Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction

I am very pleased to announce that I have a short story in the upcoming Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction--An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories. Sales of Tomo will benefit young people affected by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake that triggered powerful tsunami waves, devastated the area around Sendai, and killed and injured more than 20,000 people. Even today, people throughout Japan are still dealing with the effects of the earthquake.

Tomo will debut almost exactly one year to the day of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Here's a bit more about it from the Tomo website:

Tomo (meaning “friend” in Japanese) is an anthology of young adult short fiction in prose, verse and graphic art set in or related to Japan. This collection for readers age 12 and up features thirty-six stories—including ten in translation and two graphic narratives—contributed by authors and artists from around the world, all of whom share a connection to Japan. English-language readers will be able to connect with Japan through a wide variety of unique stories, including tales of friendship, mystery, fantasy, science fiction and history.

By sharing “friendship through fiction,” Tomo aims to bring Japan stories to readers worldwide, and in doing so, to help support young people affected or displaced by the March 11, 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami disasters. Proceeds from the sales of this book will go directly toward long-term relief efforts for teens in Tohoku, the area most affected by the disasters, in the northeast region of Japan’s main island, Honshu.

Edited and with a Foreword by Holly Thompson, Tomo contributing authors and artists include Andrew Fukuda (Crossing), Liza Dalby (The Tale of Murasaki), Tak Toyoshima (Secret Asian Man syndicated comic), Alan Gratz (The Brooklyn Nine), Wendy Nelson Tokunaga (Love in Translation), Deni Y.  Béchard (Vandal Love), Debbie Ridpath Ohi (illustrator of I’m Bored), Graham Salisbury (Under the Blood-Red Sun), Naoko Awa (The Fox’s Window and Other Stories), Suzanne Kamata (The Beautiful One Has Come) and Shogo Oketani (J-Boys), among others.

My contribution, a short story called "The Ghost Who Came to Breakfast," is the story of a zashiki warashi (a good luck ghost) whose friendship is financially rewarding--but comes at a high price.

I hope you'll help support relief efforts in Tohoku by purchasing a copy of Tomo when it becomes available. You'll be rewarded with a terrific collection of Japan-themed prose, poetry and sequential art!

Click here to learn more about Tomo, and to pre-order a copy.

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Life advice (?) from a Japanese toy box

I've been saving this box from a little toy I bought at a Tokyo Swallows baseball game during my visit to Japan in the spring for a little while now, because I've been meaning to blog it. The toy was just a little plastic brick guy in a baseball uniform, but the box turned out to be something special. All along the top there (half-hidden by a sticker) and along the sides are...advice? Life lessons? Philosophical musings? Social commentary? I'm not quite sure. Whatever it is, the author certainly has a lot to say on the matter.

I present the text here in the hopes that you, dear readers, can discern some truth or meaning from them. From the front of the box:

Everyone is playing himself or herself, in spite of he or she is conscious it or not. People cannot stop the play because their ideas are strongly affected by international information that is brought by TV and Newspapers, and they are conscious themselves by social bonds, although they may believe that they are making decisions by themselves first, then they take actions, but these are strongly affected.

The daily life that does not have any changes is passing with unexpected fine balances.

Everything that people is feeling by their five senses is in their inside. They cannot show them to other people as they are.

And from the side:

The imperfection is becoming a motivation to cope with social environment. However suppose people could love others only to the level that they can compromise. You should take more interested in yourself. What really am I?

What really am I indeed? A toy box that has given us a lot to think about for sure.

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The vending machine with eyes

Check out this new Japanese vending machine. Instead of the old plastic bottles on display with push buttons for the choices, it has a 47-inch touch panel display. Customers can use the panel to zoom in on products and read more information about them too.

When people come near the vending machine, sensors detect age and sex with a reported 75% accuracy, and the machine makes recommendations based on those factors as well as the season, time of day, and temperature. When no one is near it, it cycles through different full-screen advertisements, including the one in the video that has big, blinking eyes and says, "I'm thirsty!"

The first of its kind, the "Smart Vending Machine" has been installed in Tokyo's Shinagawa Station.

