There is nothing like March in Japan. The weather starts changing as the chill of February fades. Setsubun in early February is the traditional launch of Spring, and although the majority of Japanese participate in the cultural and spiritual cleansing of the house, nobody really believes or feels Spring in the air. March, on the other hand, has clear signs things are changing.
As the air warms, a trail of cherry blossoms start blooming from the southern tip of Okinawa up to the northern edge of Hokkaido more or less like falling dominoes. Like clockwork, everyone knows what to expect, the events and the traditions, none bigger than the Sembatsu Kotogakko Yakyu Taikai, the national high school baseball invitational tournament. So begins the Spring Tournament, Haru no koshien, the Spring rendition of the Japanese high school tournament classic, where 32 of the top high school teams from around Japan are invited to Koshien Stadium in Hyogo. The baseball tournament is often the first glimpse of Japan’s talent pool before the main and last tournament in the summer at the same stadium, the Zenkoku Kotogakko Yakyu Senshuken Taikai, or Natsu no koshien, the Summer Tournament. Think March Madness, but with high school baseball instead of college basketball.
It’s March 18th, a sunny 15°C, or 60°F, perfect weather for baseball. The 95th Memorial Tournament’s opening ceremony kicked off at 10:30, and an hour and a half later, the first game began between Tohoku High School from Miyagi, and Yamanashi Gakuin from Yamanashi. In the top of the first inning with Tohoku High School up to bat, a grounder is hit toward Yamanashi Gakuin’s short stop, who was unable to field it. Upon reaching first base, Tohoku High School, and all of Haru no koshien, had the first runner on base. Seizing upon the opportunity, the young Tohoku high schooler put his two hands together and rotated them against each other in a grinding motion in a celebratory act. Unfortunately, not everyone saw the action as one for celebration.
The game was briefly stopped, with the umpire reprimanding the member of Tohoku High School not to engage in such laudable manner, since it would draw attention away from the game itself. For those who have followed the tournaments since its inception in the Meiji Era, pass the Showa Era, throughout the Heisei Era, and now into the Reiwa Era, such stringent demands from officials is fairly commonplace. For others who haven’t been around that long, or who haven’t had the experience of participating in the koshien tournaments before, the long arm of history would certainly lose to the adrenaline-filled moment. A player only gets five chances throughout their three-year high school career to qualify, of which going to the invitational just once is an historic moment not only for an athlete, but also the school’s and the community around them. Once there, the way the athlete chooses to display those emotions could be seen as self-aggrandizing. Or it could be seen as a sign of the times. And the player’s choice of signs, the pepper mill action, was currently sweeping over not only the world of Japanese baseball, but all of Japan itself. Crowds of fans, the mainstream media, and even department store shop staff have embraced it. Apparently, the Japan High School Baseball Federation did not.
“We have always asked high school baseball to abstain from unnecessary performances and gestures. We understand the players’ feelings of wanting to have fun, but the federation believes the fun should come from the game,” the Japan High School Baseball Federation said in a statement, as if intentionally wanting to nip it in the bud. World Baseball Classic or not, they would carry on as always regardless.
The pepper mill action, which has now become synonymous with the 2023 WBC Japanese team, was brought about by Japanese-American Lars Nootbaar, an outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, playing in honor of his mother’s native Japan. Without the ability to express the energy he wanted from his teammates, his Japanese being less than remedial, and expecting his new teammates to understand English too much a demand, Lars Nootbaar decided to go with a gesture that could better represent what he wanted them to understand, one that didn’t need saying outright.
“We wanted a little hit celebration, something to do. We didn’t really know what to come up with.” Japan’s first exhibition game was against Japanese baseball team Chunichi Dragons in early March, before koshien had begun, with all baseball eyes on the country’s biggest stars. Lars Nootbaar was the lead-off batter for Team Japan. “Whatever I go out there and do first, that’s what we’re gonna roll with. We got the pepper-grinder out there. And you know, we kind of stuck with it.”
Lars Nootbaar was able to single on to first base, and twisted his fists on top of one another, like a pepper mill. Although it was new to his Japanese fans, his St Louis fans were very familiar with it. The gesture was less about himself, and more about the whole team. In fact, it would be a stretch to call it celebratory. It was a to say it was time to grind in the most universal way possible, beyond the language barrier that existed between not only he and his teammates, but between fans from every corner of the world, watching as the world comes together over baseball. It is a metaphor, his metaphor, for the philosophical approach to the game he wanted his teammates to lock onto, to get his them to grind out every at-bat, to make the opposing pitcher go deeper into the count until a more favorable, playable pitch presented itself. The gesture, let’s call it the pepper mill action, is a metaphor for working hard, to grind it out, a phrase Americans and other English-speaking citizens have heard millions of times. It meant nothing was going to just be given to you. No pitcher was going to loft an easy one directly over the plate. You are going to have to do the work. If you wanted something hittable, then knock away all the other pitches that could strike you out, until the pitcher had to throw the one with your name on it.
It went immediately viral the moment Shohei Ohtani, Japanese player of many talents and the world’s biggest baseball star, batted Nootbaar in later on. From his spot on base, Shohei Ohtani pointed to the dugout and repeated the gesture, giving Nootbaar’s pepper mill action the fortitude to cement its significance to the rest of the team. What it stood for was perhaps not immediately grasped, as the team ended up losing that first exhibition game 2-7. Perhaps it was that first loss that made them embrace the silent mantra the pepper mill action offered. They were going to have to grind.
The next night, every player celebrated hits with the same gesture. The gesture created a phenomenon all itself. Signs were made, t-shirts printed, and even pepper grinders were selling like never before. Rubirosas, the biggest pepper grinders measuring over 60 cm long, for the most part used as a gimmick, as a touch of theater for dining experiences, were quickly the first to be sold out. Their gargantuan nature made them easily visible among the 70,000+ who attended the games at Tokyo Dome.
