Today’s post is not about baseball but about Japanese culture as revealed through a current big sports story in Japan, how the nation’s best basketball player, Rui Hachimura, voiced his concerns about how the national team is run, and how the sport’s domestic authorities have responded.
One sign of an authoritarian mindset is blaming deviations from desired outcomes on “a failure to communicate.” The popular media example of this is the favored expression of Strother Martin’s character, the sadistic prison work farm warden, in the movie “Cool Hand Luke.”
Shut up and dribble
Whenever one hears the expression in Japan, you can bet it is said by one in a privileged position explaining how disagreements are others’ fault. We heard this Nov. 20, when Japan Basketball Association Secretary General Shinji Watanabe responded to criticism by the Los Angeles Lakers’ Hachimura by essentially saying the player was mistaken.
“He’s an important player, and I take this very seriously,” Watanabe told reporters. “There was miscommunication, and this has placed a burden upon him.”
Subsequent reports have identified some actual hang-ups in the relationship between the national team, head coach Tom Hovasse and Hachimura, but there is no mistaking the association’s assertion that it is in charge, and that players should shut up and dribble—even while paying lip service to Hachimura’s right to disagree.
The implication is that if individuals could only see things from the autocrat’s side, they would fall into lockstep as desired.
Understanding the Olympics
This whole scenario echoed language used in the buildup to the Tokyo Olympics. Not long after the buzz of Japan’s national celebration of “winning” the obligation to host wore off, Japan got a reality check. Before long, the news stopped being about how cool the Olympics would be but about organizers’ incompetence, allegations of corruption, and the real cost of the bill Japan and Tokyo had committed its citizens to foot.
When surveys indicated two thirds of the population opposed the Olympics, the IOC expressed concern. The government and organizers, however, attributed this as a failure to communicate, saying support would follow after they “gained the population’s understanding.” They tried this by switching the PR narrative.
Understanding as a con job
The Olympics were a grand vehicle for funneling taxpayers’ money to construction companies and developers to remake Tokyo. But not long after Tokyo won the hosting bid, they were rechristened the “Reconstruction Olympics.”
This is not because a number of Tokyo neighborhoods were slated to be “reconstructed” whether they wanted it or not – see “An insult to the people,” and “An Olympian ‘quits,'” but rather because the Olympics’ “stated” purpose became to rebuild the Tohoku region from the devastation caused by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent nuclear disaster.
Reconstructing opinion
A few events were held in the region, behind closed doors because of the pandemic. But the whole thing was like someone displaying a sickly child on the street in order to panhandle for money.
Everything was about Tokyo from Day 1, which was revealed when a survey asking how people viewed the games’ “Tohoku reconstruction benefit,” was buried in an annex to the government’s report on the Olympics.
The Reconstruction Agency survey in November, 2021, asked if people were “grateful for the reconstruction support, or believed the Olympics sent a message to the world that reconstruction is taking place.” Only 29.8 percent of the 4,000 people in the survey answered that question by saying either “I really think so” or “I think so.” A total of 38.8 percent answered “I don’t think it did much” or “I don’t think so.”
Asked about the best thing from the Olympics, 20.7 percent said, “events held in the disaster-hit region,” while 11.1 percent answered, “the torch relay.” Nearly 40 percent answered, “nothing in particular.”
What’s worse is that those questioned were divided evenly between the three disaster-hit prefectures of Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate, and, wait for it, Tokyo–which suffered two deaths from the earthquake.
It doesn’t take much to realize that after surveying the three affected prefectures, the person running the study said, “Holy shit, we need to find 1,000 more people who might not think this giant con job was in fact a giant con job.”
