Squaring the circle in sumo

IN BOXING, the prizefighters square off against each other in a small square arena known as a ring, despite its shape. In sumo, the rikishi square off against each other in a real ring, though the name of their battleground—the dohyo—contains no connotations of its shape.

Some sumo theorists hold that the ring is a symbolic representation of Japan or the universe. Others say the sport came to Japan from China through the Korean Peninsula, and the spirituality underlying the Japanese version is a blend of Shinto and Taoism. In the latter theory, the dohyo represents the yang element, or the sun. Either would seem to be a reasonable explanation for the circular shape of the dohyo.

‘Twas not ever thus, however.

For example, the rikishi in the sumo competition held earlier this week at the Sho’okita Primary School in Sho’o-cho, Okayama, fought in what is believed to be the only remaining square dohyo in the country.

All 213 of the school’s pupils participated–including the girls–with each of the students representing either the red or the white team. That’s the classic Japanese color scheme for two squads in a competitive event. The first graders performed the initial ring-entering ceremony, and all the students made up their own shikona, the distinctive names by which the rikishi are known.

The dohyo itself dates back about 500 years when the local feudal lord moved the Hiyoshi Shinto shrine. The daimyo thought sumo improved the fighting spirit, so he built the dohyo to toughen up the members of his clan. Sumo has close connections to Shinto, and tournaments were held at the same shrine during festivals as an offering to the divinities. That practice ended during the Second World War, but it was revived again as a school event in 1967.

Nambu sumo in Morioka

The phrase “only remaining square dohyo” is the key that unlocks a door to another corridor that is largely forgotten today. As any other sport, sumo has evolved over the years, and other variations flourished before the current form became the standard. There was once a style known as Nambu sumo, named after the ruling clan in what is now Iwate. The square dohyo was used in Nambu sumo, but only for the frequent barnstorming tournaments held in different towns to provide popular entertainment. Records indicate that round dohyo were used in Nambu sumo when the matches were held at Shinto shrines.

It also seems to have been widely known outside of Iwate. An account survives of a tournament held in Kyoto in 1732 between the rikishi of the Nambu style and those of the Kyushu style.

Regular performances of Nambu sumo ended about 100 years ago, but the folks in Iwate never forgot about it. Three years ago, local groups held a Nambu sumo tournament with a square dohyo in Morioka that the organizers say required six months of study and preparation. There isn’t much information about that tournament on the web, either in Japanese or English, but one Japanese blogger who made a special trip to see it found the differences fascinating.

He wrote that a great deal of time and effort was spent to recreate the rituals before the match, which he thought emphasized the religious aspects more than the contemporary version. He also said the rikishi began the match standing upright rather than from the crouching position used for modern tournaments. The match commenced on a signal from a third person. The victors were those rikishi who threw their opponents to the ground, or caused them to fall to the ground, rather than throwing them outside the ring. The observer said it reminded him of judo or Western-style wrestling. Here’s a brief second-hand account in English from a sumo fan who ordered DVDs of the tournament from Iwate and got information from people who were there. According to his description, one of the participants said the emphasis on throwing the opponent to the ground gives it a resemblance to traditional Mongolian wrestling.

The square rather than round shape of the dohyo doesn’t necessarily negate the theory that the ring represents the sun, by the way. The old Chinese character for sun is 日, and even those who can’t read it can still recognize the shape!

Afterwords: The name of the Shinto shrine in Okayama might be the Hie-jinja. Both readings are possible, and I couldn’t find enough information on this shrine to know for certain.

Kabocha!

COULD THIS BE the start of a trend? Here’s another example of the Japanese using a commonplace item for casual recreation to promote neighborhood amity and have some fun while they’re at it.

This May, we had a post about yacurling that described how some people in Tokushima had modified Japanese kettles, or yakan, to play curling on a gymnasium floor. Now here’s a report about a game created for the Kabocha Project in Nanyo, Yamagata. Kabocha is the word for squash in Japanese, and the folks in Nanyo came up with all sorts of ways to enjoy the food in an event they called the Kabolympics, timed to coincide with the autumn harvest.

