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Japan and NPB share a dilemma

With Japan’s All-Star games coming up on Wednesday and Thursday, it is worth mentioning that the Central League will field four non-domestic signings on its roster, one short of the five players originally selected to play. The record for either league is six, set by the CL in 2014 and tied seven years later.

The number of imports on this year’s all-star rosters is of little real importance, except that NPB’s limits on foreign-player participation in its summer exhibitions highlights a question that plagues Japan now more than at any time in its past: What in the heck should the country do about non-Japanese?

Japan’s brand

It is no surprise that Nippon Professional Baseball has struggled with this issue since Japan has long invested heavily in branding itself as a nation with a homogeneous population comprised of ethnic Japanese–regardless of the fact that a huge number of Japanese citizens are not.

Among Japanese nationals are indigenous peoples, the Ainu from Hokkaido and Ryukyu Islanders from Okinawa, along with a huge number of ethnic Koreans and Chinese whose ancestors were born here, as well as more recent naturalized immigrants.

On Sunday, an election for one half of Japan’s legislative upper house, the House of Councillors, dealt hand-puppet Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s ruling coalition a severe blow, but the election also demonstrated voters’ current enthusiasm for rejecting foreign nationals.

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Japan’s white lies

In Japan, one becomes accustomed to people saying things that are patently false.

The hero interviewee who jacked a fat pitch into the third deck at Osaka Dome for a decisive home run will typically be asked if he was trying to hit a home run.

With few exceptions, he will answer, “I’m not a home run hitter. There are good hitters coming up behind me, and I was simply trying to make contact so I could set the table for them. I was fortunate to hit a home run and I’m happy about that.”

The crowd will roar when he says that. At the same time fans are praising his athletic feat, they are simultaneously honoring his obedience to Japan’s politeness rules. In Japan, one tells obvious, transparent lies to gloss over inconvenient truths – in this case trying to hit a home run in a baseball context where the answer to every tactical question is “play for one run regardless of the game situation.”

Trash talk

In my new gig as a tour guide, visitors often tell me they carry their personal trash with them until they can take deposit at their hotels, because they’ve been taught “Japanese people always take their trash home.”

Of course, when Japanese say, “We carry our trash home,” virtually every Japanese understands this to mean, “We carry our trash home if we fail to come across a convenience store where we can discretely deposit it in a bin marked ‘no personal or household trash.'”

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