8/09/00
Olympic Openers & Japanese Baseball
Summary:
This week, Japanese baseball. How has the quintessential American game been transformed to project a Japanese view of life and sport? Baseball's been played in Japan for well over a hundred years, but an American ballplayer once said of the Japanese version: "This isn't baseball. It only looks like it".
Plus, a reflection on Olympic Games opening ceremonies. Since the Hollywood-style extravaganza of the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the Olympic opening ceremony has become a competitive event in itself. ALAN TOMLINSON, Professor of Sport & Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton in the UK, asks whether the creed of "Bigger, Glitzier, Better" serves Olympism, the public, and the athletes.
Details or Transcript:
THEME
Amanda Smith: On the Sports Factor this today, and a week out from the Big O for Olympic opening ceremony, we’re going to reflect on previous Games openings, and the pressure on Sydney’s to be bigger, glitzier, better.
Also coming up on The Sports Factor: Japanese baseball, and how the quintessentially American game of baseball has been transformed to fit in with a Japanese view of life and sport.
Before that though, to Olympic opening ceremonies. Alan Tomlinson is the Professor of Sport and Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton, in the U.K. And he’s written critically on Olympic ceremonies, particularly on the way that the narratives presented in some recent openings, have tended to reduce history to a childish sort of level.
Well that may be so, but it seems to me that it’s the opening ceremony that really distinguishes and makes memorable one Olympic Games from another. After all, once the competition starts, the events and the venues are really pretty similar from one to the next.
Alan Tomlinson: Yes that’s a good point, because really, every Olympic Games stands for whatever these Olympic ideals are supposed to be, the ones of friendship, peace, mutual understanding, and when you get the Games going then the athletes really represent all that. And so it is in something like the ceremonies that the host city and the nation can say, ‘Well this is our version of how we see what this is all about.’ So there is a sort of difference; but at the same time, they all come out with rather interestingly comparable sorts of messages.
Amanda Smith: Well the modern era of Olympic Games opening ceremonies I think really began with the extravaganza that opened the 1984 Los Angeles Games; why did those Games set a new benchmark in scale and content for opening ceremonies?
Alan Tomlinson: Well there were two reasons really: and at the Los Angeles Games you have to remember, were at the height of the Cold War, and nobody else wanted the Games then. Los Angeles got it on its own without any race against any other city, because there’s been such disasters in the 1970s, the Munich massacre and the Montreal African boycott and so on, and the over-budgeting for the overall event in the Montreal Games. And then of course, Jimmy Carter pulled the United States and a lot of western nations followed suit out of the 1980 Games in Moscow. So in a way, it was the comeback Games. But it was also in many respects, the ‘Hamburger’ Games, as some of us watching the whole transformation of world sport were saying at that time, because Los Angeles changed the rules, and in a way marketised the Games, and privatised the Games. And so they offered a new economic model for the Games and a new sense of what the spectacle could be about, and the scale of the spectacle itself could be conceived in new ways. And anybody who saw that ceremony can’t forget the Rocket Man. Can you remember?
Amanda Smith: Yes, now remind us about the Rocket Man.
Alan Tomlinson: Well in the opening ceremony, a man just coming out of the skies, landing in the middle of the stadium and everybody thinking would he land on that circle where he’s supposed to land. And what it does to us is it brings us back to the circus, we all become kids, become infantilised, it’s what I’ve called, along with some other writers, a kind of Spielberg in effect. We believe in a kind of magic and a kind of miracle, and we just go ‘Wow!’ and we say, ‘Well this is wonderful’, and in a way we suspend at times, our critical response to it, and we just accept it for the show that it is. But you don’t forget some of those strange images, and Los Angeles to, it was an absolutely achievement, if you like, technically and so on, however culturally trivial it was, when 84 grand pianos were just wheeled out of the coliseum to play some Gershwin tunes, and again you just gasp, you say, ‘Wow! I’m glad this wasn’t made a mess of; I’m glad it worked’. And all the shows since have really tried to compete with Los Angeles on that sort of scale.
Amanda Smith: Yes well the opening ceremony seems to have become a competitive event in itself now, doesn’t it? … with each host city feeling the need to present an opening that’s at least as, but preferably more spectacular than the last.
