark school uniform, she’d chosen white underclothes, which almost completely protected her from burns. Her only injuries were on her right arm and the back of her neck. With her “bullet like forehand” and an understandable absence of fear, she crushed the competition in Bombay.

  Later that year, Ogi attended his first All-Japan Championship. He had never faced off against his country’s finest, and they had little idea of what to expect from the boy so poor that he traveled with a book of rice ration coupons at the bottom of his bag. Ogi won the tournament against members of the world’s best team. He celebrated by drinking his first beer. The dour young man broke into a wide grin and he knew it would last as long as he kept winning.

  CHAPTER 14 | Tiny Tornadoes

  The Japanese hadn’t participated in the 1953 World Championships in Bucharest because their government had refused to let the team travel behind the Iron Curtain. Ogi ramped up his training regime. Now, instead of doing frog jumps for a kilometer, he hopped for four kilometers while carrying a forty-kilogram dumbbell on his shoulders. He learned to twist his torso so far backward that when he unleashed the bat at the ball, it carried all the momentum possible. But it was financing, not fitness, that was his largest hurdle. A ticket to London cost over a thousand dollars. A salaryman’s annual wage in 1953 was $280. The Japanese Table Tennis Association was asking each player to contribute $2,200 to their total expenses, an extraordinary sum for most, and all the more so for Ogi, a mere university student.

  He collected it the hard way, cent by cent over three arduous months. Side by side with friends, he begged on the streets of Tokyo for money to send “Ogimura to London.” Ogimura? They asked. Who’s that? He’d explain that he was Ogimura, that he was representing the country, that they could win back a title that they hadn’t been allowed to defend. Collections dripped in from staff at his university, distant relatives, the College of Art, mayors of local districts. He played matches for donations and spent rush hours soliciting at train stations until he finally had enough for his expenses.

  The arduous training regime made him manic. He put a fountain pen lid on the corner of a table and served at it until he could knock it down a hundred times in a row. When he missed, he started again. Then he tried the exercise blindfolded. Before he left for England, he bought a large wrapping cloth from a department store. Ogi was thinking ahead; it was to protect the trophy that Montagu was going to give him.

  In 1954, the London that Ogi arrived in did not fit Montagu’s utopian vision of brotherhood among all men. It was the bombed-out capital of a country that had won a world war only to realize that its empire was never coming back. There were no economic miracles happening in England; only in Germany and Japan.

  Six years of war had been measured in half a million British dead. The only comfort was that the sacrifices had been worth something—an emotion reinforced in hundreds of books and films that regurgitated and reinterpreted the heroism of the war years. High on the list of themes was British stoicism in the face of Japanese cruelty. Stories of British prisoners of war suffering at the hands of Japanese officers during the building of the Burmese Railway had leaked out from the survivors. Six and a half thousand British prisoners had been worked to death laying tracks in the jungle. Ogi arrived in London the same year that the bestseller Bridge on the River Kwai was released, rekindling a deep anger against the Japanese.

  Ogi was warned. Before he left, he practiced his smile. It was a grin, it was a mask of his uncertainty. He was the only member of his squad who was fluent in English, which he had picked up from American schoolkids in Tokyo, then honed when he was allowed to audit a class for translators. He was not only Japan’s best shot as champion; he was also its de facto interpreter, the mouthpiece of a nation. On his first day in London, he walked through streets wearing his blazer marked by a Japanese flag. At the first restaurant that Ogi walked into, every customer rose and left. A mother dragged her child away from a full bowl of soup. He watched the steam rise over the empty table. He walked into a barbershop but the barber refused to cut his hair.

  The few Japanese in Britain had a simple tactic: they pretended to be Chinese. When Ogi first walked out into the hall in Wembley in front of eight thousand people, it was to a chorus of boos. The British papers couldn’t bring themselves to report evenhandedly on the Japanese team. They were accused of snacking on charcoal (it was actually dried seaweed), alleged to be taking drugs, and called Nips, Japs, and Slants. British umpires docked them points when they spoke in Japanese. Their progress was attributed to their “atomic effort.” During one game, play was halted for forty minutes after a fan pulled out a starter gun and fired, making a Japanese player miss an easy slam.

  Ogi tried to concentrate on executing his n
ew strategy, the “51 percent doctrine.” Instead of heeding his own coaches, who wanted him to probe the opposition for weakness before smashing, Ogi reasoned that every opportunity should be smashed—if you won only 51 percent of those points, you still won the game. Otherwise a player was waiting for select opportunities that might never arrive. In one of their first matchups, Ogi led the Japanese to victory over the favorites, Hungary. The British press began to soften their tone, though the metaphors they reached for still had a touch of militarism about them. These “tiny tornadoes” from Japan had “killer technique.”

