Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Yet most of these skin-deep anomalies turned on nothing deeper than the funniness of brand names and fashion statements mistranslated. In Japanese baseball, however, I felt that something more complex must be going on. For in baseball, Japan had taken over not just an American prop but an American rite, a living drama, a healthy slice of the All-American Pie. More than designer jeans or Burger Kings or the Beach Boys, baseball occupied a special place in the American imagination. It was, in a sense, the story that America told itself about what it could be, its rose-tinted image of an Unfallen garden where all races worked together and heroes walked tall on sunlit patches of green, while families watched the rites of innocence over hot dogs and Cokes on a never-ending summer’s afternoon. Baseball was in many ways a repository for certain cherished aspects of the American Daydream.

  What, I wondered, could Japan hope to make of this?

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK on a Sunday morning, while the broad streets of Tokyo were eerily desolate, armies of pitchers warmed up on mounds throughout the sleeping city.

  And late at night, in the narrow-waisted back streets of Asakusa, I saw a woman pitching a shuttlecock at a shaven-headed boy who met it with a sweet baseball swing, over and over and over again, while two men crouched in the dark to watch his form. A snatch of a folk song was caught on the breeze. A full moon rose above the nearby temple.

  II

  When Japan’s favorite team, the Yomiuri Giants, came to Osaka to play their traditional rivals, the Hanshin Tigers, I took a Hanshin Express from the Hanshin department store and arrived at the Hanshin Tigers’ Koshien Stadium ninety minutes early—only to learn that I was late. Because of the capacity crowds expected for this regular midseason contest, the gates had been opened six hours before gametime, many fans had actually camped out overnight in order to be sure of tickets. And already, there issued forth from within the stadium a steady, relentless, deafening chant. Da da da, da-da da da.

  In the forest of shops that encircled the stadium, it was not hard to find pledges of allegiance. Souvenir booths were selling Tiger towels, Tiger pens, Tiger pins, Tiger fans; they had Tiger rings, Tiger opera glasses, Tiger hats, Tiger alarm clocks; they offered Tiger lighters, Tiger radios, Tiger drums, even Tiger telephones. The huge central gift shop also displayed Tiger purses, Tiger postcards, Tiger pillboxes and Tiger pillows on which was inscribed: “50th Anniversary established. We must win a VICTORY this year. HOLD OUT.” All these items were being snapped up in huge numbers by fans in flowing black-and-golden Tiger kimonos, gold-and-black happi coats and Tiger caps (complete with tails), many of whom had doubtless given prayers at the Tiger shrine. And all around, from every corner, came the solemn martial strains of the Tiger fight song.

  Inside, more than an hour before the first ball, the right-field bleachers were already a swelling sea of black and gold. Flags of the Rising Sun snapped in the breeze, and around them fluttered as many as twenty other banners—Tiger flags, numbered pennants, and even the Stars and Stripes. At the front of each row, white-gloved cheerleaders with megaphones were telling the audience when to clap; in the aisles, men in black coats and golden headbands banged heartily on drums to intensify the noise. Most of the time, the fans sat obediently, without a word, in their uniform rows; as soon as they were given their cue, however, they thrust their yellow bullhorns into the air, in perfect unison, and joined together in a thunderous chant. Da da da, da-da da da.

  The fans seemed never to tire of their single, monotonous battle cry, and they raised it, and raised it, and raised it again, whenever instructed to do so. Da da da, da-da da da. And by the time the game was ready to begin, the chorus had turned into a deafening roar. Caught up in the sound and the fury, I felt myself irresistibly stirred. I also felt part of a single huge, and single-minded, body. All of us were one, I thought; teenagers and kindly-looking grandmas and self-possessed young mothers and businessmen, all of us were united in our single common cry. Da da da, da-da da da.

  Thus the chanting continued, always on time, always in synch, as regular as the tick-tock of a metronome. Whenever a Tiger came up to the plate, the cheerleaders leaped on top of the dugout, the men pounded their drums and the entire army of black and gold rose to its collective feet, waving its bullhorns and rending the air with a special chant devised for every player. As soon as the Giants came up, the crowd fell absolutely silent. The next inning, up again would rise the surging chants. Then silence again. The regularity of this push-button rhythm was disrupted only when a Tiger pitcher had two strikes on a Giant; then, the fans would rouse themselves from stillness to let out a low, owl-like hoot that rose like a wave and crashed with a roar to throw off the unfortunate batter.