Prior to Lars Nootbaar’s successful at-bat and the dual swordsman’s recognition of it, pepper grinders had no place in Japanese baseball whatsoever, even if they truly are a perfect metaphor for how the Japanese way of playing baseball is, the small ball approach that dominates the coaching philosophy throughout all 47 prefectures and regions. The power hitters, like Shohei Ohtani or the legendary Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui, simply were too few and far between in the island nation. Without a glut of that dynamic amount of force, power ball wasn’t going to work. Japan had to rely on a different approach to manufacture runs, to outscore opponents. Grinding out every hit and every run, stealing bases or bunting players over, putting players into the best position for success, efficiently maximizing every possibility to gain an edge was what Japanese baseball had always traditionally been about. Now, after a hundred years, there was a gesture to represent all of that history and tradition, one embraced by all who loved the game of baseball.
A pepper-grinder had even made its way into the dugout, brought in by someone on Samurai Japan, propped up in the biggest of moments. The team never lost again. The gesture was here to stay.
Metaphors exist because certain things are very difficult to put into words. In English, metaphors are used figuratively, to offer an explanation for its intended audience that is better understood than a whole lot of words. Metaphors in sports do a better job of bringing the sport’s intensity to its fans than the action sometimes did. “The eye of the tiger” is a metaphor for the ferocity required to rise up and defeat a stronger opponent. “A Hail Mary” is a metaphor for something improbable and miraculous. “The whole nine yards” refers to doing everything that can possibly be done; thought-out, examined, and performed. “A game of inches” is a metaphor for how even minutiae can have a surprisingly large impact on the overall result, even if games and plays literally are decided by an inch or so. Sometimes the metaphor is more than one thing, for example, “the meeting between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.” This is often the metaphor of choice when pitting a great offense against a formidable defense. Metaphors are everything and everywhere in sports.
Metaphors, though translatable to sports, is less translatable to Japanese. Judy Wakabayashi’s “Japanese-English Translation” offers a detailed list that can be strenuous for those unfamiliar with it. Commonly known as hiyu, hiyu have linguistic parts attached to them, specific grammar such as like or as..as, to offer an English equivalent. What are considered metaphors seem to much more resemble similes, in as much that they are used for comparison, and correlating the intensity of those compared to one another, rather than asserting the identity of another, transcending one object beyond its accepted consensus identity.
That is not to say that metaphors are not a function within the Japanese language. Rather, they don’t function in the same way that they do in English. Japanese metaphors are used to add to specificity, rather than to blur the lines, as a way to elucidate instead of suggesting ambiguity. “His baseball game lights the world on fire,” is understandable because it highlights how amazing his ability to play baseball is. As for the sentence “He is a baseball,” there is no room for the simplicity of the sentence to exist. Of course he is not a baseball. A baseball is an object thrown around, without its own intention and direction, and although it can do amazing things, it certainly cannot be a human. And that is the problem.
The metaphor, in the English usage, offers another level of thought. The baseball is not meant to be the human. The human is the baseball, not turned into a baseball, not resembling a baseball, but the object itself, devoid of its own pleasures, existing only to entertain the millions watching it, until it is discarded for another one. With the metaphor, the rest need not be explained. The rest is created by pondering on what truth is meant by a human being a baseball, and what relevant things had led up to such an unusual coalescence of self. The concept is rather dialectic. The concept is also foreign to most Japanese people, even those who speak English beyond a remedial level. Partly to blame is the way English is taught in the Japanese education system. “He is a baseball” is after all, grammatical incorrect.
Although there is evidence to support that English education began in the 1600s when Ieyasu Tokugawa was forming a united government throughout Japan, the date of the beginning of modern formal English education is largely accepted to be in the 1850s, after Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry advanced his ships into the harbor of Tokyo Bay, opening lines of communication with the island nation and the rest of the world, and more importantly, with the United States.
The world was demanding that Japan be present, and for Japan to present itself accordingly, it would have to modernize. Since no one beyond its thousand or so islands spoke Japanese, Japan was forced to learn the language of trade that was already in use; English. This is crucial to understanding why some English is better understood than other English. English in Japan was meant to be a tool used toward modernization and industrialization. It was not a subject meant for conceptualization. What words in English were necessary to communicate trade and industry with the rest of the world? It is doubtful that metaphor was at the top of the list, or even on the list at all.
An interesting thing to point out: one of the things that Commodore Perry had unofficially brought to Japan that is now vital to Japanese culture happened to be the game of baseball.
So when Lars Nootbaar put his hands together to imitate the motion of a pepper mill in order for his teammates to understand that they would need to grind out every at-bat, although the message may have been understood, rather than the rally cry being something like “Time to Grind,” what we got on signs and towels professionally printed instead was “Grind the Pepper.”
Whoever was printing them most likely copied designs which were already being sold in St. Louis Cardinals shops all across America. Americans, though, are aware of the phrase as a metaphor. In a similar vein, the Angels, the team that Lars Nootbaar’s WBC teammate Shohei Ohtani plays for, uses a rally monkey. People don’t literally buy or bring monkeys into the ballpark with them.
Rather than metaphor, the pepper mill action was likely seen as some kind of idiom. And there are plenty of them in sports, too. When something is going “down to the wire”, it is originally a reference to horse-racing, and how the result will be impossible to know until the finish line. If you’ve ever “dropped the ball”, you’ve let down the team, just as you would have in baseball, basketball, football, or rugby.
