On Monday, in Craig Calcaterra’s wonderful irreverent newsletter, “Cup of Coffee,” I found notice of Munetaka Murakami’s posting, and Craig’s bewilderment that the left-handed slugger is called the holder of the single-season home run record among Japan-born players.
“I’m not sure why that “Japanese-born” distinction is repeated by everyone. There is a long and rich history of racism against non-Japanese players in NPB history. I don’t know where that stands these days, and I don’t know how it’s been reckoned with if at all, but it seems to me that separating the records between Japanese-born and non-Japanese-born players isn’t pushing things in the right direction, ya know?” — Craig Calcattera
Aside from the fact that it’s not an official record, the answer has a little to do with Japan’s racist ethnic branding but a lot to do with its cultural emphasis on group conformity.
When something idiotic like this catches on in Japan’s mainstream news, every writer and editor will feel some pressure go along with the crowd and ascribe importance to it.
Murakami’s 56 home runs belongs to a class of cherry-picked stat Japan’s sports media pounce on in order to write headlines so that stories about non-records can be made more prominent.
As Craig mentioned in his newsletter, Murakami’s record is not Nippon Professional Baseball’s single-season home run record, or even the Yakult Swallows’ single-season team record — both of which are Wladimir Balentien’s 60 for the Swallows in 2013.
The only legitimate excuse for making a note of Murakami’s 56 jacks was that for 46 years, Sadaharu Oh’s 1964 NPB record had stood at 55. It had only been tied twice, in 2001 by Tuffy Rhodes and in 2002 by Alex Cabrera. Murakami was the first domestic player to match Oh’s 55.
Because Oh’s record was unmatched for decades, 55 is an iconic uniform number here. Japanese sluggers, including Murakami and former New York Yankee Hideki Matsui, often wear No. 55 to indicate the record they aspire to beat.
The “Japanese-born” part of Murakami’s “record” was added by us trolls in the English language sports media to recognize Oh’s Chinese heritage and was eventually adopted by the Japanese media, which had for decades chosen to call him Japanese.
He was born and raised in Japan, but his father was Chinese, and he was never a Japanese citizen despite the fact that his team, Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants touted its team as “All-Japanese” when they won nine consecutive Japanese major league championships from 1965 to 1973.
Besides that history, stupid made-up records are standard fare in the Japanese media, especially if the player toils for one Japan’s fourth professional team and the oldest still around, the Giants.
In 2020, current Orioles right-hander Tomoyuki Sugano won his first 13 decisions for the Giants, a feat reported as the longest season-opening winning streak in NPB history.
Although Masahiro Tanaka went 24-0 in 2013, the sports media called Sugano’s 2020 feat a record, calling it the longest win streak “from Opening Day.” Tanaka did not start on Opening Day in 2013, having just returned from the WBC, where he had been scheduled to pitch the final had Sugano not lost Japan’s nail-biting semifinal to the Americans.
In 2020, I was writing most of the English-language baseball copy for Japan’s national press agency, Kyodo News. Being a stubborn cuss and a know-it-all, I refused to recognize Sugano’s streak as a record.
The English language section has a daily review board, in which the most senior busybodies pass judgement on the previous day’s stories, and invent new nits to pick. In their daily e-mail report to the whole department, these folks criticized my extreme negligence for not mentioning THE record.
Being too much of a smart ass for my own good, I responded to the email, admitting that I also failed to recognize that Sugano’s streak was the longest ever in Japan by a right-hander born on Oct. 11.
An obscure condition was needed to turn Sugano’s streak into a record, while in other circumstances, the media will create a story line out of thin air based on alternate definitions of well-known terms.
Thus, in 2021, Teruaki Sato’s 24 home runs for the Central League’s Hanshin Tigers was declared a rookie record, a claim that depended on ignoring Japan’s current official definition of a rookie as a pro with limited experience in less than six years on a standard NPB contract.
In 2019, Murakami hit 36 a year after making 14 plate appearances as an 18-year-old the year before, and won the CL’s Rookie of the Year Award. That didn’t stop the media from choosing the alternate definition of a rookie–“new player” in Japanese–as a first-year pro in order to make Sato’s story into a historic feat.
As a tour guide now, I like to tell visitors about Japanese culture, how Japanese are often uncomfortable when others notice that they fail to act in a similar fashion to their peers. So, as soon as one or two outlets declare some insignificant stat a “record,” virtually every other outlet will jump on the bandwagon, with editors fearing criticism to avoid being the only ones to “miss” the story leading to an epidemic of stupidity.
Team PR people and editors all know who holds the records for the fastest pitches thrown by a domestic player or an import, because it gives them more potential stories to write.
This is not to deny racism’s hand in the media implication that Balentien’s superior numbers were somehow separate but not equal to Murakami’s.
Although a large chunk of Japanese citizens are of Korean or Chinese descent or indigenous Ryukyu Islanders from Okinawa or Ainu from Hokkaido, the nation loves to brand itself as 100 percent ethnically Japanese, and has habitually discriminated against those citizens known to have non-Japanese ancestry.
Just as America’s Major League Baseball’s business model long banned black athletes as part of its branding in the Jim Crow United States, Japan’s majors have long sucked up to the notion that most fans paid to see Japanese players succeed and win championships, and that imports were only brought in to help achieve those goals.
It’s as absurd as the current manufactured frenzy over immigrants in Japan. Most Japanese don’t care where people come from as long as they are good citizens, but political parties looking to score bonus points are promoting cherry-picked news stories of trouble-making foreign residents and tourists, and people are picking up on it.
As a result, people who had zero interest in the issue are flooded with horror stories about the destruction of the Japanese way of life. So, politicians of nearly all stripes in Japan are pushing the discussion to the right and promising to be strict with foreigners because that’s where they believe exaggerated news stories will lead to votes.