  Not once in the game, though, did a single fan shout out of turn, or give way to a sudden yell or solitary jeer. Nobody screamed at the umpire. Nobody cheered on a favorite player. Nobody threw curses, let alone beer cans, at an enemy player. Never once was there an undignified scramble—or any scramble at all—after a foul ball that landed in the stands (instead, it was calmly picked up and ceremonially handed back to a bowing attendant). Everyone cheered only when everyone else cheered, at the prescribed time in the prescribed way. The roars were followed by silence; the silence was followed by a roar. Here was passion by remote control.

  Inevitably, the great tribalism of the occasion—the ritual incantation of the massed chant, the black-and-golden regalia, the thronged partisanship—took me back to the crowds I had seen at British soccer matches. But these fans were as wholesome as their British counterparts were not. Soccer fans were all too often nothing more than unemployed layabouts with knives in their shoes and switchblades in their eyes, scrounging for a fight; the Tiger supporters, by contrast, were uniformly well dressed and well behaved; they would rather, I imagined, switch than fight. Indeed, they presented a virtual model of an ideal social order. For even in the bleachers, there were no bums, no drunkards, no necking couples or unruly kids. Four children in front of me tidily poked at four tidily boxed meals of noodles and rice, while their mother anxiously snapped photos of them. Pairs of teenage girls whispered to one another and giggled. Senior citizens looked on with serenity. When the Tigers scored, everyone turned around and shook hands with everyone else, decorous as parishioners at an Easter service. And when their moment came, everyone joined together, on time and on cue, again and again and again, in their single compact chant. Da da da, da-da da da.

  As I traveled to other games around the country, I managed to register a few regional differences. At Meiji-Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, the stalls sold “Hot Man Dogs” and “Guten Burgers” (no pun, I think, intended); ivy-covered, double-decker Korakuen, home of the mighty Giants, was ringed by an amusement park, complete with batting cages, baseball video games and a sock-hop pop group in pink-Cadillac suits singing “Route 66.” The Giants had two pom-pom girls in every row, and a scoreboard that told the fans when to clap by flashing an image of mechanically clapping hands. Supporters of the Taiyo Whales struck up the Notre Dame fight song, greeted a Hispanic star with a jaunty rendition of “La Cucaracha” and serenaded another favorite—almost too perfectly, I thought—with the Mouseketeer chant. Fans of the Seibu Lions traveled to every home game en masse, in a specially decorated train (a show of unity encouraged by the stadium’s policy of providing no parking places). Whenever an opposing pitcher was yanked from the game, Tiger fanatics cried out “Sayonara, sayonara,” and then launched into a remorselessly poignant version of “Auld Lang Syne.”

  Yet for all the minor variations, the ritual was effectively everywhere the same: the same chants at the same time, begun before the game and continued for ten minutes after the final out. (Equally punctual, television broadcasts of Japanese games traditionally lasted for exactly one hour and twenty-six minutes. No more. No less. No matter the context or the occasion: one hour and twenty-six minutes.) Every now and then, I was told, all the feeling that was so scrupulously contained would suddenly erupt, and the fans would go berserk, in wha
t the Japanese call a fit of “temporary insanity,” storming the field or pummeling an umpire. But that was only the exception that proved the rule. Generally, the control at the games was as regular, as rhythmic, as relentless as the chanting. Da da da, da-da da da.

  And every time I saw ten thousand fans filling the air in unison with black-and-yellow bullhorns, I found myself shuddering a little at the militarism of the display—and at its beauty. For the rites of Japanese baseball, however orchestrated, were lovely in their lyricism. When the fans scattered pieces of colored paper or rice into the night air, it looked as if fireflies were lighting up the darkness. In the middle of the seventh inning, the crowd chose not to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” but let off flares, scarlet and mysterious, into the sky. And after the final out, spectators sent rainbowed streamers fluttering out onto the field that streaked the air with their brightness. The teams in the Japanese leagues were not called Dodgers or Expos or Astros; they were Dragons, Swallows and Carp. And the song the Tiger fans were singing was called, quite beautifully, “When the Wind Blows Down from Mount Rokko.”