Although the two languages have a history of bizarre idioms that the other would find hard to fathom, idioms are not metaphors, and metaphors are not idioms. Though very similar to each other, and certainly interchangeable in certain cases, there are differences, and the minutiae matters. One relates to a state of being, and one relates to a state of action. One relates to an object, and one relates to an activity. One relates to a presence, and one relates to the results around it. One can be culturally explained, whereas the other is meant to offer a glimpse of the transcendent, to bridge the imaginary gaps that cultures have, to set themselves apart from the rest of the world.
“Grind the Pepper” is a literal interpretation of what someone is doing. “Time to Grind” is a metaphoric representation of what something is or needs to be. One is temporary. The other exists, whether we accept it that way or not. “Grind the Pepper” is similar to saying that Lars Nootbaar is Japanese-American. “Time to Grind” is saying that Lars Nootbaar is Japanese. The rules of the WBC say so. Do they people of Japan who have now become his fans agree with that statement?
Not that he sees himself as one way or the other, or if he feels identity itself is confined to a nationality or not, but Lars Nootbaar is a difficult metaphor for Japan to wrap its head around. These statements are not his, but mine. These ideas are also not his, but mine. Given that disclaimer, these statements are also uncomfortable things for Japanese culture and society to have to grasp.
Let’s start with things everyone can handle. As a child growing up in El Segundo, CA, Lars Nootbaar, American and up to that point still possibly Japanese as well, due to his mother Kumiko being of Japanese origin, there is video of him wanting to play for Team Japan when he grows up. In the previous iterations of the World Baseball Classic, he may not have had the chance to do so. Almost two decades since then however, player eligibility was updated to no longer limit players’ nationalities, also including players’ ancestry. It was as if Destiny had wanted Lars Nootbaar’s dream to come true. It also helped that, as of 2021, he was a major leaguer, the dream of all Japanese baseball players to one day become.
Looking back now, it seems silly and obvious, but upon graduating from high school, Shohei Ohtani did not want to play in the Japan League, for fear that it would endanger his dreams of one day becoming a player in the MLB. The coach for the Nipponham Fighters at the time, who is the same team manager for the 2023 WBC Samurai Japan team, Hideki Kuriyama discouraged him for being so impatient. Whether Sho-time would have made it then is a moot point, considering the fame Ohtani has achieved.
Although the invitation Lars Nootbaar received to join the Japanese team is now publicly well-known to be from Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, there is also a lesser known anecdote that has now come to light. Hideki Kuriyama was also contemplating extending a similar invitation to him. Kuriyama had expressed how much Lars Nootbaar’s skillset had impressed him, his ability to run, his fielding prowess, and his adroitness for getting on base. Since the 2022 All Star break, he was 4th in the majors for drawing walks. Even as an American, Kuriyama firmly believed that the team would love him. To invite Lars Nootbaar to join Samurai Japan, Kuriyama would have probably tried to call him, most likely requiring him to first acquire a capable interpreter. Those are the traditional methods. Of course, traditional means of communication would not have reached Lars Nootbaar as quickly as Instagram.
Whoever sent the invitation is trivial, minutiae in the history of baseball. That Lars Nootbaar accepted is the far more important thing. In doing so, it made him the first non-Japanese citizen to play for Team Japan. Now for something not as easy to deal with, for something slightly beyond the limitations of words, and start to see behind them, behind what they are made of. We have to look at the essence of the meanings of the words, and the transcendental signifier that gives them any meaning among the consensus of people and groups which use them, which expect them to mean something congruently.
Was Lars Nootbaar an American playing for Team Japan? Yes. Was Lars Nootbaar a citizen of Japan? Legally, unless he declared that he was not a citizen of Japan at either an American or Japanese embassy, or unless his mother Kumiko did not indicate an intention to retain his Japanese nationality, then the answer to this question is also yes. Then again, there is a Japanese law stating that a person with dual nationality in Japan need to declare at the age of 22. As of the beginning of the 2023 World Baseball Classic, Lars Taylor-Tatsuji Nootbaar, or Tacchan as his Samurai Japan teammates call him, is 25. Final question: is Tacchan Japanese? The best answer that the majority of his newfound fans would give on a general level is that Lars Nootbaar is a hafu. Half-Japanese. A dodge, and certainly not a metaphor.
Most likely, his teammates wouldn’t have even bothered looking at his identity in such terms. To them, Lars Nootbaar is clearly American, an American who wants to play for the same team that they do, with roots that allow him to do so. With that as an obvious boundary, it was easy to accept his personality, intensity, and lack of similar language ability. Besides, if they wanted to say something to him, translator Ippei Mizuhara was always around. Who knew which country’s announcers’ wanted a comment or two from Shohei Ohtani, right? Lars Nootbaar is of mixed race, and it is clear to most Japanese people that he is not Japanese, even if an exact and explicit definition of what it means to be Japanese has never really been agreed upon with absolute certainty. What then makes him not Japanese?
Is it that he grew up in the United States, outside of Japan? So did Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, who also grew up outside of Japan, in the United Kingdom. After first asking on social media, “Who the hell is Ishiguro Kazuo”, Japanese newspapers were soon celebrating his Nobel win on front pages as a native of Nagasaki. Reuters even reported that The Sankei Daily boasted: “(Ishiguro) follows Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburo Oe as the third Japanese-born writer” to win the prize, rejoicing his Nobel award the same way they had with others such as Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura, credited with inventing the blue led.
Kazuo Ishiguro had this to say about Japan, “Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.” Rather than using a metaphor to help us understand what it must have been like for him, he decided on the more direct approach, the more Japanese way of doing things. What Kazuo Ishiguro was more or less referencing is known as nihonjiron, the essence of what it means to be Japanese. Whether you are born in Japan, have Japanese parents, or have Japanese roots, nihonjiron is essentially a conformed behavior that all loosely defined Japanese must understand, and what makes them so exceptional as the children of Amaterasu, and is supposed to bring clarity to what the true Japanese spirit is. Unfortunately, it isn’t necessarily a declarative statement, meaning there is no straightforward way to understand what that behavior encompasses to a satisfactory degree, so it creates more feelings of anxiety than it attempts to lessen, unless you have lived in Japan your whole life. It’s confusing, but Japanese people will explain that it is the definition of being Japanese. In a separate quote, Kazuo Ishiguro further commented, “I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan.”