Alan Tomlinson: Yes, that’s right, and of course a lot of that links with international TV interests, but because of course the television companies pay for a lot of this; in this case of course it’s NBC, in particular from the United States. They want their money’s worth, and so they want these wonderful spectacular images. So linked with something like the ceremony in the beginning is what Dick Ebersol and NBC this year want, which is this panoramic shot right out of the stadium, across from Homebush, east across Sydney, down to the Harbour Bridge and North Sydney and the river; they can’t quite squeeze the Opera House in, but everybody’s had enough of that anyway. And so there is a sort of race for the memorable image; the hope here in this case, that this would outdo that fantastic location that there was for the Olympics in Barcelona in 1992, with a traditional old stadium, if you like, and the swimming in particular, down from the stadium, hovering almost over the Mediterranean itself.
Amanda Smith: Is there a danger for Sydney then of trying too hard?
Alan Tomlinson: Well my impression is that when this sort of race escalates on this scale, the magnificence of the event intensifies, but also the triviality of it intensifies accordingly. And I know there’s been a lot of debate in Australia about the bicycling kangaroos and so on, so people both want to make their own mark in terms of the Game thing in Australia and in Sydney itself, but they don’t want to be seen in too stereotypical a fashion. That’s one of the really difficult balances in managing these ceremonies, because when you try and construct the history of a nation and a city and a region in these sorts of ways, theatrically and try and blend the showbiz popular culture styles with some higher art forms, perhaps dancing and singing of certain kinds, then you’re obviously going to be quite selective, and it’s going to look sometimes a little bit lop-sided, and the only way that you can really say, ‘Well yes, this is the United States’ or ‘This is Australia’ is to work with international stereotypes. I do think Sydney is trying too hard, because it’s saying that these will be the Athletes Games, the Green Games, the Recycling Games, the Public Transport Games, the best Games and the biggest Games ever, it’s bound to fail on something. I hope something that it doesn’t fail on, something that does satisfy both local needs if you like, and international audience, is the opening ceremony, because rather like journalists who come to Sydney won’t give you another chance if the transport doesn’t work very swiftly and very smoothly, then the world audience might really not have much of a chance to change its view of the context of the Games, and the cultural distinctiveness of where those Games are if it doesn’t come off well in the opening ceremony.
Amanda Smith: Is there also an attempt within the opening ceremony to suppress or minimise issues of dissention, or controversies around the host country, or indeed the Olympics themselves? I’m obviously thinking here that the Sydney opening ceremony will include the display and acknowledgement of our indigenous culture at the same time as Aboriginal protest around the Games over human rights issues. Has the opening ceremony become a vehicle for smoothing over the cracks?
Alan Tomlinson: I think it has become a vehicle for that kind of smoothing over. If you look back at Los Angeles again, you can see a certain sort of romanticisation of the pioneer figure, the wagons rolling across, though some of us noticed that the wagons were going the wrong way across the map of North America in that particular ceremony, but the Indians, if you like, the indigenous peoples of North America didn’t feature in any significant way at all, and in Korea there’s a sort of sub-text that was at work there about north and south and about the emergence of the south into the capitalist world. And that in lots of ways, was not made explicit, so there’s a sort of smoothing over of what was probably one of the most, still is, one of the most lingering aspects of the cold war of the last century.
Sometimes it’s very positive actually. In Barcelona there were some very interesting negotiation across Catalan interests and central Spanish interests, and the representation of both parties if you like, through the use of two flags and different languages and different cultures balanced in the ceremony. But there is a real chance that some serious issues can be marginalised, because those sorts of histories are often kind of children’s illustrated history; they can get a little bit of mention and then get easily marginalised, and they can look fairly tokenistic.
Amanda Smith: And you see that as what? disingenuous, even hypocritical?
Alan Tomlinson: Well I do see that as hypocritical, because I think what usually happens in most of the Games, the ceremonies, is that the kind of mainstream cultural emphasis which showed these, or popular cultural emphasis as well as selected aspects of what traditional higher culture; does it merge to dominate? And so I don’t think the ceremonies in the end really help resolve the issue, or help profile the issue as fully as they should do.
Amanda Smith: And yet couldn’t you also see the opening ceremony as a true reflection of the optimism of the Olympic ideal, of the possibility of inclusiveness and harmony among people?