  IN ORDER TO get closer to the heart of the sport, however, I decided one day to pick up the English-language autobiography of Sadaharu Oh, the Babe Ruth of Japan and the country’s unquestioned king (in symbol-perfect Japan, even his name meant “king”). The classic works of American baseball reminiscence—Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, for example, or Sparky Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo—are, famously, gossip columns crossed with jokebooks that throw open the doors on a madcap whirl of cokeheads, birdbrains, rakes, flakes and lovable bumpkins; Oh’s book, by comparison, ushers his reader into a world as hushed and solemn as a monastery.

  The story of the star’s ascent unfolds, in fact, like nothing so much as a Japanese Pilgrim’s Progress, with its author a kind of earnest Zen Everyman bumbling along an archetypal obstacle course of pitfalls and temptations. Instead of accounts of key games or late-inning heroics, Oh devotes most of his space to chronicling his “fatheaded clumsiness” as a youth, his typical off-field errors in the entertainment districts of the Ginza, his sense of obligation to the fans. “Outside the world of baseball,” he matter-of-factly reports, “I was a fairly boring fellow.” And instead of dwelling on his greatest hits, he concentrates on the stages of his often painful quest for spiritual maturity. The stars of this morality play are Providence and Time; its protagonists a strange, half-magical group of spirits and forces and guardian angels that seem to govern Oh’s destiny much more than the man himself.

  Thus everything in the player’s life takes on an almost mystical glow. When the fledgling star was still in his teens, he records, he consulted a soothsayer for advice. Keep always the image of a dragon in your mind, said the sage, and change your name for a year. Oh did so, and became a star. When the schoolboy pitcher developed a blister on his finger before a crucial game in the High School Championship, while far from home in a dingy boardinghouse, a man suddenly appeared at his door. It was his father, there to proffer an ancient medicinal cure of ginseng root mixed with Chinese wine, before vanishing again into the night. Many years later, when he was struggling to beat Hank Aaron’s world record of 755 home runs, Oh was in desperate need of help. The more he pressed, the less he achieved. The less he achieved, the more he pressed. Days passed, the record remained unbroken, camera crews and police escorts dogged his every move. The star tried everything he knew to break the slump. He stood on his head, he held his breath while swinging, he practiced kiai, a special Zen method of shouting. All to no avail. Then, one day, as he sat in the clubhouse before a game, his mother abruptly materialized, as from a mist, before him. In her hand she carried a bag full of apples and a box full of crickets. The apples, she explained, were for Sada’s teammates, the crickets for his daughters. With that sibylline utterance, she disappeared again. Mysteriously strengthened by her appearance, Oh went out and broke the record.

  As befits such an unearthly history, Oh’s story, subtitled A Zen Way of Baseball, was not only shot through with poetry; it was also steadied by a temple of oracular aphorisms (“In combat, I learned to give up combat. An opponent was someone whose strength joined to yours created a certain result. Let someone call you enemy and attack you, and in that moment they lost the contest”). Whenever he was asked for an autograph, the slugger copied down, next to his name, the characters for “patience,” “spirit” or “effort.” He never once asked for a salary raise. And the glossary at the back of his volume does not explain such terms as “goof off,” “gopher ball,” “beaver shooter” or “bonus baby,” but Japanese phrases that connote “the path of an echo,” “tender feeling” and “internal or spiritual balance.”

  Remarkably too, everyone else in Oh’s world seemed to move within this same high realm of rarefied abstraction. A member of the star’s fan club used to express his devotion to his hero by visiting the grave of Oh’s sister whenever Oh could not make the trip himself. The Giant manager prepared for the season by purifying himself at a Buddhist retreat, and after disappointing showings, he delivered public apologies to the fans. The man who made the slugger’s bat wandered through a forest in search of a tree whose soul would match the soul of the hitter. And perhaps the closest thing to a hero in the story was Oh’s sensei, Hiroshi Arakawa, the batting coach who trains him in aikido, Zen, Kabuki and, ultimately, the traditional arts of swordsmanship, teaching him how to hit by showing him how to wait.