So if it is not necessarily growing up in Japan, what makes Lars Nootbaar not Japanese? Is it that he can’t speak the language? Other than being able to sing the Japanese national anthem Kimigayo, and a few choices words and phrases, it’s safe to say Lars Nootbaar would safely admit he doesn’t speak Japanese in any effective way. Neither can world famous formerly No.1 ranked tennis champion Naomi Osaka, not to the standards held by the average Japanese citizen anyway, although she has shown over and over that she understands it at a native speed.
Naomi Osaka, very much like Tacchan, is very much a metaphor. The case can be made that she is more Japanese than Lars Nootbaar because 1) she was born in Japan, moving to New York when she was three years old, and 2) she officially announced herself as a Japanese citizen, essentially renouncing her American nationality, after winning the Australian Open, which has a payout of $4 million and possibly preventing her from having to deal with the burden of being double-taxed in both countries, saving her a whole lot of money. Yet, in her 3-part self-titled television series for Netflix, she reminds us that she still struggles to speak Japanese.
What makes Lars Nootbaar not Japanese then? The ambiguity of the explanation is as mesmerizing and rich as what makes him Japanese as well. It is also the perfect setting to embrace his existence, as well as others like him, for the metaphor that he very much is in the scope of Japanese society.
The definite nature of an undefined identity forces the culture not even to see them as mixed. Instead, they are half. Although the differences between the two words seem irrelevant, because in English they are often interchangeable, again minutiae matters. In Japanese, their intentions are clear. Something that is mixed is put together in such a way that makes separaing them into different factions impossible. Whereas something that is half contains two defining components which can be clearly seen, separated, and even disadvantaged, and disfavored. Like the difference between metaphor and idiom, one thing can be traced to something, and one thing simply exists. Something that is mixed is still complete. Something that is half, well, it is half of a whole.
Years ago, former Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, or Aso Taro as he’d probably prefer to be known, gave a speech in which he called Japan a nation with a single race. The following comes from Mari Yamaguchi’s piece in the Associated Press. “No other country but this one has lasted over 2,000 years with one language, one ethnic group and one dynasty.” The comments were controversial because they paint over hundreds of years of struggle and brutal assimilation that occurred in different regions of the country, as Japan was marching towards its own version of Manifest Destiny.
What made the speech fascinating and not the typical discriminatory diatribe was how later on, also as reported by Mari Yamaguchi, the former Prime Minister, who lasted a year in office, understandably, “also praised Japan’s success in last year’s Rugby World Cup and noted its ethnically diverse team. Japan became one team while maintaining its own culture and language, stressing the importance of having a clear sense of Japanese identity as the country competes internationally in sports and in other ways.”
The team, although made of athletes holding Japanese passports, would have been described by any other ordinary Japanese person lacking a politician’s mellifluousness, as being somewhat of a mixed bag. Certainly, a mixed bag of goodies, but hardly the homogenous image that people like him try to project to others about Japan. In my opinion, it was about as disingenuous and out of touch as former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s remarks about how there were no gay people in his own country.
Demographically and historically, the area of Japan known as Okinawa is aware of its mixed culture. Filmmaker Greg Lam explores Okinawa’s multifaceted culture and traditions in his documentary Being Japanese. Although now modernly called Okinawa, it was once known as the Ryukyu Islands, and for a long time, had been a kingdom of its own. It had been a tributary state of China, and later a vassal state of Japan. At one point after World War II, it had even been a territory of the United States. This deep mix of language and traditions, contrary to what a rich person born with a silver spoon from Tokyo may think, allowed for a broad range of ideas to comingle, and even change the identity of those living in the area for generations. This mixed nature is locally known as champuru, and seems to work fine, since thousands come to visit Okinawa yearly. Regardless of local problems, identity-wise, something’s right.
Okinawa and champuru is a rarity, a unicorn, like Shohei Ohtani. Most of Japan does not see positives in mixing culture or identities. The opinions of Taro Aso, or Aso Taro, are more or less the mainstream. Whether you agree with what he said or tried to posit doesn’t really matter. Most Japanese consider its residents to be either Japanese, non-Japanese, or half-Japanese. And the scales largely favor one.
Half, or hafu, as it is written and pronounced in its Japanese iteration, is far friendlier than the terms that used to be used prior. Emiko Jozuka and Vivien Jones from CNN give us a little bit of background. Ainoko was the original term, which roughly translated to hybrid, and unlike the Toyota Prius, friendly it was not. The term, we are told, was the common insult for over 200 years. After Commodore Perry forced Japan to modernize, Japan focused on its own national image in the face of globalism, similarly to how the Han-Chinese have also promoted their own version of Chinese identity, Uighur encampments aside. The whole face and identity of Japan gave way to a new term for those who did not match that same face, regardless of how they self-identified themselves. Konketsuji, mixed-blood child, was less monstrous than hybrid per se, but not by much. It highlighted the impurity of a person’s Japanese ancestry. Originally used to describe the other parts of foreign Asian origin, after a while it evolved to include the children of military personnel. By the 1970s, Japan had globalized to a large degree. International corporations had brought new economic opportunities into the country, like Kentucky Fried Chicken, making things with non-Japanese beginnings not terribly grotesque. The former derogatory terms, once translated, would indelibly paint Japan in a negative light. This lead to the rise of the newest term to describe Japanese people who were not necessarily of pure legacy, hafu, spread throughout the culture, and has been the go-to term ever since.
