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nnozomi This is something that happened a while back, but continues to interest me. So I have this favorite player on the Tigers (Hanshin, not Detroit). Lin Wei-tzu is his name, a young outfielder and pretty good hitter who comes from Taiwan. A while ago he and another player, a guy called Sakurai, did some nice batting and, after Hanshin won the game, were called out for a "hero interview," a Japanese tradition by which the fans cheer while an announcer asks the player(s) formulaic questions and receives obvious answers.
I was half-listening, generally pleased that Hanshin had won and Lin had done well, when the rhythm of the interview broke. The interviewer had said to Lin something along the lines of "Now please give Sakurai over here some praise for his good work too," using the word negirau, which means something like "to praise" or "to reward for hard work." Lin said "Sorry?" It was immediately obvious to me, watching, that he didn't know the word, but the announcer simply repeated himself as if he thought Lin hadn't heard him clearly.
To Lin's credit, he remained unfazed and, in front of the several thousand fans jammed into the stadium, asked amiably "What does that mean?" The interviewer, on the other hand, was remarkably disconcerted, stammering and fumbling around before coming up with a passable definition of the word. Lin got the idea, said cheerfully to Sakurai something like "Keep the hits coming, man," and that was that.
The reason this stuck in my head was the interviewer's lack of ability to deal with the situation. Now, Lin went to high school and college in Japan and speaks Japanese, to my ear at least, very competently indeed; his answers up till that point of the interview were standard hero-interview style, beginning with "Well now," ending with "Yup," and using boku for a first-person pronoun (there are many ways to say "I" in Japanese, and boku is sort of the masculine-innocent one, the one Luke Skywalker as opposed to Han Solo would use). Unlike many of the "foreign players" (=those from the States, Australia, South America, and sometimes Korea) he doesn't use an interpreter. So the interviewer clearly had him mentally filed as "can speak Japanese" and when that proved not to be completely true, got stuck--as if there were "Japanese" players and "not Japanese" players and no middle ground in between.
Coincidentally, not long after this the National High School Baseball Tournament* website put up an article about Taiwan and Japanese baseball. They touched on a story from 1931, when a team from Taiwan--then a Japanese colony--made it to the finals of the tournament. Colonial teams from Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria participated several times, but this team was notable for its starting members: three Japanese, two Chinese-Taiwanese (?), and four indigenous Taiwanese (referred to in the article as members of the "Takasago tribe," which I thought was a derogatory expression).
Particularly notable, in fact, when you consider the Musha (Wushe) Incident of 1930, one year earlier: indigenous Taiwanese rose up and killed about a hundred Japanese colonists, which--not surprisingly--resulted in reprisals in which nearly a thousand indigenous people were killed. And just a year later Japanese and indigenous high school boys were playing baseball on the same team? People are strange. Baseball is strange.
Someday I'd like to do some real research about baseball in Japan's prewar colonies--Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, even the South Pacific--and the lingering effects of the colonial period on baseball in Japan. Some of the best professional baseball players in Japan have been Taiwanese-Japanese (see the legendary Sadaharu Oh) and Korean-Japanese (Isao Harimoto, Masaichi Kaneda and so on in the past; Tomoaki Kanemoto, Shinjiro Hiyama, the Arai brothers, Hichori Morimoto et al. currently playing), and yet it's still a sensitive subject. Judging by the interviewer's unsuccessful attempt to pigeonhole Lin Wei-tzu, the story isn't one of the past.
*The National High School Baseball Tournament, better known as Koshien, is held every summer (and every spring, but the summer is the really big deal) with 49 teams representing the 47 prefectures (two each from Tokyo, which has a lot of people, and Hokkaido, which has a lot of ground to cover). Every game is broadcast in full on national public television, and the stars of a given year--notably the dueling pitchers Masahiro Tanaka and Yuki Saito of about five years ago--become household names for a while. Japan isn't supposed to have a national religion any more after World War II, but the Koshien tournament comes pretty close.
I was half-listening, generally pleased that Hanshin had won and Lin had done well, when the rhythm of the interview broke. The interviewer had said to Lin something along the lines of "Now please give Sakurai over here some praise for his good work too," using the word negirau, which means something like "to praise" or "to reward for hard work." Lin said "Sorry?" It was immediately obvious to me, watching, that he didn't know the word, but the announcer simply repeated himself as if he thought Lin hadn't heard him clearly.
To Lin's credit, he remained unfazed and, in front of the several thousand fans jammed into the stadium, asked amiably "What does that mean?" The interviewer, on the other hand, was remarkably disconcerted, stammering and fumbling around before coming up with a passable definition of the word. Lin got the idea, said cheerfully to Sakurai something like "Keep the hits coming, man," and that was that.
The reason this stuck in my head was the interviewer's lack of ability to deal with the situation. Now, Lin went to high school and college in Japan and speaks Japanese, to my ear at least, very competently indeed; his answers up till that point of the interview were standard hero-interview style, beginning with "Well now," ending with "Yup," and using boku for a first-person pronoun (there are many ways to say "I" in Japanese, and boku is sort of the masculine-innocent one, the one Luke Skywalker as opposed to Han Solo would use). Unlike many of the "foreign players" (=those from the States, Australia, South America, and sometimes Korea) he doesn't use an interpreter. So the interviewer clearly had him mentally filed as "can speak Japanese" and when that proved not to be completely true, got stuck--as if there were "Japanese" players and "not Japanese" players and no middle ground in between.
Coincidentally, not long after this the National High School Baseball Tournament* website put up an article about Taiwan and Japanese baseball. They touched on a story from 1931, when a team from Taiwan--then a Japanese colony--made it to the finals of the tournament. Colonial teams from Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria participated several times, but this team was notable for its starting members: three Japanese, two Chinese-Taiwanese (?), and four indigenous Taiwanese (referred to in the article as members of the "Takasago tribe," which I thought was a derogatory expression).
Particularly notable, in fact, when you consider the Musha (Wushe) Incident of 1930, one year earlier: indigenous Taiwanese rose up and killed about a hundred Japanese colonists, which--not surprisingly--resulted in reprisals in which nearly a thousand indigenous people were killed. And just a year later Japanese and indigenous high school boys were playing baseball on the same team? People are strange. Baseball is strange.
Someday I'd like to do some real research about baseball in Japan's prewar colonies--Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, even the South Pacific--and the lingering effects of the colonial period on baseball in Japan. Some of the best professional baseball players in Japan have been Taiwanese-Japanese (see the legendary Sadaharu Oh) and Korean-Japanese (Isao Harimoto, Masaichi Kaneda and so on in the past; Tomoaki Kanemoto, Shinjiro Hiyama, the Arai brothers, Hichori Morimoto et al. currently playing), and yet it's still a sensitive subject. Judging by the interviewer's unsuccessful attempt to pigeonhole Lin Wei-tzu, the story isn't one of the past.
*The National High School Baseball Tournament, better known as Koshien, is held every summer (and every spring, but the summer is the really big deal) with 49 teams representing the 47 prefectures (two each from Tokyo, which has a lot of people, and Hokkaido, which has a lot of ground to cover). Every game is broadcast in full on national public television, and the stars of a given year--notably the dueling pitchers Masahiro Tanaka and Yuki Saito of about five years ago--become household names for a while. Japan isn't supposed to have a national religion any more after World War II, but the Koshien tournament comes pretty close.