  Next up was the English team, backed by a fervent crowd and a message of support from Her Majesty the Queen. Ogi beat England’s number one in front of a crowd that grew increasingly silent. At the very end of the game, after it was obvious the Japanese would be victorious, the eight thousand sat in absolute silence. Ogi could hear the soft thwack of his sponge paddle as he drove the ball past a former world champion. The newspapers continued their barbed admiration. The “brainy, superbly fit, ruthlessly efficient terrors of the table” had prevailed. Having won the team event, Ogi made short work of the men’s singles.

  Ogi stood high on the podium, then bowed to accept the men’s trophy. Hell, Ivor Montagu’s wife, approached him with the St. Bride’s Vase, and the cloth caps of London finally broke into applause. Ogi’s manager reached into his bag for a Japanese flag for the victor to wave, but Ogi signaled for it to be put away. The diplomat was emerging. He smiled widely as the “battery of photographers popped flash-bulbs in his eyes.” The Times at least appreciated the gesture: “Let’s not regard them with contempt.”

  The Japanese would enjoy a victory tour through Europe, never losing a game. Back home, the media wryly wrote that each win came “much to the astonishment of those who still think that Japan’s national sports are cherry-blossom viewing and hara-kiri.”

  The crowd that greeted the Japanese team back in Tokyo was the largest the new airport had hosted. Table tennis was no longer a game for girls. Ogimura was celebrated as one of “the genuine national heroes of postwar Japan.” There was a parade in an open-top car, tours of the country, countless magazine features, thousands of autographs for him to sign. The penniless obsessive had forced a new sport on his 70 million countrymen. Three million registered as players by the end of the year.

  The next World Championships, in Holland, were equally difficult for the Japanese. Every day their embassy’s flag was pelted with eggs and ketchup. Rocks sailed over the walls. The British weren’t the only POWs who had suffered in the Pacific arena. Ogi heard a man hiss at him, “I’m glad you Japanese were bombed.” His team was booed throughout the tournament, until a game when one of Ogi’s teammates was playing against a one-armed Hungarian. Trying to retrieve a shot near the Japanese bench, the Hungarian stumbled and began to fall. Ogi and his doubles partner managed to break the player’s fall and help him back to his feet. Instead of boos, a slow applause gathered.

  The next day, for the first time all week, the embassy’s flag was free of eggs. On their return to Japan, the prime minister congratulated the team that had “ended the stone throwing overnight.” If the change in attitude was being watched by the Japanese government, it was also being noted by the Chinese. There was something to Ping-Pong, a strange tone of diplomacy that was allowing the Japanese to reposition the way the rest of the world was looking at them. Of course, no one would have been looking too hard had they not won.

  Ogimura’s victory was undoubtedly one of grit and ability. Ogi, to graduate from college, produced a short film called Japanese Table Tennis. One of the first purchasers of the film, unknown to Ogi at the time, was the Chinese government.

  The World Championships of 1956 were in Tokyo. Montagu visited his father’s favorite country and wrote that table tennis was a “contribution of all of us to universal friendship through sport and so, in however modest a degree, to peace among all without exception.” A crowd of ten thousand jammed the stadium. Japanese domination of the sport was now so thorough that all four men’s semifinalists were local. Ogimura managed to keep three gold medals from leaving the country: the men’s singles, the mixed doubles, and the Swaythling Cup for the team. The Japanese won the women’s singles as well. As the finals ended, the happy “hysterical crowd” knocked down the partitions between the courts and nearly tore the women’s champion “limb from glistening limb.”

  Montagu stopped by the Chinese squad, giving them badges from England. The Chinese team had been watching the Japanese closely. The lesson was obvious. Victory had lent credibility to the claim that table tennis was a “potent symbol of the country’s postwar reconstruction.”

  CHAPTER 15 | Reconnaissance

  In 1930s China, the murderous tides created by the civil war and the Japanese occupation were strong enough to affect life in the four corners of the nation. Misfortune followed the family of Rong Guotuan, no matter how many times they fled their home in southern China. The tiny town of Zhuhai sat on the far side of the Zhujiang River Estuary. It was only twenty-five miles from British-controlled Hong Kong.