Half is in itself without racist origins. In fact, it is a globally borrowed term, commonly used not only in English, but throughout the world to describe a person’s heritage. When usually used, both the person’s paternal and maternal countries of origin are referred to. Lars Nootbaar, for example, is half-Dutch, half-Japanese. Hafu, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily offer a source for where the other country is. Hafu often is a statement about how Japanese a person is. And though the term is widespread and an attempt to show its neutrality in terms of describing a person’s identity, needless to say, it’s easy to spot how it could still be seen as a derogatory term, whether the speaker thinks so or not.
On the other hand, when Taro Aso, or Aso Taro, had referred to Japan’s 2019 Rugby team, perhaps he did see the ethnically diverse team truly as being one team having a clear sense of identity. It can even be seen as a truly beautiful statement, suggesting that Taro Aso, or Aso Taro, no longer sees Japanese people through any other filter but as all, as different as they are, truly just being Japanese. It would be similar to how Stephen Colbert had often said that he doesn’t see color on his late night show The Colbert Report. However, for me to see that Taro Aso, or Aso Taro, no longer sees the need to use terms like hafu and that this idyllic image that all diverse people living in Japan are Japanese has finally arrived, I’d have to ignore all the other awful things he had also said, such as “blaming the elderly and childless for Japan’s aging and declining population, or for defending a top bureaucrat in his finance ministry against sexual harassment allegations, or also making comments interpreted as defending Adolf Hitler’s motives for the killing of Jews by Nazi Germany”, which were all again reported splendidly and honestly by Mari Yamaguchi. As she follows him better than I do, I believe her portrayal of the former prime minister is far more accurate than my thoughts could ever be. I feel, through her reporting, as if I know how the man sees the use of the word hafu fairly clearly. I feel he has not quite crossed the Rubicon. He and the rest of Japan haven’t bothered getting on a boat, or even coming near a river for the most part.
It is easier to determine what isn’t Japanese then it is to determine what is Japanese. A lot of the problem stems from the obsession with being 100%. 100% suggests completion, a full or complete amount. If you got 100% on a test, that is the most you can be awarded, and you got the maximum amount you possibly could. That doesn’t mean that was the only amount of work you did, though.
There is a word used less by Japanese citizens that are considered hafu. Some within this demographic refer to themselves as daburu, the Japanese pronunciation for double. In a sense, it is a pronouncement that being of mixed heritage means one is already a whole person. the half-Japanese part is already a whole part, and another part tops it off. It is a celebration of the other side, which does not get the amount of attention the Japanese side often gets. The term is a more modern one, the 90s being more recent than the 70s, but not one that has caught on through popular Japanese culture, at least not yet. Whether it will ever rise in popularity to replace hafu is unknown, but judging from the media coverage given to biracial people, the accuracy of the term seems to hold muster.
Rui Hachimura, although inadequate at English in his Japanese high school, demonstrated his bilingual chops during a pre-game show as a member of the Gonzaga Bulldogs on a bit where he answers English questions in fluent Japanese. Often in Japanese media, only his Japanese answers are shown, but he answers questions in fluent English during those same press conferences as well. Now a member of the Los Angeles Lakers, he’s become more of a two-way player than he had previously been.
We already know what Naomi Osaka is capable of, as the first Japanese player to ever hold the No.1 ranking in professional tennis. Other than making appearances on Japanese variety TV shows, where she often encourages young Japanese children to continue playing the game of tennis, she also appeared on the streets of Minneapolis, in support of Black Lives Matter. During her last championship march through the US Open, she donned face masks with various names of victims who had died because of police brutality, including that of George Floyd. She has shown not only what the responsibilities of athletes are to its societies, but also how far these societies can be stretched by its athletes.
Now, what about Lars Nootbaar? For now, rather than look at how his countries view his achievements, the word is yet out on that, there is a range of people who can comfortably show us what they think of the body of work he has put up so far: his family. Does anyone believe his parents are not proud of him for getting into the majors? What parent would not be ecstatic that their child was able to fulfill the dream of becoming a professional athlete? Now who will try to argue that his mother Kumiko is not proud of him for not only joining Samurai Japan, but also winning the 2023 WBC on behalf of Japan? Clearly, that is also going above and beyond maximum expectations, is it not? 100% is not enough. 200% seems far more appropriate, and certainly more appropriate than half.
Then again, maybe that is a bridge too far for now. That would seem to proclaim that the rest of the people of Japan are not adequate enough to be quite as whole. Nobody would be willing to stand behind such a statement. However, looking at current global trends, the world is changing rapidly. The real question then is this, by trying to remain true to the traditional terms Japanese people are accustomed to, is what is currently accepted as being Japanese enough to cut it in the future? Especially with a declining birth rate and an ever-increasing need to import workers to keep the status quo, will Japan even have enough people to sustain its place in the world, by its own terms and standards? If not, what then is the point of the rules it is forcing itself to abide by? It’s impossible to draw from, especially just from watching baseball.
Lars Nootbaar, however he sees identity to mean, has outperformed any doubts that may have existed before the start of the 2023 World Baseball Classic. When the roster for the Samurai Japan team was announced, frequent television guest and former Yomiuri Giants baseball player Hisanori Takahashi posed the question, 「どうして選ばれるのか分からない」「そもそもヌートバーは必要?」 translated to English, “I don’t really understand why he was selected. Is he really needed?”