Alan Tomlinson: Yes; one thing I haven’t mentioned there is the parade of the athletes, in fact I think that’s the most boring part of all, I don’t know whether you’d agree with me, but what happened when you mix together the opening ceremonies that are designed by the organisers of each Olympics with the recurrent ritual of setting the Olympics off, which has to do with the torch, the flame, and the parade of athletes and so on, that you can move towards a certain sort of inclusivity, which is what you said, and I think that can be quite uplifting; it needs to be, it lasts so long. But if you listen to all the commentators on say the parades of athletes, it really transforms itself into a kind of bad geography lesson, and really a half-baked fashion commentary. So I do think that the very form of the ceremony in a way reduces the significance that it potentially has, you know, what colour skirts have the Australians got on, or what shape hats have these East Europeans got, those sorts of things which commentators are reduced to saying during the parade of athletes. But yes, I do think it is true that one can say, ‘Well there could be worse things in the world than this’, and there are worse things in the world than this, and to bring, in this case when we’re talking about the athletes, that number, over 10,000 people together, parading like this, in this fashion, does really have a lump in the throat sort of effect that you can see as a positive, optimistic sign of how things can be better than they often are in a war-riven, poverty stricken, in certain parts of the world itself.
Amanda Smith: And for all that the content and images of Olympic opening ceremonies might be a bit facile, I guess I have to ask what more can you realistically achieve in a mass public spectacle of this scale, and one that is accessible to the huge and diverse audience that it has, and I’m talking here of the television audience of 4-billion, or whatever it is, around the world.
Alan Tomlinson: Yes, the figures are a bit hard to corroborate; they’re the ones reported by the International Olympic Committee; some scholars have really trawled a load of media research internationally, and they established that perhaps the audience is 1-billion or 2-billion rather than 3-billion or 4-billion, but we were still talking the biggest that we’ve known. But yes, to try and cater for this need, you’re absolutely right, it means that there’ll be a sort of dilution of what the big themes are. The problem I think is that as well we know which events in the Olympics get most viewers, and this is it, the opening ceremony does get more viewers than just about anything else. The 100-metres dash gets quite a lot; the marathon gets a lot; then a lot of the figures vary when people are in different countries. If they’ve got a star doing well, then the figures go up in that country, unsurprisingly. So it s hard to cater for an audience on this scale, and the simplest way of doing it, and this really is Los Angeles’ legacy for the last half-dozen Summer Olympics and the similar examples you can find in the Winter Olympics, is to really take the showbiz style and create the spectacle almost as if it is a Hollywood movie.
Amanda Smith: What would you want to see in an opening ceremony for the Olympics then ?
Alan Tomlinson: Well I think that you could bring a little bit more about the athletes themselves in it, about the histories of the Games. It’s always struck me that we’ve got the history of the nation and you’ve got the rhetoric of Olympism, which is at the heart of these ceremonies in the ways that they’ve developed. But you could say highlight Olympic moments; you could highlight the history of sport, more than say, the history of the nation’s own popular culture or something like that. And I’m sure there are some more inventive ways in which you could include the athletes, rather than parading them in this rather unsatisfying fashion parade.
Amanda Smith: Alan Tomlinson, Professor of Sport and Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton, in the UK, but who’s currently in Australia and based at the University of Newcastle.
To Japan now, and what has for many years been the country’s Number One team sport, baseball. At first glance, you might assume that baseball has been part of the Americanisation of Japanese culture. But if you look into it a bit further, you find a very different attitude and way of playing baseball in Japan, compared to the United States or indeed, to anywhere else in the world.
For example, batters bow to umpires. Practice is unending, and in the Land of the Rising Sun, baseball, or ‘besuboru’ as it’s called, has developed into a discipline of spiritual proportions.
But with the next World Cup for Soccer, the World Game, being co-hosted by Japan with South Korea, Japanese baseball is now facing an increasingly popular rival in soccer.
From Tokyo, the ABC’s Toni Hassan explores how baseball was transformed into a Japanese game, and why it’s now under threat.
GAME ATMOSPHERE/COMMENTATOR
Toni Hassan: An enthusiastic crowd at one of this season’s professional baseball games in Tokyo, the Yakult Swallows against the Yokahama Base Stars.
Watching the stands can be as entertaining as the game. Spectators stand several thousand strong chanting in unison at the instruction of cheerleaders dressed in special outfits.
The unwritten rules dictate that only when your side is batting you’re allowed to let loose and cheer, accompanied by trumpets and whistles. Organised fans carry small plastic megaphones which they thump with enthusiasm against the seats in front.
But the most obvious noise is the call for mobile vendors selling beer, ice cream and of all things, whisky. With that sort of fuel, the crowds are buoyant.
Baseball is one of Japan’s national obsessions. The sport highlights the Japanese people’s best-known and mythologised traits of hard work, the quest for perfection and the belief that the collective good should triumph over the ambitions of the individual.
Jim Allen is an American who’s long been fascinated by the differences between Japanese baseball and the national game of his home country.