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Here a Hen, There a Hen, Everywhere a Hen, Hen

So Alan leaves for Japan very soon and we've been doing our research and making our plans. One thing we found out is that lots of individuals and businesses (like the owners of inns we'll be staying at) often give little gifts to people. We wanted to be able to reciprocate and we racked our brains to think of something appropriate. We wanted it to be handmade and to say something about us or where we're from. I had just bought some new wool felt in yummy colors for doll hair, and I was in the mood for hand-sewing some of that felt - so we decided to make some little hens. It took an afternoon to develop the pattern - and I thought I'd take you through some of the steps in designing a felt critter.

I started with my standby favorite, Ed Emberley's Drawing Book of Animals. But something wasn't quite right. Maybe it was the size of the neck and tail? I tried shorter, but that was worse.

 I decided to make it curvier - lose some of the sharp angles.

Success! See the graceful swoop of her tail? The proud tilt of her head? This was one of our hens.

Now - to translate into 3D. I knew I'd be sewing felt with seams on the outside and teeny-tiny seam allowances - so I decided to try it without any additional seam allowances added. I could have cut two pieces of felt and stitched them together for a very flat chicken, but I wanted her to have a wide bottom to allow her to sit upright - like she's sitting on a big pile of eggs. So I needed to add a gusset to the bottom.

I used a cloth measuring tape to measure the distance around the curve of her body from her chest to the base of her tail - that's the length of the gusset. Then I cut two body pieces out of paper, stapled them together at the top, and played with it to figure out how wide I wanted the spread across her belly - that's the width of the gusset. Then I sketched in symmetrical curves - and that's a gusset.

I stitched up the first prototype.

The comb is set too low on the back of her head, and the embroidered wing scribble looks like a three. She's stuffed with polyfill, which plumped her up nicely, but left her almost weightless.

Test 2. The comb and the wing are better. I filled her with plastic pellets and I like the weight, but her head and tail are too flat.

Test 3. Polyfill stuffed tightly into the head and tail and pellets filling the rest seem to be just the right combination. She's pleasantly plump and has a nice heft to her. Now - I just need to make 49 more. . .

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Cultural enrichment at a Japanese hostel

 I leave for Japan this week (!!!!!!!!!) and of late I've been getting the last of our personal hostel/hotel/ryokan stays booked for the family trip we're going to take once my work at the American School in Japan is over. Check out some of the more, um, eclectic offerings at the Matsuyama Youth Hostel:

★ a course on "bending spoons"　(for 2 persons or more. \300 for each)
★ a course on "ecology" (free)
★ consultation of "reforming color vision"(free)
-in Japanese only-
★ How about taking a photograph of your "aura"?
aura for your whole living body : \2500
aura for your fingers only : \1000
-in Japanese only, Reservation is required.-
★ Why not join "President Hirano" in our discussions on…
space and dimensions, the moon and the aliens,water and foods, fortune telling and other curious topics.
-in Japanese only- 

The hostel's motto: "You meet wonder life...maybe."

Good enough for me.

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Japan's "Knuckle Princess"

 

Dubbed "Knuckle Hime" (Knuckle Princess) by the Japanese press, eighteen year old Eri Yoshida became the first female player drafted by a Japanese professional baseball team when the Kobe 9 Cruise of the Kansai Independent Baseball League drafted her two years ago. Now she's brought her knuckleball act to the States, trying to catch the eye of scouts in Arizona winter ball.

The 5'1" pitcher started throwing knuckleballs after watching video of Major League knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, and has a fastball that tops out at 63 miles per hour. Knuckleballs are finicky things though; some days they dance, and some days they don't, and when they don't you need that fastball to get people out. Sixty-three miles per hour isn't going to blow past too many professional baseball players, but Eri is just 18.

 

Her success will depend a lot on having a pitch she can throw for a strike beyond her knuckler. In her first start for the Yuma Scorpions, she gave up five runs in two innings, allowing three hits, walking one, and hitting four batters. Her second stint was better though--she retired all three batters she faced, with one strikeout.

Japanese pro baseball used to have a rule that did not allow women from playing, but that restriction was dropped more than a decade ago, and women have been trying out and playing ever since--but none has yet broken into the all-male ranks of the highest level of Japanese baseball, the Nippon Professional Baseball League. Eri Yoshida has a long way to go before she can expect to compete there, but as Wayne Graczyk of The Japan Times says in his recent column about her, she has certainly showed a gutsy attitude and lots of heart--which will get you everywhere in Japan.