When Lars was a little leaguer, the Nootbaars had hosted the Japanese high school national baseball team in Los Angeles, and according to his mother Kumiko, the team had “loved him like he was the mascot for the Japanese national team.” Interestingly, unlike American high schools, Japanese high schools don’t have mascots. They are just referred to by their high school names. Spending that time together with the team, which featured players such as former Yankee Masahiro Tanaka, Yuki Saito, Yu Funabashi, and Yuta Shiozawa, who has remained close to the family, is not the same as playing Japanese baseball, but it explains Lars’ motivation and excitement for joining the team. He had been more than just their mascot or bat boy.
Jason Coskrey of The Japan Times reports on how current Japanese major leaguers have received him. Yu Darvish and Seiya Suzuki, who could not suit up for the team because of injury, reached out to several of Samurai Japan’s players on his behalf before the WBC began. Then, there was this endorsement from Shohei Ohtani himself, “He has great talent, and personality, so I have no worries about him. The more fans cheer, it will bring him extra energy. So please cheer as much as you can.”
Hisanori Takahashi, having once been a journeyman pitcher in the major leagues in the 2010s, had never himself been selected to represent Japan in any iteration of the World Baseball Classic, and has since apologized for the remark, praising Tacchan for his achievements on the field and in the batter’s box.
It’s not a surprise that so many major leaguers accepted Nootbaar so quickly. Once beyond the borders of Japan’s island, and Japanese nationalism, the view of what is Japanese and what isn’t changes, or better yet, expands. There are pockets of Japan everywhere, which is well-known to Japanese people, since there are so many programs on Japanese television promoting the reach of Japanese influence all over the world. It’s up to Japanese people to accept them as being Japanese or not.
What is not mentioned in the Japanese media about Lars Nootbaar was how the 2022 major league season had gone for him. When the season began, he had not been a starter, though he was the fourth outfielder on the 40-man roster. He ended the year with a .228 batting average, 14 home runs, and 40 runs batted in, hardly superstar numbers, hardly the type of stat line that Shohei Ohtani displayed. Baseball’s story is told beyond the headlines and box scores, though. Most of his disappointments came before the All-Star break, understandable as a young player seeing regular playing time in the big leagues for the first time in his career, for a player who “didn’t really have an approach, didn’t really know how I wanted to be as a player.”
Fortunately, Lars Nootbaar didn’t let the slow start define his season. He went back to what always got him going, putting in the work, and working hard. He worked out at the batting cages, he worked out at Driveline’s facility to improve his bat speed. He was going to shake off the slump by swinging his bat, grinding away every day. Then, it started to happen. He saw an uptick in production with all that extra work that he put in, as did his team manager Oliver Marmol, who played him every day in the second half of the season, to the delight of all St. Louis Cardinals fans, the original recipients of the pepper mill action. The gesture gave them something to do, other than just sitting in their seats and watching. It had let them take part in the game, giving their energy to the game the same way their favorite athletes do.
I wonder if the Cardinal fans were still able to cheer on Lars Nootbaar, pepper mill action and all, as they watched him bat for Team Japan in the WBC Championship Game. As an American living in Japan, I was certainly able to. Actually, I did more than cheer just for Lars Nootbaar and Samurai Japan. I cheered for Team USA. I cheered for Mike Trout and Trea Turner, as he belted that grand slam in the 8th against Venezuela to put America into the WBC semi-finals. And then I cheered for him again as he belted two more home runs against Cuba, knocking out the 2017 WBC champs by a score of 14-2.
I cheered after Masataka Yoshida hit a three run homer to tie the game up with Mexico at 3 apiece. I cheered after Shohei Ohtani hit a lead-off double in the bottom of the 9th, and I cheered the loudest after Munetaka Murakami broke out of his slump with a walk-off double to send Japan to the championship game. I even cheered every time Randy Arozarena made a great grab, or posed for the camera after a successful showing, his antics only demonstrating his preternatural abilities, inspiring young players throughout the baseball world to see not only what is acceptable, but also what is possible within the game.
So which team did I cheer for in the final game of the World Baseball Classic? Truth be told, I don’t think I really cheered for one team more than the other. I cheered them both on, both Trea Turner and Kyle Schwarber’s solo home runs as equally as Munetaka Murakami and Kazuma Okamoto’s solo homers as well. All of it was, as Okamoto often says in his native Japanese tongue, saikoh desu. I cheered both for the country that I currently live in, and the country that raised me and first taught me about baseball.
I imagine that Tom Hovasse, the man who coached Japan’s women’s national team, felt the same way on the court as he led the Akatsuki Five in the Tokyo Olympics to a silver medal, losing finally to Team USA. As a competitor, I’m sure he wanted to get the W, but as an American, the L might also not have stung so deeply, maybe even having an amount of acceptability that doesn’t usually come with losses, but you’d have to ask him to be sure. I imagine seeing the game played at the highest possible level, and playing the part he had, it’s not impossible to think that what Tom Hovasse was really cheering for was simply a victory. Sometimes, it is more than just the game. Sometimes it is about more than the game.
As I was watching the 2023 WBC Championship Game before noon on March 22nd here in Japan, I didn’t once think about the game, not in the way baseball people often talk about it. I didn’t care about the strategies, the infield or outfield shifts, nothing like that. I was awe-struck, like everyone else watching the game wherever they were watching it from.
Look at how the game began. The two captains and teammates, Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout holding their respective country’s flags, marching their teams out around the infield diamond and along their respective dugouts, before finally meeting each other a few feet away from home plate. That was beyond pomp and ceremony, especially for someone like me with so many ties to both countries. I didn’t have anything at stake. The result wouldn’t change my life in any way. Yet, this little ceremony at the beginning gave off an historic air nonetheless. And then, let’s not forget how the game ended.
