The 2026 World Baseball Classic kicks off Thursday at Tokyo Dome, where it started in 2006 after a gestation period that was prolonged, painful, and acrimonious, simply because Nippon Professional Baseball was involved in all its incompetent splendor, and unable to see the big picture of potential prosperity.
The heart of dumbness
While incompetence and NPB are still often synonymous, Japan is now taking aim at its fourth WBC championship. NPB’s transition from rancorous obstinate outrage and protest to bourgeois contentment is a common theme in Japanese history.
Originally slated to kick off in 2005, the WBC was delayed by NPB’s incompetence and arrogance. In 2004, as Major League Baseball was hurrying to pull everything together, Japan lowered the boom. At the time, NPB secretary general Kazuo Hasegawa said its signed agreement to participate in the inaugural tourney, was not a binding contract, but “an agreement to agree to participate” – whatever that meant.
Prior to that, the owners wanted nothing to do with the WBC because it was different, and I
it took lobbying from people including baseball legend Sadaharu Oh to persuade them to consider it.
“Pro baseball is run by business people who focus so hard on the bottom line that they miss the big picture. I felt it was something we needed, to make the game bigger,” Oh said.
Japanese pro baseball thinks small. NPB teams are considered profitable if operating losses are outweighed by the sum of tax write-offs and the advertising value of having the parent company’s name in the media daily.
Let’s get small
Although Japan is lauded for the efficiency of its products, the beating heart of Japan is in its obsession with every trivial detail. So, once NPB agreed to take part, and then denied it had, the bureaucrats began compiling a laundry list of every fault that needed to be addressed.
“It was a daily knock-down drag-out fight with Hasegawa, one MLB negotiator said recently. “And the union and its lawyer weren’t any better.”
Not surprisingly, NPB, the same organization that had its butt handed to it by its players association in 2004’s labor strife, devoted its planning time to complaining about details, all the while assuming the players would do as they were told and take part without a fuss.
Even winning the inaugural championship in 2006 did not end Japan’s dissatisfaction with the tournament’s timing and its financial side. The players still wanted a November tournament that didn’t interrupt the holy of holies, practice, in the spring, while both players and management both felt Japan deserved most of the money flowing from Japanese corporate sponsorships.
After threatening another boycott, Japan participated and won again in 2009. Ichiro Suzuki knocked in the decisive extra-inning run to defeat South Korea in the final, but Japan’s real victory came when NPB learned to monetize its national team.
Money, money, money
After complaining non-stop since 2005 that the WBC unfairly captured uniform sponsorship fees for a few weeks every three to four years, a couple of sharp cookies connected to NPB pointed out that the team could profit from selling its own sponsorships and hosting international March and November international friendlies.
With that mental breakthrough, Japanese opposition to the tournament melted. Instead of constant complaining, shouts of righteous indignation and threatened boycotts, NPB and its players became bourgeois acolytes of a system that suddenly worked for them at the bank.
Such turnabouts have a history in Japan, when benefits and rewards previously considered out of reach are suddenly accessible.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes
In 1960, after five years of unrest over a proposed security treaty with the United States, the government’s use of police and right-wing thugs to put down protestors saw arrogant prime minister Nobusuke Kishi’s government collapse. With the nation coming apart at the seams, new prime minister Hayato Ikeda changed Japan’s direction in a heartbeat–by helping the people make money.
Behind Ikeda’s popular policy goal of doubling incomes within 10 years, Japanese exchanged violent popular protest for rampant consumerism–aided by the 1961 introduction of universal national health insurance and old-age pensions.
Thirty years later, history rhymed at Narita Airport outside Tokyo. Decades of pitched battles between urban guerrillas at an airport used mostly by business travelers and the wealthy, saw the facility with iron curtain-caliber security fencing.
By 1992, a strong yen and deregulated airfare meant it no longer cost two-month’s salary to fly overseas. Opposition evaporated, Terminal 2 opened, and the railroad stations that had been sitting unused underground began bringing travelers straight to the terminals.
Now that NPB has learned to make money off its national team – and Japanese players have increasingly learned to have bigger dreams than the small-minded pro baseball here can support, the once constant outrage about the WBC’s finances and its timing seem like echoes of another time.
Japan’s talk of boycotting the WBC now feels as distant and nostalgic as the days when one exited the train outside Narita Airport and passed through security checks while riot police and armored cars with water cannons stood guard.