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Book Review: Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

Sadako is a rambunctious, energetic Japanese girl growing up in Hiroshima in the 1950s. Only a baby when the city was devastated by one of two atomic bombs dropped by the United States Air Force at the close of World War II, all the anniversary of "The Thunderbolt" means to her is a day off from school to enjoy the peace festival's shops and concession stands with her friends. But soon the fallout from the attack catches up to Sadako vividly and painfully, as she learns that even the children of those who survived Hiroshima can become victims.

First published in 1977, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes is the fictionalized true story of an eleven-year-old Japanese girl with fallout-induced leukemia who became famous throughout Japan for her campaign to fold one thousand origami (folded paper) cranes in a quest to seek the favor of the gods and become healthy again. Her inspirational story was immortalized in a collection of her letters and journal entries that was published in Japan, and today a statue commemorating her life--and her paper cranes--stands in Hiroshima Peace Park, a vivid reminder of the awful consequences of war.

At just 72 pages--17 of which are given over at the end to an epilogue explaining how the author came to write the story, and how to fold origami paper cranes--Sadako is a brisk read, but certainly not a light one. Told in simple and straightforward, yet often lyrical, prose, Coerr pulls no punches in her depictions of Sadako's and other children's illnesses. But while the book is certainly gut-wrenching, it is by no means so graphic that it cannot be read by (or to) children younger than its recommended eight and up age level. (I am, in fact, reading it to seven year old Jo in preparation for our upcoming trip to Japan.) This is one of those rare books where "eight and up" can really mean any age, up or down, not just "eight to twelve."

More than thirty years on, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes is still one of the most powerful, accessible, and important stories we have about the catastrophic effects of nuclear war.

The Sadako Memorial at Hiroshima's Peace Park

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Japanese ghosts and monsters, illustrated

Surfing around looking for information about Japanese ghosts and monsters, I stumbled onto a fantastic site called The Obakemono Project, an ambitious attempt at cataloging all the macabre and fascinating yokai (monsters, ghosts, and demons).

Along with the descriptions of many of the creatures are some fantastic illustrations by artist Susan H. Morgan. Above, the Yuki-onna, "the spirit of the snow itself."

 

 

The Hari-Onago, or "Hook Hair Woman"

 

The Ippon-datara, or "One-legged Blacksmith"

There are even more goodies at her portfolio web site, Drunken Tengu, though not always cataloged yokai (and not always Japanese):

 

 

The Shaggy Tyrant

Sun Wukong

Give both sites a look! They're well worth your time, particularly the Obakemono Project if you've never had a glimpse into Japan's rich--and bizarre--ghost and monster folklore. Weird, weird stuff.

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Sorry, no Project Runway precap...

Hello, faithful readers! Many of you are probably tuning in today to read our precap for the first episode of the new season of Project Runway, which begins today.

But there isn't a precap.

It was a difficult decision, but we're not going to preview this season of Project Runway. (Please, please! Put away the pitchforks!) Yes, we suffered from bland-fatigue last season, as so many others did, but that's not why we're bailing. We're guardedly optimistic about this new season, and certainly willing to tune in to the show and then read the snarky reviews from all our favorite recappers.

But Real Life, as they say on the interwebs, has intervened. In a good way, to be sure, but it has intervened, nonetheless.

You see, we're going to Japan for two months! Woohoo! You can read all the details here. It was a somewhat sudden thing, but when an opportunity like this comes along, you put everything else aside and you just do it. Consequently, we'll be leaving before the end of the new Project Runway season, and we wouldn't be able to finish what we began if we started the precaps up again.

We also have day jobs (of sorts), which we still have to do until we leave for Japan. Which means that our Japan trip-planning has to happen in the evenings after work, which is, traditionally, when we've written up all those lengthy Project Runway posts--to the tune of 7-8 hours a week working on them. (Yikes!) Simply put, if we didn't spend that time getting ready for what might possibly be the trip of a lifetime, we would never forgive ourselves.

And so many of the things we do with our free time around here have to be put on hold, Project Runway precaps among them.

