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born outside the diamond
Jul. 3rd, 2011 08:22 pm More thoughts on the crosscultural qualities of baseball in Japan.
The Russian-born ace pitcher Victor Starffin is interesting for many reasons, not less the standard English spelling of his euphonious last name: a back-formation from the Japanized Russian. “Starukhin” became “Sutaruhhin” (roughly) became “Starffin”… Wikipedia (I’m sorry to say) tells me that he came to northern Japan with his White Russian family after the Russian Revolution, grew up in Asahikawa where he became a high school star, and was more or less blackmailed into pitching professionally, with his family’s right to remain in Japan hanging in the balance. He won three hundred games, and is sometimes called “the blue-eyed Japanese,” an extraordinary feat in a country where a Korean boy can be born and raised of parents born and raised there and still not be considered Japanese.
During the wartime years, baseball was considered an enemy sport. The authorities had the good sense not to go against popular sentiment to the extent of banning baseball games altogether, but did, bizarrely, insist that all the baseball terminology, borrowed wholesale from English, be translated into Japanese. I’ve read that “baseball games stopped dead while players and umpires tried to remember what they were supposed to say,” but can’t verify this. Postwar, some of the Japanese terms stuck, some of the English words returned, and a whole new host of unique neither-nor expressions arose (some of them back-translations from the Japanese). Ichirui, nirui are commonly used in preference to “first base, second base,” for instance, but you’ll rarely if ever come across yuugekishu for “shortstop” or honruida for “homerun,” apart from the newspaper box scores. And how about “get two” for “double play” or “dead ball” for “hit by pitch”?
In his book about baseball in Asia, Joseph Reaves writes that while baseball was introduced to Taiwan by the Japanese colonists, it remained after the war—with some de-Japanification. “Baseball still was played, but when it was, Japanese terms like sutoraikku (strike) and boru (ball) were banned.” Japanese terms? Clearly, the de-Americanization of wartime baseball in Japan had not penetrated to the colonies: the enemy-English of 1942 Japan was the colonial-Japanese of 1946 Taiwan.
The Koshien tournament (see previous post) was suspended during the wartime years, for all the obvious reasons—materiel was needed for the munitions of war, not for gloves and bats, and young men were needed for aircraft factories or battlefields, not for pitching and hitting. The exception was the summer of 1942, when sixteen teams competed in a military-themed “ghost Koshien” or “makeshift Koshien,” so called because it does not appear in the official history of the tournament. There’s a whole book about the 1942 Koshien, fascinating and sad, given how many of the players went on to fight and die in the war. Others, like the ace pitcher Jun Togashi, survived the war but paid a less obvious price—Togashi’s professional career was shortened because he’d damaged his shoulder during the tournament, thanks to the wartime no-substitution rules.
The journalist Kim Chanjung has written a book about the summer Koshien of 1981, in which the two teams in the final (not coincidentally, both from the Kansai region of west Japan) boasted between them five Korean-Japanese starting players, two of whom chose to use their real (ie Korean) name: Han Yu and Chung Sosang. Kim writes about his young daughter’s excitement at seeing the Korean surnames on the scoreboard at Koshien Stadium. Despite this, there are still almost no Korean-Japanese players who use Korean names professionally, reflecting the general trend among Korean Japanese. Hichori Morimoto, long of the Nippon Ham Fighters and now hitting for the Yokohama Bay Stars, is an exception of a sort, using a Japanese surname and a Korean first name. (“Hichori” is a slightly Japanized spelling of a pet name; a more typically Korean transliteration would be something like “Hee-chul.”) The same Korean first name-Japanese surname pattern is used by a rising young high school star, Waseda Jitsugyo’s Kwonsu Yasuda, known for his habit of doing push-ups in the on-deck circle. Articles about him have mentioned his “unusual” first name (“he was named by his grandfather”), without specifying his ethnicity.
It’s probably worth mentioning that, while God only knows what goes on in the darker and damper corners of 2chan, it seems to be Not Done in Japan to use ethnic epithets in the ballpark. Foreign (meaning Western) players are often considered to be big dumb sluggers, to put it bluntly, but, for instance, I’ve never heard of a black player being called kurombo (a rude diminutive of the word for black, less offensive than the n-word but not nice). Nor have I ever heard bad words being yelled at the players who are known or suspected to be Korean. This may be good gamesmanship or Japanese sweep-it-under-the-rugification (koto nakare shugi, if you prefer) or some of both.
