In my last two posts dealing with the differences between baseball in Japan and the United States, I discussed the history behind Japan’s unwavering allegiance to one-run tactics, and its almost unique penchant for obsessive attention to detail as it applies to practice.
These phenomena achieved their maximum expression in the 1980s and ’90s, in a management style known as “kanri yakyu,” or controlled baseball.
This bastard child of small-ball history and the “kodawari” obsession with detail was the brainchild of a former star infielder for the Yomiuri Giants, Tatsuro Hirooka, who led two previously underperforming franchises to Japan Series championships.
Hirooka has recently distanced himself from the more indefensible tactical aspects of his dogma, stating in 2023 interview with Hall of Fame manager Hiromitsu Ochiai that his focus was solely on management techniques and not on all the other nonsense kanri yakyu espoused.
Kanri yakyu was a product of its time as pro baseball’s answer to the quality control movement that allowed its industrial exports to enjoy huge growth in the 1970s. It was a scientific approach to the game that dictated what players should eat, how they should train and the offensive roles and styles appropriate to players depending on their body type.
On Thursday, I wrote about Japan’s “kodawari” cult, the idea that if something is worth doing, then no detail is too small to ignore. At its heart, kodawari is an individual quest, where one learns and from previous masters, and respects but also refines their teachings to create something new.
Hirooka, however, believed the manager’s job was to limit variables injected in baseball equations by restricting how much players could pursue individual styles.
In addition to advocating for a top-down version of kodawari, Hirooka strenuously recited Japan’s historic dogma in the primacy of small-ball over power, and wrapped it all in the idea that managers needed to apply tough love, as Hall of Fame Giants skipper Tetsuharu Kawakami had done.
In his interview, Hirooka cited Hall of Fame manager Akira Ogi as someone who really understood kanri yakyu, because of his strong managing skills. Ogi, of course, was of course a tremendous manager and organizer. But he was also someone who believed in the classical form of kodawari: individuals shaping individual styles to perfection–as two of his protégés, Hideo Nomo and Ichiro Suzuki, had famously done.
Kanri yakyu dictated the tactics managers should employ from batting order construction to the emphasis on playing for one run at the earliest opportunity, and claimed these were justified because they had worked for Kawakami, but that was ahistorical nonsense.
While Kawakami did bunt frequently, he bunted much less frequently with runners on first than his Central League rivals did during his 1961-1974 reign. What Kawakami’s teams did do, was lead the CL in walks 14 times, and 10 times in home runs.
But if one’s goal is micromanagement, the sacrifice is the way to go, and after leading the Yakult Swallows to the 1978 championship and the Seibu Lions to championships in 1982 and ’83, HIrooka’s influence was impressive.
Altough Hirooka quickly wore out his welcome with Yakult, he went on to win three PL titles with the Lions, partly because of the incredible talent pipeline constructed by Hall of Fame executive Rikuo Nemoto.
This guy was Japan’s unrivaled master of manipulating the amateur player market so that his teams routinely walked away with the lions’ share of talent in every autumn’s draft. I documented his remarkable story in Mr. Nemoto’s mystery tour.
Once kanri yakyu caught on, managers quickly began eliminating diversity and turning every game into a series of predictable set-piece plays. This made games boring, but as a Swallows fan, it was fun, because it allowed the most successful manager of the 1990s, Swallows skipper Katsuya Nomura, to ruthlessly exploit his opponents’ predictability.
Nomura took advantage of bunt-shift defenses by faking bunts and swinging away. And because kanri yakyu dictated that fringe players should be power hitters or defensive specialists, Nomura could easily sign a pair of weak defenders who excelled at reaching base from both sides of the plate to spark late-inning comebacks.
It was a joy to watch. It was like he and Ogi were the only two skippers in Japan who saw the obvious flaws in the doctrine.
The irony of kanri yakyu was that it’s central tenet, that sacrifice bunts were the most important element of an offense, was obviously indefensible at a time in NPB history when walk and home run totals were going through the roof and the value of the bunt was less than it ever had been.
But once it became doctrine, no TV broadcast was complete without a lecture from the announcer and the analyst about the sacrifice’s spiritual properties.
But to those of us who lived in Japan in the 1980s, hearing people in the media chant utter nonsense was part of the bubble economy experience.
If it wasn’t, “Japanese people don’t want cheaper prices, because they demand the highest level of service, so discount stores will never catch on here,” it was, “Tokyo real estate prices will never go down,” or “The economic boom is due to Japanese culturally and genetically superior.ty”
But that’s the way Japan rolls. Once something becomes established doctrine, criticism ceases, uniformity spreads and the behavior that doctrine calls for magically becomes “culturally suited to Japanese” – until one day, magically, it isn’t and everyone forgets people once uttered such nonsense.
The biggest nail in the kanri yakyu philosophy came, not surprisingly, from Ichiro. For two years, Suzuki dominated Western League pitching to the degree that one could make a case for his being one of Japan’s best pro hitters from the time he turned 18.
Unfortunately, his first Orix BlueWave manager, kanri yakyu devotee Shozo Doi, decided that a young speedster with a quality arm could only be a defensive replacement or pinch-runner until he abandoned his unorthodox pendulum leg kick. A true believer in kodawari, Suzuki stuck to his guns and his amazing success shredded the belief that every hitter should have an authorized kanri yakyu stance.
Within five years of Ichiro’s 1994 breakout season, virtually every young player in Japan looked like a wind-up toy in the batter’s box, with the legs and elbows flying every which way, and the coaches could do little but deal with it.
There is a huge amount of irony in this.
Had Ichiro Suzuki been signed out of high school by the Yomiuri Giants in 1964, when Kawakami ran the club as a meritocracy, he would not have spent two full years in the minors but likely would have rivaled Shigeo Nagashima or Sadharu Oh for his share of the spotlight.
Oh had been a teammate of both Hirooka and Doi, but had Doi managed Oh as an 18-year-old in 1992, it is likely Japan’s greatest slugger’s career might have included years of minor league invisibility, because his batting style was crafted to suit his individual strengths and weaknesses, and was not stamped from a kanri yakyu cookie cutter.
As a manager, of course, Oh proved vulnerable to the kanri yakyu virus and spent his tenure with the Giants trying unsuccessfully to turn Kiyoshi Nakahata into a home run hitter, but that is another story.
Now as SoftBank Hawks chairman, Oh has said one thing he regretted as a manager was his insecurity about being closer to his players, as he tried to keep his distance as Kawakami had.
Which brings me to a Hall of Fame hard ass manager in the 1970s and ’80s, Hankyu Braves skipper Toshiharu Ueda.
I don’t know if it emboldened him to be even more tyrannical than he had been in the 1970s, but after his managing career, Ueda was one of the sweetest gentlest men I’ve had the pleasure to know.
We began talking because before COVID allowed NPB teams to restrict field access, former players and managers frequently showed up at the park to chat with anyone willing to listen.
Ueda would come to me in the press box at Tokyo Dome or in Chiba and offer me hard candies from a bag he always had on him. One night, shortly before his death, he took Teruyo and I out to dinner.
“The one thing I would do over if I had a chance would be to not treat every player the same,” he said. “I had a catcher, Hiromasa Fujita, he hit 22 home runs in his first season (1984), but he gained weight easily, and I was constantly on his case. He never developed into the player he might have been.”
If we live long enough, we all learn.