We're truly sorry to disappoint those of you who stuck with us through thick and thin (lots and lots of thin), and we really appreciate all your support and your kind comments and your feedback during the past few seasons. Thanks too to the great folks at Blogging Project Runway, who have been tireless supporters of our previewing efforts. We hope to be back at it next season--another possibly life-changing event not withstanding.

In the meantime, let's start the show!

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We're going to Japan!

The big news here at Gratz Industries: we're going to Japan!

After years of dreaming about a Japan trip, we're finally going. At the end of last year, the American School in Japan invited me to apply for a scholar in residence position at their school, and I was one of two people selected to join them this year for an extended school visit! I'll be the guest of ASIJ for six weeks, all the while working with the middle school students on a school-wide historical fiction writing project that will take the place of their usual research papers they write at this time. (It's an English-speaking school, in case you're wondering.)

My first involvement with ASIJ came in the spring of 2009, when the seventh grade read Samurai Shortstop and posted responses to a series of creative and analytical questions on a school-sponsored blog. By invitation, I tuned in to read their work and make comments, and at the end of the project I did an hour-long Skype visit in which I announced the winners of each writing contest and answered general questions about Samurai Shortstop and the writing life.

I'm thrilled to build on that connection now by going on an extended school visit to ASIJ, which is located in Tokyo. I'll be staying in an apartment in Tokyo for six weeks, and commuting to my temporary day job via subway and bicycle (which they're loaning me!) Then, toward the end of my tenure at ASIJ, Wendi and Jo will join me to explore as much of Japan as we can see in a couple of weeks. All in all, I'll be in Japan for a full two months! (Alas, it's just too expensive to have Wendi and Jo join me the whole time. My tiny apartment is definitely a one-person flat!)

And here's the kicker: we're going very soon! This spring, in fact--less than three months from now. I've already begun preparing my historical fiction lessons, and we've bought a book or six about traveling around Japan to prepare. Jo is even learning a bit of Japanese, via her Nintendo DS--we found a Japanese language game for her, and she's getting pretty good!

I'll still be blogging from Japan, and should have great pics and stories to share. I'm also expecting to be creatively inspired by the trip, and hope to have a notebook full of great ideas when I return.

You know, many years ago, when I first began researching and writing Samurai Shortstop, I had to work on faith: faith that what I was writing was good, faith that people would want to read it, and faith that someone would actually buy it from me and publish it after all my hard work. I had no way of knowing then just how far that book would take me: first from my day job as a teacher to a day job as a writer (a dream come true), and now, literally, it is taking me from my home in rural North Carolina to live and work half way around the world in Tokyo, Japan. Pretty amazing.

Thanks again to ASIJ for this wonderful opportunity!

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Live in Tokyo: Alan Gratz!

Last week I got to talk live to a group of students in Tokyo, Japan, about Samurai Shortstop! Not live in person, unfortunately, but live via an online Skype connection. At 10:30 p.m. my time (11:30 a.m. the next morning Tokyo-time), select students from the American School in Japan sat around a computer in their classroom and posed questions to my Max Headroom-like mug on a screen.

The virtual visit was the culmination of a month of online interaction between me and the students. The entire seventh grade at ASIJ read Samurai Shortstop for class, and then posted to one of six different creative blogs set up to test their knowledge on the book. The students could come up with chapter titles, write haiku, compare figures in modern baseball to figures in Meiji-era baseball, write the opening of a Samurai Shortstop sequel, write a newspaper article about something that happened in the book, or pitch a new novel idea to me. I checked in to read the blogs throughout the month and replied to their posts, and at the end selected what I thought were the best entries in each section. One of things I got to do in the Skype chat was to announce the winners.

Chris Rose, the great guy who put all this together at ASIJ, also edited together a side-by-side video of me and the students doing the Q&A, starting with the video above and continuing in the videos below. The picture on my end is grainy--I don't know what's up with that, since I could see them just fine, and every time I practiced this with my dad in Tennessee he told me I looked crystal clear. Maybe it's something to do with it being an overseas connection--but why one would look sharp and the other not is odd. Anyhow, with schools being even more strapped for cash lately, I think this might be a really viable way to do school visits here and around the world on the cheap. If you want to arrange a virtual visit with me, drop me a line! In the meantime, check out my Skype chat with the students at the American School in Japan....