The Russian-born ace pitcher Victor Starffin is interesting for many reasons, not less the standard English spelling of his euphonious last name: a back-formation from the Japanized Russian. “Starukhin” became “Sutaruhhin” (roughly) became “Starffin”… Wikipedia (I’m sorry to say) tells me that he came to northern Japan with his White Russian family after the Russian Revolution, grew up in Asahikawa where he became a high school star, and was more or less blackmailed into pitching professionally, with his family’s right to remain in Japan hanging in the balance. He won three hundred games, and is sometimes called “the blue-eyed Japanese,” an extraordinary feat in a country where a Korean boy can be born and raised of parents born and raised there and still not be considered Japanese.
During the wartime years, baseball was considered an enemy sport. The authorities had the good sense not to go against popular sentiment to the extent of banning baseball games altogether, but did, bizarrely, insist that all the baseball terminology, borrowed wholesale from English, be translated into Japanese. I’ve read that “baseball games stopped dead while players and umpires tried to remember what they were supposed to say,” but can’t verify this. Postwar, some of the Japanese terms stuck, some of the English words returned, and a whole new host of unique neither-nor expressions arose (some of them back-translations from the Japanese). Ichirui, nirui are commonly used in preference to “first base, second base,” for instance, but you’ll rarely if ever come across yuugekishu for “shortstop” or honruida for “homerun,” apart from the newspaper box scores. And how about “get two” for “double play” or “dead ball” for “hit by pitch”?
In his book about baseball in Asia, Joseph Reaves writes that while baseball was introduced to Taiwan by the Japanese colonists, it remained after the war—with some de-Japanification. “Baseball still was played, but when it was, Japanese terms like sutoraikku (strike) and boru (ball) were banned.” Japanese terms? Clearly, the de-Americanization of wartime baseball in Japan had not penetrated to the colonies: the enemy-English of 1942 Japan was the colonial-Japanese of 1946 Taiwan.
The Koshien tournament (see previous post) was suspended during the wartime years, for all the obvious reasons—materiel was needed for the munitions of war, not for gloves and bats, and young men were needed for aircraft factories or battlefields, not for pitching and hitting. The exception was the summer of 1942, when sixteen teams competed in a military-themed “ghost Koshien” or “makeshift Koshien,” so called because it does not appear in the official history of the tournament. There’s a whole book about the 1942 Koshien, fascinating and sad, given how many of the players went on to fight and die in the war. Others, like the ace pitcher Jun Togashi, survived the war but paid a less obvious price—Togashi’s professional career was shortened because he’d damaged his shoulder during the tournament, thanks to the wartime no-substitution rules.
The journalist Kim Chanjung has written a book about the summer Koshien of 1981, in which the two teams in the final (not coincidentally, both from the Kansai region of west Japan) boasted between them five Korean-Japanese starting players, two of whom chose to use their real (ie Korean) name: Han Yu and Chung Sosang. Kim writes about his young daughter’s excitement at seeing the Korean surnames on the scoreboard at Koshien Stadium. Despite this, there are still almost no Korean-Japanese players who use Korean names professionally, reflecting the general trend among Korean Japanese. Hichori Morimoto, long of the Nippon Ham Fighters and now hitting for the Yokohama Bay Stars, is an exception of a sort, using a Japanese surname and a Korean first name. (“Hichori” is a slightly Japanized spelling of a pet name; a more typically Korean transliteration would be something like “Hee-chul.”) The same Korean first name-Japanese surname pattern is used by a rising young high school star, Waseda Jitsugyo’s Kwonsu Yasuda, known for his habit of doing push-ups in the on-deck circle. Articles about him have mentioned his “unusual” first name (“he was named by his grandfather”), without specifying his ethnicity.
It’s probably worth mentioning that, while God only knows what goes on in the darker and damper corners of 2chan, it seems to be Not Done in Japan to use ethnic epithets in the ballpark. Foreign (meaning Western) players are often considered to be big dumb sluggers, to put it bluntly, but, for instance, I’ve never heard of a black player being called kurombo (a rude diminutive of the word for black, less offensive than the n-word but not nice). Nor have I ever heard bad words being yelled at the players who are known or suspected to be Korean. This may be good gamesmanship or Japanese sweep-it-under-the-rugification (koto nakare shugi, if you prefer) or some of both.