With a one run lead, Ohtani facing off against Mike Trout for the final out of the 2023 WBC Championship is a legendary moment, albeit one that became less possible after walking Jeff McNeil to lead off the top of the 9th. Think about the possibility of that match up for a moment. There was now a runner on board and no outs, with Mike Trout on the on-deck circle. Next up was Mookie Betts, a legendary player in his own right, whose incredible antics against the Atlanta Braves in the 2020 NLCS had helped deliver the World Series to the Dodgers, and a year before, whose incredible talent had helped the Boston Red Sox capture the title. And somehow, that Mookie Betts batted into a double play to set up the final showdown between both captains and teammates.
Mark DeRosa made mentions of it feeling scripted, as did Japan’s 1st baseman Kazuma Okamoto, who actually said via translation, “I thought it was like a manga, like a comic book.” It was a moment destined to happen, as if the stars had aligned. Or rather, more appropriately, the stars had all finally gathered. The two teammates had an at-bat for the ages, going to a full 3-2 count before Shohei Ohtani struck Mike Trout on a wicked 87mph breaking pitch, one of his sweepers. I can’t say for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Mike Trout was expecting one of those 100mph fastballs Ohtani had shown him earlier.
Then what happened? Shohei Ohtani, the sport’s biggest star, did something unlike what Shohei Ohtani usually does. Always the gentleman, occasionally picking up scraps of litter from off the field, and always leaving a flawlessly clean locker(such Japanese habits, right?). Sho-time stepped off the mound, chucked the glove on his left hand, and flung his hat in celebration, cueing the rest of his team to run in and join him on the field to revel in the biggest of moments, if not his biggest baseball moment ever. And after delivering on such a stage as this, who was going to tell him he shouldn’t, or didn’t deserve to do that?
After Shohei Ohtani was presented with the WBC MVP award, which was obvious since he had the best stats over the entire tournament, US manager Mark DeRosa had this to say, “What he’s doing in the game is what probably 90% of the guys in that clubhouse did in Little League or in youth tournaments, and he’s able to pull it off on the biggest stages. He is a unicorn to the sport.”
From the other dugout, Reuters reported that Japan manager Hideki Kuriyama said the win could have a big impact on the sport’s popularity back home. “…all the kids in Japan who are watching that might think, ‘Oh, that’s really cool’, and they might want to make up their minds to be baseball players”.
Tohoku High School lost that first game to Yamanashi Gakuin, the final score of 3-1. It seemed the error committed by Yamanashi Gakuin’s short stop had little effect on how things played out, at least compared with the umpire’s reaction. Then again, umpires impact the game far more than they think they do, and sometimes far more than they should. The school still got to sing their song at game’s end, as all winning schools do. The young player from Tohoku High School went on to scoop up koshien dirt behind home plate with the rest of his teammates, as a thank you to losing teams for participating. It becomes one of a player’s prized possessions throughout their lives, as a way to remember their achievement. I’m sure tears were involved. Without being scolded, baseball has always been an emotional game, as all sports are, for players and fans alike who’ve invested their heart and soul into it.
After the game, several people chimed in online about the pepper mill action, or in this case, reaction. Among those voices was that of Hiroshi Sato, the team manager for Tohoku High School. “It’s so popular the whole nation is talking about it,” he is quoted saying by The Daily Mainichi newspaper. “The children are just having fun. Why do adults have to put a stop to it?”
Fun in regards to baseball is something I would trust Hiroshi Sato to know about. Before he started managing Tohoku, he was a left-handed pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants, the most storied baseball franchise in Japan. “We should be thinking more about how children can freely enjoy baseball.”
The outrage even reached the highest levels of the Japanese government, with cabinet member Taro Kano even raising issue. Taro Kano, unlike Taro Aso, has not been a prime minister, but he was close. He had been the leading candidate before Fumio Kishida was chosen. Like other Parliamentary nations, Japan’s prime minister is not directly voted on by the general public. If so, Taro Kano may have become Japan’s Prime Minister, since he was the popular choice. Even still, it is doubtful that he could do anything to change how cheering in high school baseball is conducted, or not conducted for that matter.
To be honest, it is a little disconcerting that someone with real power cares so much about what is happening in high school baseball, when so many other things could use his attention. If Lars Nootbaar’s well-known gesture had been disallowed because it originated from Lars Nootbaar, and what he represents not as a baseball player, but as a person with unresolved Japanese origins, then that is something that Taro Kano should be addressing. For now, we will all move on. Fist pumps and guts poses will still be frowned upon.
Lars Nootbaar himself had been unaware of the controversy his gesture had prompted in koshien. Who could blame him? He had been busy winning a world championship, and his enablers, Japanese baseball fans everywhere, only seemed to show their approval of what he had done. When finally asked, he responded, “I don’t know why it’s banned, but it’s pretty cool.”
It’s hard to know whether he was talking about how the gesture has caught on, or the ban that followed it. I tend to favor the former. He is known for his positivity, which is why he was dubbed the team’s mood-maker. In Japanese, mood-maker only has an optimistic meaning. As for it being banned, it has grown to become too much of a fan-favorite, like the wave, raise the roof, and the tomahawk chop. The pepper mill is one of those great actions that deserve to be in the Hall of Fame of gestures, if it existed.
Baseball’s Hall of Fame sits in Cooperstown, NY. It is named after James Fenimore Cooper, a writer and not a baseball player. For the most part, it is a glamorized museum, a collection of things that people who love baseball can appreciate. The memorabilia spans decades and generations of stars from all over the world. There are collectibles from several Japanese baseball players as well. Suzuki Ichiro has vowed to donate everything that he has left of the game to Cooperstown. That cap Shohei Ohtani had thrown at the end of the game, Cooperstown is where it ended up. So did Masataka Yoshida’s bat, Munetaka Murakami’s batting gloves and helmet, championship game-winning pitcher Shota Imanaga’s jersey, and even the pullover worn by Hideki Kuriyama, Samurai Japan’s manager, who didn’t face a single pitch the whole classic. Yet somehow it all seems deserving. After all, Cooperstown is all about the people of baseball. These things they have donated are a celebration of the things they have achieved on the field.