  Ghostwritten, so it seemed, by a samurai monk-poet, Oh’s book was in many parts movingly beautiful. Closer in spirit—and “spirit” was the word that tolled through the book like a prayer bell—to Waiden than The Mick, it transported one from the beer-stained bleachers of the American game to a shrine in the mist at the top of a mountain. Suddenly, baseball was seen from a great and cloudless height, sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the game seemed only to interest Oh as a model of man’s larger universal striving. The diamond was just a reflection of the diamond path, the base path just a narrow road to the deep north within. The game was taken seriously only because it was not in itself taken seriously. Baseball, I thought, was back in proportion.

  Or was it? The single great problem with the Japanese game, I was told by Robert Whiting, the longtime American expat who has become the foremost Western expert on Japanese baseball, was that, in truth, everything—absolutely everything—was deadly serious. Everything was pitched at the exalted, almost dizzying heights inhabited by Oh. Poker-faced committee men thrashed out the implications of the game’s minutiae. Managers and fans pored over statistical breakdowns of every single pitch thrown by every single pitcher. Editorials in the Japan Times solemnly deliberated over the pros and cons of aluminum bats (which increase the potential for home runs, but break all too easily: progress has its price). Teams, above all, were managed like Marine camps, in which players had to run endless, mindless exercises in order to toughen their “fighting spirit.” Some managers determined the marriages of their players; one had recently slapped his shortstop and kicked his catcher. “It’s almost a military-type discipline,” Dennis Barfield, a U.S. import, said on TV, explaining how the teams had to perform their wind sprints together, chanting the same slogans and running in formation like a squadron. Players had to be as relentlessly well drilled as their fans.

  In America, the special charm of baseball had always seemed to lie in its casualness, each game and season drifting past with the rhythm of a lazy daydream. Baseball was full of spaces, interstices, silences for Memory or Fancy to fill. And since every team played 162 games in a year, very few individual contests greatly mattered; a trip to the stadium was really a leisurely outing on a spring afternoon, a prolonged seventh-inning stretch, a languorous distraction. The game offered none of the jazzed-up jive and nighttime ghetto fire of pro basketball, nor the power-politicking head games of football. It flowed instead like a family picnic. Basketball was about drugs, football about sex. Baseball was good clean fun.

  So too, the whole mythos of American
baseball had to do with summertime flights of whimsy and wackiness, red herrings and gentle amusements. The game was the domain of screwballs who came out of left field. Its most cherished figures were not such superstar exemplars of decency and hard work as Dale Murphy, Steve Garvey or Rod Carew, but Characters—Tommy Lasorda, for example, the pasta-eating Italian with a joke for every occasion, or “Spaceman” Lee, the dope-smoking free spirit beloved of rock stars, or Gaylord Perry, gray-haired master of the illegal spitball. The Marvelous Mets, slapsticking their way to last place season after season, had gained much more attention than the routinely successful Orioles; the oral history of the game lay not with Lou Gehrig or Ted Williams, but with salty curmudgeons and masters of the malapropism like Casey Stengel and Leo Durocher. Baseball Is a Funny Game was the title of Joe Garagiola’s first book, while Jay Johnstone’s autobiography reveled in precisely the element that the Japanese generally preferred to forget: Temporary Insanity. True, Bill Freehan’s seminal book of memoirs, Behind the Mask, did enjoy the perfect title for a study of Japan—and one that had, in fact, been used for a book on Japanese subculture—but the Detroit catcher had meant the phrase in only the most literal of senses.

  In Japan, however, baseball was not a funny game. Oh rarely cracked a smile in his book, and the fans I saw never guffawed. There was no time—or room—for folly in the Japanese game. Watching the high school contests on TV, I told Whiting, I was much impressed by how expertly the teenagers mimicked all the moves and mannerisms of the pros—were it not for the scoreboard, I would not have been able to tell whether I was watching a major-league game or a high school one. That, said Whiting, was no surprise. Many high schools were in fact nothing more than baseball factories, set up for the assembly-line production of pros. The boys had to practice 350 days a year, and often through the night. Each of them had to shave his head as a sign of devotion to the team, and each was likely to get slapped if he did not chant in harmony with the team. In the stict kohai senpai hierarchy that governed these squads, every freshman had to dance attention on his seniors. The bullying that resulted could make even the fagging of British boarding schools sound benign by comparison; recently, said Whiting, a freshman had died at the hands of a senior.