Jim Allen: For fans and for the people who run it, it’s almost a religion. It’s deadly serious. Failures by the players will often get the description of being Class-A war criminal.
Toni Hassan: So in what way is Japan’s version of baseball aping real life here?
Jim Allen: This has to do with how perfection is measured by the teams. Perfection meaning a lack of mistakes, as opposed to a lack of production. And the assumption here is that if you don’t make mistakes, your product will be excellent.
Toni Hassan: Well let’s explore the ethic underlying baseball in Japan. I’ve read that a fairly famous baseball manager and essayist in the 1920s was quoted as saying, ‘Players if they don’t vomit blood in practice, then they cannot hope to win games’, you know, you have to suffer to be good. Do you see that still being played in Japan?
Jim Allen: To a minor degree. That was really the opening ethos of baseball in Japan from the 19th century when it became Japan’s first team sport. There really wasn’t a concept of sport in Japan, everything was pointed towards the martial arts, and baseball drew out of that the kind of discipline, adapted that on a team level, and the ultimate achievement was to achieve perfect form. Only through repetition and devotion, a sort of spiritualistic or ritualistic affection for the game, and devotion, could you expect or hope to achieve perfection in your form.
Toni Hassan: Baseball came to Japan in the mid-1800s, 100 years before the American occupation. It’s story is intertwined with Japan’s political and economic history.
Jim Allen: Japan was trying to build up its industry and build up its military, and in order to do that, it had to bring in Western experts, teachers and engineers. At the same time it was sending young Japanese college students to the United States and to Europe to train, and baseball was one of the things they brought back with them.
Toni Hassan: It was a natural import?
Jim Allen: Right, it transplanted of its own freewill.
Toni Hassan: And it was at a time when Japan was actually opening its doors for the first time really to the West.
Jim Allen: Well it was opening its doors, but looking for ways to catch up. It wasn’t so much ‘We want to be like the West’, but ‘We have to learn from the West in order to basically kick the foreigners out of Japan.’
Toni Hassan: By the start of the Second World War, Japan had established a professional baseball league. The league has gone on to play every year but one, 1945, the year that the atomic bombs were dropped and the country lost the war. Nine months after the surrender, baseball was back for the 1946 season. General Douglas McArthur, the American commander in occupied Japan, ruled that the game was important to instil American values of fair play and team work. It was equally popular with the Japanese establishment.
Jim Allen: It was not embraced by the establishment until they had co-opted it, to the extent that they co-opted a lot of other grassroots developed organisations at that time, like the Housewives Association started as an activist movement for housewives. But the government co-opted it, and made the head of the Housewives Association a man. This is a famous story in Japan. And they did the same with baseball.
Toni Hassan: So the State basically took it over?
Jim Allen: Yes, in essence, through the Ministry of Education. They thought that they could inculcate the ideas of teamwork and use that as something that was lacking in the education system up to that point.
Toni Hassan: Because the collective identity is everything in Japan, even now, right?
Jim Allen: Right. It hasn’t changed; it’s changed in the details, but the idea that you are what group you belong to, that you’re identified with the success and failure of some essential group hasn’t changed much.
Toni Hassan: The rules of Japanese baseball are virtually identical to those in the US and Australia, same bats, same balls. But scratch the surface and you’ll find something the Japanese have made very much their own. And it’s a matter of style. To avoid making mistakes, Japanese ball players adopt a cautious approach: batters are reluctant to try and hit home runs when other players are on base. Jim Allen says the game here is one of form and strategy, more so than power.
Jim Allen: Many Japanese people consider the essential part of baseball is getting a runner on base anyhow, any way you can, and advancing him through a variety of tricks and strategies, as opposed to trying to hit the cover off the ball and put it into the stands. And that’s really the big difference.
Toni Hassan: So is it a less spectacular sport to watch?
Jim Allen: No I don’t think so, but I think the expectations are different. The concept is that correct baseball is a game of small details, and baseball is a game of details. But the concept in Japan is that the team that wins will be the team that masters the details the most.
Toni Hassan: This also extends to pitching, where the Japanese may not throw as hard, but exhibit superb control.
Jim Allen: They tend to be more team-oriented, they tend to be less divisive.
Toni Hassan: Is that for the sake of team harmony, a fear of standing out?
Jim Allen: I think it’s more or less the way that children who grew up playing baseball were taught, that’s what the game is.
Toni Hassan: More so than winning?
