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.'”
These white lies, part of the linguistic mode called “tatemae,”* serve to reinforce the concept of a harmonious society where everyone is on the same page – if only superficially. They are the polite Japanese way of paraphrasing Jack Nicholson’s line from the courtroom witness stand in “A Few Good Men”: “You can’t handle the truth.”
The way we were
Pre-pandemic, NPB allowed reporters to roam the sidelines, sit on the bench and wander around in non-clubhouse areas under the stands until lineups were exchanged 40 minutes prior to the game and then again after the game.
When the pandemic hit, the 12 clubs decided that the only way to cope with COVID 19 was to let each team write its own press access rules, and suddenly we were all but banned.
By the time the pandemic ended in May 2022, pro baseball in the United States, South Korea and Taiwan had already restored press access to its pre-pandemic norms, but NPB clubs did not. Their power to limit press restrictions never expired.
Only the Seibu Lions restored access to their players in their home games at the roofed stadium formerly known as “Prince.” Lions GM Hisanobu Watanabe, when asked if it was suspicious that 11 teams continued to restrict press access after the pandemic ended, said, “It certainly seems like it.”
I quizzed the other 11 teams about their access, and when I asked for reasons, I got, what could be called, with all due respect, bullshit.
The lies
The Yomiuri Giants, DeNA BayStars and Yakult Swallows all told me reporters were banned from their fields for their own safety because their teams practiced bunting using a pitching machine in front of the photographers’ area next to the home dugout.
Yomiuri’s lie was particularly transparent, because the Giants had been doing their bunting practice near their dugout for as long as I had been going to Tokyo Dome. The only thing that had changed was the Giants’ sudden decision to call what had been standard practice dangerous.
It was as if they suddenly cared for our safety after 70 fraught years of neglect.
Prior to COVID, the Swallows’ clubhouse building at Jingu Stadium had a reporters’ workroom, and the media would chat with players in front of the clubhouse, while the Swallows practiced their bunting down the foul line near the home bullpen. With no reporters on the field, the team moved their bunt-practice equipment near the dugout, and told me the field was “unsafe for reporters.”
The BayStars did the same, and didn’t even let reporters into the photographers’ section until 2024. If a reporter wanted to talk to a player, he had to shout at him from the stands, or wait for him to leave the clubhouse after the game. The only writers who could do that frequently were beat writers.
And while telling me it was unsafe for reporters to be on the field prior to the game, neither the Giants and BayStars didn’t exhibit the same concern for the fans they had been letting on the field to watch their teams take batting practice since the 2021 season.
The Rakuten Eagles, at least, had a creative excuse. In 2016, the Eagles switched out Miyagi Stadium’s artificial turf infield for natural grass, but in 2022 suddenly decided it was bad for the grass to have reporters stand on it.
“Before the games, the players practice on the artificial turf warning track in front of the dugout to protect the natural grass, therefore it’s too dangerous for reporters, and the bench is off limits now because it is the players’ private space.”
Because the Lotte Marines allowed reporters into their dugout during practice, I thought they were another outlier, only to find that Lotte blocked reporters from walking the two dozen steps from the press workroom to the dugout. Instead, we were forced to climb stairs up to the stadium concourse and access one section of their huge dugout only after hiking through the stands and entering the photographers’ section via the field seats down the right-field line.
In the spring of 2022, I asked the Marines’ longtime head of communications, Noriaki Kajimura, about their press restrictions, and he assured me that they would be relaxed little by little.
“We have a lot of young players who joined the team during COVID, and they are not used to dealing with the press,” he told me one day at Tokyo Dome during interleague.
I’ve dealt with Kajiwara for decades, and found him to be generally straight-forward. In March 2023, on a rainy day in Yokohama, I was walking off the field and saw him and manager Masato Yoshii in the visiting dugout.
Kajiwara said it was OK for me to approach the dugout since it was raining and no one was practicing. When I offered Kajiwara the standard polite greeting, “itsumo osewa ni narimashita” (thank you always for your kind consideration), Yoshii almost spit out his coffee.
“You’re joking, right?” asked Yoshii with a look of incredulity, although to be fair, Yoshii’s sense of humor might have just been pushing him to take the piss out of his PR guy.
Last year, finally, reporters were allowed behind the toss batting area in Chiba, but only those still willing to strap on their trekking boots to journey up the back stairs, and through the concourse, the stands, and the field seats.
Stop talking
The one time I did go to the Marines dugout, I had a long chat with pitcher Hirokazu Sawamura, before a Lotte PR guy decided we had talked long enough.
In my 20 years on the field before COVID, I was only ordered twice to stop talking to a player.
The first time was in 2004, when the wonderful Shigenobu Shima was a hot commodity in his breakout season with the Hiroshima Carp. When my Yomiuri colleague and I approached him one day at Jingu Stadium, the head of the Carp’s PR detail yelled at us for having the temerity to talk to HIS star without getting HIS permission.
Another time, a Hanshin Tigers busy-body chastised me for speaking overly long to a player on the field at Yokohama in full view of the fans.
In my rare post COVID visits, I’ve already been reprimanded five times despite being where I had access, including the times when Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Hiroya Miyagi told their Orix Buffaloes minders to piss off.
Prior to COVID, the sidelines at every park would be populated with a variety beat writers and writers there to talk to players for features and other stories. That was my gig. Players and coaches had to pass through or around the reporters, who were free to talk to them without interference from the teams’ PR staff.
if a weekly magazine or an evening tabloid quoted an unnamed Giants player, the team would have little chance of tracking down who said what to who. And then COVID happened, and the teams were suddenly saved from the chaos of press access.
All of a sudden, the media became manageable. Players could only be approached by reporters in full view of the PR staff. And with access so limited, feature writers like me and former players without a media gig on a given day all but stopped showing up at stadiums, leaving clubs to deal exclusively with the beat writers who depend on the PR staffs for daily information and access for interviews.
False hopes
Prior to 2023, we had hoped that Japan would have trouble explaining its continued suppression of the media after reporters were allowed on the field at Tokyo Dome during the last World Baseball Classic, but when the 2023 season started, the media found itself once more banished from nearly every NPB field.
As I reported in “Inside Out,” my story on NPB teams’ transparent excuses, proved too hot for Kyodo News to handle, and so after quizzing the Lions, Giants, Swallows, BayStars, Eagles and Marines about their “reasons” for blocking access, I stopped asking.
It’s awfully far for me to go to Chiba or Yokohama just for crappy access and bullshit, so I really have no idea if their situations are any better this year.
Whatever the situation is, I’m sure of three things: that all teams’ media restrictions are for the reporters’ benefit, that no Japanese player ever swings for the fences, and that Japanese always carry their trash home.
Note: *–face; official stance; public position or attitude (as opposed to private thoughts)
