Yesterday, I wrote about the history behind how the styles of baseball in Japan and the United States have diverged so much over the years.
Today, I’d like to write about how Japanese culture has forced Japanese to approach the game so differently.
When I first came to Japan, baseball fans said the Japanese game was detail-oriented while MLB baseball was about power and speed. For a long time, I saw this as a way of complimenting both baseball brands, but after joining the media, I began hearing some managers imply that MLB players were good, only because they were more physically gifted, and not because they worked hard – like Japanese.
The work ethic here is different than it is in America, and Japanese baseball reflects this.
Japan’s obsession with meticulous attention to detail is referred to as “kodawari.”
It doesn’t imply perfectionism, but rather the idea that if one cares about something, no detail is too trivial to overlook, and no shortcuts are permitted.
The concept, which is fairly well embedded in Japanese culture, developed from the caste system of Japan’s last feudal government, the 1603-1868 Tokugawa Shogunate.
Commoners with skills had no hope of social mobility or access to the kinds of stipend-providing jobs that were available only to those born into samurai families. If their children and grandchildren were to thrive, those skills needed to preserved and passed on, no matter what.
When offspring were not up to the task of absorbing a parent’s teachings, some parents turned to talented apprentices and adopting them into their families, so they could pass on the craft to future generations and ensure the clan’s future.
The first lessons Japanese kids receive in school are intended to engender respect for everything that goes with the process of learning including the classrooms themselves, which they themselves clean.
Kodawari means nothing is complete until every possible box is ticked off. It’s not about executing the best practices. It’s not about being efficient. It’s about dedication to the process, and it is often painfully inefficient and time consuming.
Applied to baseball, it means practice and preparation IS the purpose, to master every step so a task can be performed precisely.
That’s why when Japan’s pros were informed in 2005 that the first World Baseball Classic would take place in March – during time they intended to prepare and steel themselves for the regular season – they threatened to boycott.
In the only one-on-one chat I ever had with Ichiro Suzuki, he said, “You’d be surprised. The biggest MLB stars, like Albert Pujols, they work endlessly on the little things. You don’t see it because they do it under the stands or on the back lots.”
Still, a lot of players reach MLB thinking their physical talent will be enough, and then they get schooled, and learn they need additional skills and techniques to stay ahead of the game.
That was Tuffy Rhodes’ story. Just as he realized he needed to get really serious about learning baseball, Boston acquired him so that a Red Sox executive could sell him to a Japanese team. This particular executive funneled a great deal of talent to Japanese clubs, most notably the BayStars, and is said to have made quite a lot of money on those sales.
What Rhodes found in Japan was a mind-blowing dedication to the game and he became an avid student. “American baseball is checkers,” he said. “Japanese baseball is chess.”
Rhodes is arguably the best import ever to play the game in Japan. He told me how the Japanese pre-season practice of endless night-time swings in drills conducted by then Kintetsu Buffaloes manager Kyosuke Sasaki honed his mental discipline at the plate.
“At first I thought it was crazy, but I wanted to try,” he said. “It is exhausting, but it trained me to be able to maintain my focus and my form even when I was absolutely fatigued.”
Fernando Seguignol reinvented himself. After one season with the Orix BlueWave, he hired a personal trainer the minute he got back home and aggressively addressed the issues that had been holding him back. After a brief spell with the Yankees, Seguignol returned to Japan and became a key component to two Pacific League championships with the Nippon Ham Fighters.
As mentioned above, kodawari is not about doing it the best way, but the way it is expected to be done. This makes it difficult to break away from old ways. Pitchers throw a lot of LONG bullpens in the spring time.
For generations, relievers were expected to throw in the bullpen a few times during each game. When Itaru Kobayashi was a top SoftBank Hawks executive in 2010, he told me the team’s evaluation system for contract negotiations gave relievers no credit for games in which they didn’t appear, UNLESS they warmed up. As a result, every reliever heated up at least once during every game, in order to credit toward a raise at the end of the season.
When the Fighters announced at the start of spring training in 2013 that Shohei Ohtani would bat and pitch, the old guard nearly died en masse of heart attacks.
Because kodawari demands rigorous adherence to expected practice, proccess, and utmost dedication to one’s craft, the idea that a human being could spend half his time preparing to hit and field and the other half preparing to pitch was inconceivable to many.
Two of Japanese baseball’s most famous iconoclasts, Hiromitsu Ochiai and Katsuya Nomura, cheered Ohtani on, but to the old guard it was a betrayal of everything they stood for. Japan’s greatest pure hitter, Isao Harimoto, complained long and loud about Ohtani every Sunday morning on his TV soapbox.
This is understandable. Harimoto built his post playing career on the mantra that he was a great hitter only because of his ceaseless dedication to the craft of hitting. If Ohtani could succeed as a pro hitter, while spending a large amount of time not hitting, it would prove Harimoto’s hypothesis wrong.
Once Ohtani proved he could be one of Japan’s best hitters between starting pitching assignments, Harimoto posited the untestable hypothesis that Ohtani would only reach his true potential as a hitter or a pitcher if he focused on one or the other.
Oddly enough, the thing about Ohtani is that when he was with the Fighters, I thought he simply learned to maximally efficient in his practice, that he found the time to do both because he trimmed the fat out of his training regimen.
In a 2016 chat with him and Jason Coskrey of the Japan Times, Ohtani said he did the same pitching and batting work his teammates did. I thought the Fighters made a plan for him to be a two-way player, but they didn’t. Other than putting him on a new strength-training menu, the team just let him be himself.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but Ohtani’s super power was not his physical gifts or his ability to trim the fat from the kodawari practice menus, but his ability to concentrate to an unbelievable degree on what he’s doing, and to simply work more than anyone else.
Dedication to one’s craft is not unique to Japan, and to be fair, many Japanese find kodawari practitioners to be annoyingly stubborn. Even then, however, the idea of finding beauty in the task of doing something the right way still strikes a chord.
Great piece Jim,
Thanks Bob.