Jim Allen: Yes, again the point is that winning is a by-product of good form and co-operation. What it means to do for the team means sacrificing for the team, but it also includes occasionally sacrificing team goals for one of the players who is en route to accomplishing some record, and so teams will sometimes do silly strategies or techniques that will allow one of their players to accumulate some record. It’s not unheard of in the US, but it’s less common now; you wouldn’t see it to the extent where if two players on different teams were competing for the home run championship of the league, the game between these two teams turns into a farce, preventing the other team’s player from advancing towards the goal of achieving his championship.
Toni Hassan: Do you think audiences are robbed of a good game because of the dynamic here in Japan?
Jim Allen: Gee, I think the fans expect it. To say whether they’re robbed of it is sort of ethno-centric. In America, the feeling is that the purpose of baseball is to subordinate the individual goals towards winning a championship, and in Japan it is too, but there are other goals, and the team will pursue these individual goals as a team.
Toni Hassan: Another key difference with baseball played here is that if a game is tied after 12 innings, it must end in a tie. The rules dictate that the game cannot be extended. No-one loses face by being defeated.
Training is also about giving the right impression. In the West, managers largely believe that pushing players too far will tire their troops. But in Japan, a good hard workout every day is considered imperative in order to show the fans, the press, and the opposition, that the team is full of fight.
Jim Allen: There is a definite problem for Japanese players practising too much. The Japanese players especially the less established ones, have to fight for their playing time, and this is often determined by their attitude in practice. Players who are less gung-ho have a little less fire in practice; they tend to get fewer opportunities to play, and so most of the teams really go all out in practice, they’re expected to give it all in practice.
Toni Hassan: The gruelling training schedule in Japan was developed by one of the sport’s best known pioneers, Suishi Tobita. He reckoned that only morally correct athletes could excel. He once wrote that the purpose of training is not health, but the forging of the soul.
While Japan has had a number of contemporary stars who’ve helped modernise the sport, Jim Allen argues that these days baseball in Japan has an image problem. It’s seen as an older person’s game, and a sport that’s wooden and lacking fun.
Jim Allen: The market is middle-aged men. There are of course young people who watch, but a lot of them are being drawn away by soccer, which is gaining in popularity among young people.
Toni Hassan: How controversial is that? Is that the challenge for baseball?
Jim Allen: 1993 was an enormous challenge, when the professional soccer league opened here. No baseball broadcast was complete without the announcers going into a detailed analysis of the differences between baseball and soccer, because they were seriously threatened. Attendance at soccer games was incredibly good; TV stations were fighting to broadcast soccer games.
Toni Hassan: So what has pro-baseball Japan done?
Jim Allen: Well they’ve tried to speed up the game, gone more to marketing some of the younger stars. One team, the Sabu Lions, used to prohibit their players from being in television commercials because they felt it was counter-productive to the team effort. But that changed, because all these soccer players were doing TV commercials and they wanted to get the baseball players out there and in the public eye more often. But there is still the tendency in Japanese baseball that we know baseball, we know what the fans want, and this is what they’re going to get. It’s not supposed to be fun.
One manager said that the Japanese tradition of the first runner gets on, the second runner bunts, usually making an out in the process and scoring fewer runs, but with the goal of scoring one run, of getting a lead. He said it was predictable and it was boring and the fans played good money to come and watch the game and why are we boring them? And he was ripped into.
Toni Hassan: Well you’re saying it’s still in something of a time warp, and with the Soccer World Cup around the corner, hosted by both Japan and Korea, there could be a real challenge, would you say, to baseball here?
Jim Allen: I would say absolutely. I think they’ll have their hands full in 2002 trying to lure people away from the constant programming and the constant media blitz which will be here next year, maybe difficult as well; 2003 there’ll be the after-effect, the pro soccer leagues will find more and more enthusiasm for their game, and baseball will be having to really look around and take stock of what they have and what they can sell.
CHANTING
Toni Hassan: More soccer fans could well mean fewer baseball spectators, and the beginning of the end of an endeared pastime in Japan.
For The Sports Factor, this has been Toni Hassan reporting from Tokyo.
Amanda Smith: And The Sports Factor is produced by Michael Shirrefs. I’m Amanda Smith.
Well from next Friday, and for the duration of you-know-what, we’ll be coming to you from the International Broadcast Centre at Homebush Bay. Hope you’ll join us.
THEME
Guests on this program:
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Alan Tomlinson Professor of Sport & Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton in the UK, but currently in Australia at the University of Newcastle. |
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Jim Allen Baseball commentator based in Japan. |
Presenter:
Amanda Smith
Producer:
Michael Shirrefs
Story Producer:
Toni Hassan
©1999 Australian Broadcasting Corporation