On Sunday, I wrote about how my sudden shift from Japanese baseball insider to outsider taught me about Japan’s group dynamics and its media in “Japan’s Sound of Silence.” But being an insider comes with serious limitations that disappear when one is on the outside looking in.
After spending the past month dwelling on what I’d lost, a recent dinner with Robert Whiting, the author of “You Gotta Have Wa” and “The Meaning of Ichiro” as well as numerous other wonderful non-fiction works, reminded me that my new non-status comes with real opportunities.
When I lamented—or perhaps more accurately, whined about—my loss of easy access to players, Whiting said he wrote his three seminal books as a virtual outsider without any help from teams.
That inspired me. I was reminded me of how many insiders embraced my early work that was so hypercritical of Japanese baseball’s ways.
In the years before the Central and Pacific leagues were incorporated into the commissioners’ offices and each was still administrated by its own president, I lived in fear my fledgling “Jim Allen’s Guide to Japanese Baseball” would make me persona non grata in the Ginza office building the two leagues shared. Boy was I wrong.
Instead, individuals with teams and the league offices welcomed my criticism of the status quo. Both leagues’ secretaries general and staff not only encouraged me, but bent over backward to help and provide accurate information so that I could better aim my tiny insignificant wrecking ball at NPB dogma.
This taught me that many hard-working passionate people in Japanese baseball have been frustrated by NPB’s faith in the status quo and the owners’ obsequious acquiescence to the Yomiuri Giants bullying.
Wherever you are in Japan, insiders walk the straight and narrow and suffer the indignities of chicken-shit abuse of power to stay ahead in corporate Japan’s zero-sum advancement game. But 30 years ago, I was welcomed because I could say things insiders couldn’t.
This is what is known in Japan as “gai-atsu,” or outside pressure, where organizations encourage harsh criticism from outsiders in order to force necessary change that insiders want but cannot suggest out of fear of internal backlash.
Tip off
Perhaps the most obvious case of egregious gai-atsu in Japanese sports involved basketball.
For years, Japan’s two mediocre leagues, the corporate JBL and its professional circuit, the unfortunately name BJ League, had failed to arrange a satisfactory merger and were on the verge of giving up.
Then, out of the blue ,Ithe International Basketball Federation banned Japan from international competition in 2014, citing Japanese basketball’s inability to have a single league — a situation familar to American fans in my youth when the NBA and ABA competed year afer year for market share without the IBF interfering.
Because the IBF had zero business interfering in the internal structure of Japanese basketball, the most obvious explanation — although not necessarily the right one — is that the two leagues sought out the IBF and asked it to interfere.
I can sympathize with their plight.
In my late teens, my friends and I would often gather to play low-stakes poker in my mother’s home. One night, the pot got seriously out of hand with about $300 on the table, with no one willing to say that we were all seriously out of our depth and needed to pull the plug.
When our shouting and noise woke my mother up, she saved us from ourselves by calling the game over. We collectively exhaled, divided the pot evenly and went home, our foreheads all beaded with sweat.
In 2014, the IBF played the role of my mom, and Japanese basketball got what it wanted, but — like my friends and I –lacked the moral courage to do on its own.
Freedom of the press
In 2022, I proposed a story on how Japanese teams exploited their COVID emergency powers to restrict access to the media after the pandemic ended.
Kyodo News’ pro baseball desk was 100 percent in favor, hoping it would be picked up in the U.S. media and be such a huge embarrassment to NPB that it would be forced to restore the old order where reporters were allowed on the field, in dugouts and non-clubhouse areas before and after the game.
Kyodo’s head of all three baseball desks (pro, amateur and MLB), a man who always had my back, however, had misgivings. Fearing retaliation against Kyodo’s beat writers, he suggested I publish my expose in jballallen.com instead for Kyodo’s overseas department, where I was employed.
My department head, another guy who nearly always had my back, said he’d happily support the story if the sports department was all in. When told of the suggestion I publish it in my blog, my boss turned white as a sheet, and politely told me, “No, not ever, never.”
“Your blog doesn’t say you write for Kyodo, but everybody knows who you are and we will be blamed for it,” he said, with little mystery that “we will be blamed” meant he would take the fall.
Freedom from the press
It’s July now. I left Kyodo in March and there is no left to tell me what truths I can’t write about, so I’m free to share the full story that got kickstarted when the Giants called our baseball head to complain about my breaking their COVID rules.
My infraction was that I walked on the field as reporters had done for 70 years before the pandemic to the photographer’s area, where reporters had been quarantined for over a year. What was telling is I was called out for “violating the Yomiuri Giants’ COVID restrictions” on May 15.
That was a week after the pandemic ended on May 8.
That was three years ago, and while I’ve shared snippets here and there, it’s time again to tell stories in as much depth as I can muster.
Thanks to Mr. Whiting, I now realize that having been discarded by the system after 26 years of playing nice and reporting so that people who did despicable things wouldn’t be offended, it is high time I return to my roots.
Your story of the IBF being asked to intervene (for facing saving) has deep historical roots. During the Sengoku period, sometimes daimyos wanted a truce but could not publicly say it. So in come cases, decent sums of money were paid to the Japanese court and the emperor would ask that a deal be reached. Thus both sides would then show their respect to the emperor and a truce would begin. Funny how things change.. Some things stay the same.