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Japanese baseball managers, shame, and "kyoyu"

Wayne Graczyk, sportswriter for the English-language Japan Times, explains Yokohama BayStars manager Tatsuhiko Oya's decision to take a "kyuyo," beginning yesterday.

[W]hat is a kyuyo?

Well documented in Robert Whiting's 1977 book, "The Chrysanthemum and the Bat," a kyuyo is truly a Japanese concept, whereby a manager takes a rest with the theory being the team members are ashamed they played so poorly, their manager had to step aside.

The interim manager jumps in to revive the team and, if all goes according to plan, the players suck it up, perform much better, and the original manager returns from his "rest" period to lead the team and continue its winning ways — even as far as winning a championship — and everyone supposedly lives happily ever after.

It's an odd concept. In America, a Major League manager would just quit--or be fired. The idea of taking a break from the team until they can turn things around by themselves is an odd one. And what about the poor fellow hired as interim manager who turns the team around, and then has to give up his job when the old manager decides he's ready to return?

It does not always work out that way, of course, and often the manager never returns from his "rest." It is likely Oya is done as the Yokohama skipper and, if Tashiro does a halfway decent job over the remainder of the season, he may be retained for 2010. If not, the BayStars will just get somebody else.

Well, there's some justice in that, at least.

Read the full article here.

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Craig Arnold: Missing in Japan

How to tell this story? It's not about me, it's about Craig Arnold, a poet and professor from Wyoming who's gone missing on a small Japanese island, but the way I'm connected to it is part of the story. For me anyway.

It begins like this: A few months back, I applied for this amazing grant from the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission that sends five artists--and their families!--to Japan each year for five months to study and pursue some particular aspect of their crafts. Last year's winners were two composers, a visual artist, a fiction writer, and a poet. My idea is to follow Japanese high schoolers preparing for and competing in the Koshien Summer Baseball Tournament, with an eye to writing a novel about it.

I've been daydreaming about getting this grant since I sent in the application--which is bad, I know, since it's a very competitive grant, and chances are I won't get it--and I've gotten worse and worse about imagining me and the family there as the notification deadline looms.

So I've understandibly had Japan on the brain a lot lately, more than usual, and when I read a reTweet from Laurel Snyder yesterday about a poet who'd gone missing in Japan, I clicked through with interest. "Perhaps I shouldn't be romanticizing getting this grant so much," I thought as the page loaded--and then I was shocked to see a familiar face--the face of Craig Arnold, above.

I don't know Craig Arnold in real life, but when I was applying for the grant, I necessarily looked up previous winners and their bios, trying to get a handle on what the committee might be looking for. Craig was the poet who won one of last year's grants--which meant that he'd be spending time in Japan this year--and I remembered his proposal because it was intriguing. Craig's been traveling to volcanic areas all over the world and writing poetry about the shared experience of these far-flung regions, and his grant was to visit Japanese volcanoes for inspiration.

Craig went missing three days ago on the tiny volcanic island of Kuchino-Erabu-Shiba, which is only about 14.5 square kilometers in size, and has only 160 inhabitants. He checked in at an inn on Monday and climbed the volcano that afternoon. When he didn't come back at nightfall, the innkeeper went looking for him. When he couldn't find Craig, he called the rescue squad, and the search has been on for him ever since. Forty rescuers have been searching the island's trails by foot, and a helicopter and dogs were brought in on day two.

As of day three (Wednesday), Craig still hadn't been found, and family and friends were worried that the search might be called off. A number of people phoned his home state's senators and congresspeople, the US consolate, the media, and other parties, and as a result the Japanese authorities have agreed to extend the search past the requisite three days. Three more helicopters have been brought in too, including two US helicopters. The dense island vegetation limits their usefulness, however. The worry is that he was unable to find the path back down the mountain from the volcano's edge, and that something happened to him in the forest.

A number of blogs and pages have been set up to keep people informed about what's happening with the search, and to let us know how we can help:

The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog
The Find Craig Arnold Facebook Group
The Find Craig Arnold Blog

I'll be checking in regularly to see if there's anything I can do to help. In the meantime, help spread the word, and keep Craig and his loved ones in your thoughts.

