Baseball thinking, neurodiversity and Japan

It’s often said one can learn a lot about societies by observing how it treats its most vulnerable members. Are they exploited, shunned, persecuted, or neglected? Or are they welcomed and allowed opportunities to contribute to society?

Similarly, we can learn a little about societies and organizations based on whether they can accept unconventional ideas and ways of thinking. This is a serious problem in Japan, as I discovered the hard way, and for baseball in general.

Take baseball for example.

Baseball with its strict rules and limits on behavior within games tends to attract those with an authoritarian leaning. It is no surprise that baseball people often assert that there is a “right way” to play the game, and that abusing players who fail to observe those orthodoxies is not only justifiable but encouraged as “educational.”

Because baseball cultures develop orthodoxies and doctrines, even the most objectively counterproductive tactics that stem from doctrine are sacred cows that can never be criticized, while objectively efficient tactics originating from outside the establishment are controversial when they work and severely criticized when they fail.

Until a decade ago or so, virtually every criticism of Japanese baseball by those who grew up in American baseball could be paraphrased as “this is isn’t the way we do it back home, therefore it’s wrong.”

I was thus surprised at the 2014 winter meetings, when I heard American baseball people talk about how MLB could learn from Japan, specifically with a day off each week and giving regular-season champions a huge advantage in the postseason.

As much as MLB loves to trumpet its self-proclaimed superiority, I think few rational people now question that baseball is better off when leagues and organizations don’t think alike.

Import hitters might argue that learning how to time Japanese pitchers is the biggest adjustment a former MLB player must make in Nippon Professional Baseball, while pitchers might say it’s learning how to put away batters who are expert at hitting foul balls and not trying to put big swings on every fat pitch.

Either way, it comes down to this: Japanese think about baseball a little differently. Virtually every successful import in NPB eventually says the same thing: to succeed here, one must embrace the fact that Japanese baseball thinks differently and adjust and adapt accordingly.

In the 1990s, pitching guru Tom House expressed his belief that Japanese baseball’s yoga-like emphasis on core strength and flexibility created superior balance between powerful large muscles and the smaller muscles needed for muscular stability than what was in vogue then in MLB.

MLB is changing, of course. Where it once shunned outsiders like James, it now embraces the analytics although often without the rigour of quality science or the understanding that science is a process of moving toward a truth rather than a truth in itself.

Most MLB teams now employ massage therapists, who are often Japanese. The year the Diamondbacks made it through the playoffs to reach MLB’s championship series, one new addition was bringing in Hall of Fame Japanese catcher Atsuya Furuta as a spring training advisor.

Outside of baseball, the idea that people whose brains are wired differently are gifted because they sense the world in ways others cannot is the pillar of the concept called neurodiversity.

When I first heard the term, I passed it off as a kind of humanistic ideal with few practical consequences while completely missing the fact I had been preaching my belief in the benefits of baseball diversity for the past three decades.

Of course, players in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba and even Canada are culturally conditioned to approach baseball somewhat differently from the U.S. model. And though this is not actual neurodiversity because it says nothing about the way their brains work, it does represent different ideas about the game that can contribute to its vitality and evolution.

The term neurodiversity stems from the understanding that autistic people have and continue to make real world contributions because of the different way they think. I have long been aware that my brain works differently from most peoples’, and have long considered myself to be mildly autistic.

My attention can switch on and off, seemingly at random, from a state of hyperfocus to one where a single distraction causes me to literally put down whatever I am carrying or working on and erase it from my memory. On the other hand, I possess a childlike ability to take in diverse inputs from my surroundings that most adults fail to see, because they are burdened by the task in front of them in a way that I am often not.

These are common traits for people with attention deficit disorder.

I also perceive time as something elastic, inconsistent, and often unfathomable. Just this week l learned there is generic term for my time dysfunction, “time blindness,” and that it is also common among people with ADD.

These issues have proved to be a handicap in my 26-year employment in the media, where days and times are supposed to be fixed, concrete truths. People who perceive time this way tend to be “neurotypical” while people like me can be described as “neurodivergent.”

When my brain tells me it is Monday, but the calendar says Tuesday, my brain often has the last word and I’ll type Monday, and fail to notice the divergence regardless of how many times I re-read my work. As I have gotten older, I have learned tactics to weed out some of those issues, but I often have issues presenting details, and sometimes can’t see the discrepancy between a truth I know to be objectively provable and what comes out in my writing.

Most of my Kyodo News coworkers were accustomed to the fact that my leads occasionally employed the wrong day of the week and included other slight missteps, and simply corrected it without making a fuss about it. My last boss had difficulty hiding his frustration.

On days when he could no longer contain the mounting pressure  of steam building up within his skull, he would openly ridicule my failure to pay attention to detail. After I left Kyodo, other colleagues told me he used me as a benchmark to ridicule others, employing the phrase, “He makes even more mistakes than Jim.”

While that same boss would praise my ability to shape and add value to his work when I was able to bring out a compelling story he had buried in his copy, he told me it was impossible for him to encourage coworkers and praise their efforts the way I did.

We had a coworker who was not a native English speaker, whose copy was often flawed. While the boss would rip into him, I would quiz my collegue about what he was trying to say, encourage him, and make suggestions, where our boss’ default setting was to rip into him for his shortcomings.

“Japanese people find it hard to praise others,” he said. “But you do it so easily.”

My wife often comments about how Japanese are schooled from childhood to compare themselves to others and carry the burden of constantly being judged by their failings.

Japan’s high school and university entrance exams seek to weed out those with the most weaknesses rather than identify those with outstanding ability. This is a holdover from Japan’s 19th century modernization push when the Meiji government abolished the Confucian caste system imposed by the Tokugawa Shogunate to create a meritocracy.

Japanese job seekers are evaluated partly on the ranking of the university they attended, so entrance examinations are critical and the primary focus of most students in their final year of junior high or high school is studying for their next set of entry examinations to get into the highest-ranked school they can.

And because family connections and reputation can also play a factor in landing a coveted position or finding a marriage partner, Japanese families long concealed the existence of neurodivergent or physically handicapped family members.

Although the mental illness is no longer stigmatized to the degree it once was, there remains a strong bias against those with perceived failings, such as neurodivergence.

People join their companies on an even footing with other new employees, but are soon ranked by the number of mistakes they make. In the 1980s, it was common to attribute the quality of Japanese manufactured goods to a genetic and cultural obsession with quality, but in truth it is due to Japan’s national obsession with discovering others’ mistakes and punishing them for their failures.

In the workplace vendors are expected to offer additional discounts to customers for substandard work, while discovering the mistakes of ones’ peers at work can eliminate rivals from contention for promotions.

This promotes a national consensus that the absence of a negative is a positive, and is a further obstacle to growth through the acceptance of divergent thinking.

In baseball, this is represented by the once mystifying explanation any number of managers have said over the years.

“I don’t feel any particular pressure to win, but the pressure not to lose can be unbearable.”

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