That’s not to say such things aren’t honored in Japan. During this year’s 95th Memorial Tournament, something happened that had never happened before. Prior to the matchup between Joto High School from Tokushima prefecture and Tokai University Sugao High from Tokyo, Yuna Nagano walked out to the field and began swinging fungoes to her infield starters. Fungoes are practice grounders(as in one-go, two-goes, fun-goes). She got to do that for every game up to the quarter-finals, where Tokai University Sugao High finally exited the tournament, losing 6-1.
It says something that a person recognized as a girl has never played in a koshien match before, and something completely different when we are honoring something as insignificant as this in the age of gender rights. Let’s remember that multiracial people are also having to deal with quite a lot. But that’s Japan, and the power tradition holds throughout the culture. Still, it’s a step in what is generally called progress, especially for Japan. We’ll have to wait for a different kind of player to emerge perhaps. When Lars Nootbaar was 9 years old, he had what seemed like an impossible dream, and yet the stars seemed to align. Rather, all of the stars gathered, from Shohei Ohtani to Mike Trout. That is how his dream ended up coming true. That is how things really change.
Baseball is still a game, meant to be played and enjoyed by people, not because of its rules or its structure, but rather the energy it can generate around it. Just like the pepper mill action, the game did not start in Japan, but it is enjoyed here. Perhaps self-adulation is a bit much, but the players play the game, and they have to gather the courage and strength from within themselves to face a pitch or a ball being struck often at more than 90mph. No rule in the game can teach them how to do that. Most of it is learnt an at-bat at a time, every day of the week, and in Japanese tradition, for over two years before many of the student-athletes even get their time to come to the plate. It is learned and honed daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, yet never perfectly. And given the chance that the execution plays to anyone’s favor, it deserves celebration, even if it is self-congratulatory. When else would they be able to live in the moment? When a team loses, the moment is over. They have to keep on winning to keep on playing.
As for Yamanashi Gakuin? They got to sing their song five times. They played and sung their way into the finals. They were shooting for one more. Playing on April 1st, April Fools Day, they found themselves down by two runs in the bottom of the fifth against Hotoku Gakuen in Hyogo, not to be confused with their initial match against Tohoku High from Miyagi. They were down, but not out. And with their eyes on the prize, it started to come together. Things began with a one-out walk on base. Yamanashi Gakuin’s pitcher and captain doubled off center field, putting players in running position. Their third-baseman grounded both of them in to tie up the game. Now back at the top of the order, their lead-off hitting right-fielder hit a towering fly ball to deep center, allowing their third-baseman to get all the way home. Speed around the bases is as synonymous with Japanese baseball as the alley-oop with American basketball. More importantly, that double gave Yamanashi Gakuin the lead.
Each of Yamanashi Gakuin’s outfielders was able to garner hits off Hotoku’s pitcher. Conventional baseball thinking would be to replace a pitcher before a landslide such as this one. In Japanese baseball, doing so is highly irregular. There is a belief that the player will work through it, showing the incredible bout of confidence the coach has in his player. The more systemic problem for not taking a pitcher out is this; who could you possibly put in? Even powerhouse baseball programs such as these that have been invited to Haru no koshien often develop one pitcher at a time. That pitcher starts every game, often until the final out. The tournament runs for around two weeks, hardly enough rest and recovery time for a six game stretch as this. It is a grind. The only defensible position for this kind of a workload? Most likely, Yamanashi Gakuin’s pitcher and captain was doing the same thing.
Hotoku Gakuen’s coach did decide to change pitchers. Immediately upon doing so, the new pitcher surrendered a home run blast by Yamanashi Gakuin’s first-baseman, a two-run shot to increase their 5th inning output to seven runs. As the young player rounded first base, watching as the ball sailed beyond the outfield wall of Koshien Stadium, he lifted his right fist in excitement. Apparently, it was an acceptable act, since no one stopped him at any time on his way around the diamond, as he touched every base, which arguably could be unnecessary. After all, what greater insult could it bring to the pitcher who had surrendered it? Then again, where’s the fun in hitting a homer if one isn’t allowed to round the bases? It is the most traditional of baseball actions, insult and achievement all at once.
That was the most emotion shown throughout the rest of the game. Yamanashi Gakuin wrapped things up with the final score 7-3 to become the champions of the 95th Sembatsu Kotogakko Yakyu Taikai, the first time a team from Yamanashi prefecture had ever won koshien. And yet, there was none of the pandemonium that was present at the end of the 2023 World Baseball Classic. All the attention on the ceremony was on the speakers and presenters. Both teams were presented with flags and trophies, albeit with different meanings. Yamanashi Gakuin heard their school song sung for the sixth time, then everyone sang to Kimigayo, the Japanese national anthem, much like Lars Taylor-Tatsuji Nootbaar had done. Then they were led off the field, into their locker rooms, and onto their buses for the long ride home, both champions and runners-up. It was the way it should be, and the way it always is. It was nihonjiron all the way to the end, not the samurai spirit, but the Japanese spirit, a fitting end to a game of baseball. A game of Japanese baseball anyway.
The players would probably have a small celebration. The team would have to get back to practice quickly. If they wanted to be a part of Natsu no koshien, there wouldn’t be an invitation waiting for them. The only way to get back to Hyogo in August was to win all the small tournaments that led up to the Summer Memorial Tournament. For Yamanashi Gakuin, that began with their regional. After that, they’d be set for their prefectural against all of the other premiere teams in Yamanashi prefecture. Only by coming out on top, by winning that would they be back to Koshien Stadium, dirt, school song, and all. But first, it all starts with practice, with the daily grind.