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JapanBaseballNews.com

Koshien Stadium

JapanBall.com, former GM Bob Bavasi's fantastic site about all things baseball in Japan, has just launched a sister web site: JapanBaseballNews.com. While JapanBall.com is more a general all around introduction to Japanese baseball, JapaneseBaseballNews.com strives to report more of the day-to-day yakyu action, both professional and amateur. Right now, they're covering Senbatsu, the Japanese Spring High School Baseball Tournament. Last night was a picther's duel, with one of the kids striking out 12 batters in 14 2/3 innings--only to lose the game!

Gambatte!

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Cell Phone Novels

On the heels of the announcement today that Amazon is releasing a free app that will allow Kindle e-books to be read on iPhones comes this snippet from SLJTeen, a School Library Journal e-newsletter focused on teen reading:

According to a recent report in Japan Today, 10 of Japan's print bestsellers in 2007 were based on cell phone novels—successfully selling about 400,000 copies apiece. One newspaper survey purports that 86 percent of high school, 75 percent of middle school and 23 percent of grade school girls read cell phone novels.

Cell phone novels!? As in, novels written specifically for reading on cell phones, or novels that were simply converted to e-book formats and made available on cell phones? The brief SLJTeen article isn't clear, but the extraordinarily in-depth New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear it links to explains that yes, these are novels that were written to be read on cell phones--some of which were then later turned into manga, anime, live-action movies, and print novels.

For more info on cell phone novels, check out Magic Island and Gocco. And to download a few of your own, visit Books in My Phone. Mortal Ghost, by L. Lee Lowe, a YA fantasy novel, might be a good one to start with!

Fascinating. I'll have to give one of these a try--if my antique cell phone can handle it...

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Samurai Umbrella

Just learned about this terrific samurai umbrella from ThinkGeek, via Danny Choo's Japan blog. This gives new meaning to the samurai replacing their swords with umbrellas after the Meiji Restoration! If I didn't already own an umbrella I love, I would be slinging (steel) in the rain with this.

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Here there be Dragons

Over the weekend the Chunichi Dragons defeated the Nippon Ham Fighters to win the 2007 Japan Series (the Japanese equivalent to our World Series, only more appropriately named.) And that's the Fighters as sponsored by the Nippon Ham company, not the Ham Fighters of Nippon. The win by the Dragons ended a 53-year championship drought for the Dragons, the favorite sons of Nagoya, Japan.

Strangest of all, Dragons starting pitcher Daisuke Yamai was pitching a perfect game in the fifth and deciding game when his manager took him out of the game in favor of closer Hitoki Iwase! Proof positive that the Japanese do things differently than we do. Can you imagine if Casey Stengel had pulled Don Larsen from his perfect game in the 1956 World Series against Brooklyn!? Yankee fans would have burned Yankee Stadium to the ground.

Link to Asahi Shimbun article.

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The Father of Japanese Baseball

My friend Judy Eastwood sent me a newspaper article from the Maine Sunday Telegram of May 20th, which tells the story of a Gorham, Maine man who went to Japan in the late 1800s to teach English, and ended up teaching them far more:

On a day in 1872 or a year later, depending on who's telling the story, Horace Wilson decided his students at the First Higher School of Tokyo needed to get away from their class lessons. A little physical exercise in the form of hitting a ball, throwing it and running would get the blood pumping.

The game was baseball, of course. If you've read the end notes to Samurai Shortstop, you'll know that Horace Wilson is credited with introducing baseball to Japan--although the sources I had said that Wilson wasn't a teacher at First Higher, but at Tokyo University. (Otherwise I might have used him as a character!)

What I find most interesting about the article is how Japanese baseball officials went looking for someone from Horace Wilson's family to represent him during Wilson's induction into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001:

A century passed before a representative of Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's national newspapers, showed up at the Wilson farm, now owned by Abigail Sanborn and Balcomb. "We didn't have any idea what he wanted," said Balcomb, who teaches calculus and contemporary math, among other classes, at Saint Joseph's College of Maine.