  Hong Kong was a desperate choice for many Cantonese. The need for kowtowing and acceptance of second-class citizenship in return for a family’s survival was galling, but it was better than the world of warlords and banditry that had emerged after the collapse of the Chinese Empire in 1911. By 1937, when Rong Guotuan was born, his father had secured a job in Hong Kong working for the British bank of Standard Chartered, a domain of suits and marble vaults. The Rong family’s stability shattered when the Japanese seized Hong Kong in 1941, and Rong’s father chose to move his family back to his hometown of Zhuhai.

  He never recovered his position in the bank after the war. Instead, he tumbled down the social classes until he hit the deck as a cook on a Hong Kong port steamer. One of the few perks was enrollment in the local fisherman’s union, which had a clubhouse just big enough to house a small library and a battered Ping-Pong table.

  Rong wasn’t the healthiest of children. Until the end of his life, he had the look of a quickly constructed scarecrow, a tall, wide-eyed boy with a long face, bony arms, and knock-knees. He found a job with a local fishmonger, but only because “the fishmonger was operating a table tennis club for gambling purposes and needed an employee who could play for him.” As an eighteen-year-old, just when he should have been developing physically, Rong came down with tuberculosis of the lungs, a common enough disease in the poorer quarters of Hong Kong.

  In April 1957, now recovered, Rong was playing for the Hong Kong team when the reigning world champion, Ogimura, arrived for a brief tour of the island. To Rong’s own surprise, he beat Ogimura two to zero. When he went back into the locker room, his best friend walked beside him. The friend, Steven Cheung, expected members of the press to pour through the door to interview Rong, but to their mutual embarrassment, there was no interview.

  For a moment Rong allowed himself to dream. If he really was as good as Ogimura, then couldn’t he win a world championship? Wouldn’t that at least bring coaching jobs and sponsorship deals? Ogimura had coached briefly in Sweden and had been well paid. Perhaps a living could be made in table tennis?

  Within weeks, Rong found himself part of an all-Chinese Hong Kong squad invited to tour Beijing. Rong shone again, beating all the players the Chinese threw against him. He was issued a strange invitation. Would he have lunch with two of the most important men in China?

  It’s hard to describe the discrepancy between the Hong Kong guest and his Chinese hosts. The two were marshals, the highest rank established by Mao in 1955 when, “in a solemn ceremony,” the Great Helmsman had covered the chests of his favored generals in medals. It was considered a just reward, since they were survivors of the Long March and the top strategists of the civil war. In a nation of 800 million, Rong was being treated to lunch by two of the ten most important men in the country. Why such interest in a tubercular Ping-Pong player?

  At the time, Rong’s first
host, Chen Yi, was not only a marshal but also the country’s vice premier and its foreign minister. He’d commanded the Communists during 1948’s vast Huaihai campaign, which was credited with breaking the back of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, and was in charge of over a million soldiers and militiamen. Alongside Zhou Enlai, he had exiled himself to France in the 1920s to escape Chiang’s purge of the Communist Party. He had come a long way from his days as a Parisian dishwasher, a stevedore at the Seine quays, and a worker at a Michelin tire factory. Addicted to strategy in all parts of his life, he may have been a fan of table tennis, but his true passion was Go, the form of Chinese chess where an enemy is never killed, only encircled.

  His fellow marshal at the dinner, He Long, was Chen Yi’s fellow vice premier. One of the legends of the revolution, He Long had been put in charge of the National Sports Commission. It was another sign of how seriously the Communists were taking their sport, as if General Eisenhower had been asked to run the National Football League or Field Marshal Montgomery were managing the English cricket team.

  He Long’s political development had come slowly. He had been considered a part-time Robin Hood in the early 1920s, sharing his spoils in peasant villages before roaming off in search of new targets. He was a jovial killer. A Swiss missionary who spent eight months as his prisoner remembered his men hacking landlords to death “as though they had done nothing more than kill a chicken for dinner.”

  To begin with, He Long couldn’t even read or write. “When he gave an order, he wrote the characters of his name on the soldier’s left hand. The soldier would go back to his unit, recite the order from memory, then raise his left hand to show He Long’s genuine signature.” For all his eccentricities—his gambling, opium smoking, pencil-thin mustache, and preference for traveling by palanquin—He Long had proved himself a man of endurance and courage. Unlike many of his fellows, he continued to be a rule-breaker even after his official conversion to Communism. An American journalist innocently remarked on the bravery of his wife. There was laughter among He Long’s soldiers. They started counting the general’s wives on their fingers, and needed both hands. “Pay no attention to them!” He Long begged the journalist. “All that was before I adopted the new life.” The journalist nodded, but He Long’s comment drew “a howl of derision.”