The Japanese weren't satisfied with the notion that baseball just happened to take root in their country. They wanted the man responsible for planting the seed. Their evidence pointed to Horace Wilson. To honor him properly and promote baseball in Japan, his family had to be found.

In June 2001, a small delegation arrived at the farm to formally invite Wilson family members to Japan. The newspaper, along with Japanese baseball federations, planned a ceremony to recognize Uncle Horace before the 83rd National High School Baseball Championship Series at the famed Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya. Dice-K had pitched his Yokohama team to the championship at Koshien three years earlier.

"It was a terribly hot day," said Balcomb of the second visit. "We were haying. I was in the barn, up to my knees in manure, milking, and one of the Japanese came in to watch. He didn't speak English."

Click here to read the whole article.

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Woofers, Tweeters, and Baru Players

We're packing packing packing for our big company relocation, and part of the process (for me at least) is catching those stray books that didn't get typed in to our online library list at LibraryThing.com, which is like crack to compulsive book collectors. (See our profile here.) We've got everything entered except Jo's picture books and easy readers, and I think we may have missed Wendi's craft books and recipe books, as those were not in the regular collection. Those will have to get added after the move.

One of the stray books I found has some really funny stuff though, and I thought I'd post a little bit of it. It's an old Don Brigg's Tokyo travel guide from 1969 that I picked up at some garage sale or used bookstore somewhere. It's classic. It's got this sort of hip swinger's attitude, and is filled with punny, self-indulgent section headlines like "Hari Cherry," "A Kick in the Kimono," "My Furoshiki's Got a Hole In It," "Two-Rickshaw Garage," "The Price is a Riot," "Truth or Kimonoquences," "The Garden of Edo," "Service with a Samurai," "Squid Row," "Knights of the Round Haircuts," and "A Hard Day at the Orifice." (I'm not touching that one.) The section on packing into Tokyo's infamously crowded trains is called "Mein Kramp."

But there are two sections I want to quote from. First, a section called "Woofers & Tweeters."

Tokyo's freakier hippies are despised by the livelier "danmo-zoku" tribe which is more interested in jazz coffee shops and playgirls. Danmo-zoku young people indulge in whatever stimulants can be obtained. Most have jobs. "Futen-zoku" are hippies without a mission, considered brainless beneath their shaggy manes, interested in promiscuous liaisons without the stimulus of jazz hangouts.

Ah, Japan in the Sixties. Much like America in the Sixties, methinks. The guide book then goes on to tell you where to find these Tokyo denizens, should you want to hang with them. Or perhaps despise them.

And there's a section on Japanese baseball too, called "Take Me Out to the Baru Game" - delivered with a surprisingly fair analysis (for the time):

Japanese baseball teams have about thirty players on their rosters from Hawaii and the Americas, and some stars, such as Yomiuri Giants' slugger Oh (Chinese) and southpaw pitcher Enatsu of the Hanshin Tigers, are of championship caliber. Americans who are playing pro ball here say the Japanese teams lack the depth of U.S. teams, with fewer "stars." Japanese pitchers do not throw as fast, but are experts with screwballs and sinkers; and are called upon to pitch more frequently than are overseas regulars. In batting and fielding Japanese excel, but are considered to be very poor base runners. Japanese players are two or three years younger, on the average, and are not as money-conscious as American stars. Long spring training periods and over-long pre-game practice sessions are criticized by westerners playing in Japan. One Japanese pitcher now playing professional ball in the States notes that American hitters tend to try for the long extra-base fly ball more than do the line-drive hitting Japanese. It is thought that five or six more years will elapse before Japanese ball teams will be able to compete on a more-or-less equal basis with American teams.

That final prediction, compared to the opinions of many other observers of Japanese baseball then and now, is refreshingly optimistic.

Perhaps next time I'll feature one of the sections on sushi: "Thank Cod It's Friday."

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February 3: Meiji Anniversary

Today's "On This Day..." feature for February 3rd on the Wikipedia home page features the anniversary of Emperor Meiji taking the throne in Japan. The "Meiji Restoration" is of course a major historical element in my young adult novel Samurai Shortstop, and precipitates much of the conflict between Toyo, his father, and the new Japan. The picture they feature (shown here) is the one Toyo sees hung on the wall of the ethics lecture hall at the beginning of chapter two.

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