Visitors to the Kabolympics had the chance to try their hand at ring toss and other amusements using the vegetable while feasting on such treats as squash doughnuts, squash ice cream, and squash soup. They were entertained by local singer-songwriter Sugai Tomo’o performing his composition, The Kabocha Song. And best of all, they got to bowl kabocha style.

In the Nanyo version of the game, 25-centimeter-tall butternut squash—usually found in soups—replaced the bowling pins. Instead of balls, they rolled red, white, or orange-striped Pucchini squash 10-20 centimeters in diameter. Ten 3-person teams completed—and they kept score.

Between the requirement that the bowlers yell Kabocha! before tossing every squash and the impossibility of rolling what amounts to a mini-pumpkin down a five-meter lane with any hope that it would go in a straight line or hit the intended spot, it wouldn’t be surprising if they all collapsed in helpless laughter before they finished 10 frames.

After a bit more research, it turns out that the folks in Nanyo really do have a thing about gourds. They also used kabocha for outdoor curling this February. Competing in what were probably the Winter Kabolympics were 13 teams with three members each. They slid a squash instead of a curling stone at an 80-centimeter-wide target 15 meters away.

They had to yell Kabocha! before each shot, too.

What could be next? Using gobo (burdock root) for javelin competitions?

Water balling on Lake Biwa

ON SATURDAY we saw how the folks in Mima are having big fun by curling on a gymnasium floor with kettles, but this one looks even better: water balling on Lake Biwa.

Let's roll!

Thanks to an Italian company that is marketing a clear PVC water ball invented by Charles Jones in 1998, intrepid environmentalists, devotees of water sports, and people on the lookout for a good time can climb into the ball and roll out into the middle of the lake. Walking on water isn’t just a Bible story anymore.

The O’Pal Optics sports club in Otsu, Shiga, and the Nippon Water Walk Association have teamed up to popularize water ball use, and one of their approaches is to pitch the ball to environmental researchers. The idea is to roll out to positions on the lake they couldn’t otherwise see from shore, observe the cleanliness level of the water, and take photos from inside. The lower part of the ball also creates the same effect as a glass-bottomed boat, so waterballers can see what’s going on under the lake’s surface.

The water ball is 2.5 meters in diameter and 0.5 millimeters thick. Riders climb in through a hatchway with a fastener attached, and then use an air blower to inflate it. It has the capacity for two riders–standing room only–so you can double your waterballing fun by going for a roll with a friend. There was no mention of how long riders can stay inside before the air starts to go stale.

The people who’ve tried it say it’s just like a water bed, and no, I didn’t realize any of those were still around either. It floats gently and easily over the small waves on the lake surface, and they claim the experience transports you to another world.

Exhibiting an attitude of proper scientific detachment, the chair of the association said he hopes the ball will help foster an awareness of environmental issues and contribute to interest in Lake Biwa. But after taking a look at the association’s Japanese language website, they’re certainly aware of their new toy’s fun potential, too.

For example, here’s a video of water ball races in the inaugural competition at Lake Biwa last year. The guy in the first pair of racers who had such a hard time standing up said he had never been inside one before.

The second competition is scheduled for 30 August this year. How much longer can it be before someone comes up with an extreme sport or x-rated websites featuring water ball use?

If you’re near Lake Biwa and want to try balling on the water, give O’Pal Optics a call at their toll-free number: 0120-176-668. If you live in other parts of the country, take a look at the Water Walk Association website to see if an event is coming to a swimming pool near you soon.

And if you’re interested in buying one, you can put the search terms “water ball” and Italy into the English-language Google site and plenty of merchants will pop up!

Yacurling we will go

THERE MAY BE nothing new under the sun, but big fun often results when imaginative people modify and adapt whatever’s at hand to create something semi-new. One such group of people, led by 66-year-old physical education instructor Kita Ryoko in Mima, Tokushima, decided they wanted to invent a new sport that could be played by people of any age.

What they came up with was yacurling. It’s similar to curling, but played on a gymnasium floor with a kettle instead of on specially treated ice with a granite stone. Curling has shown up on everyone’s radar in Japan since the better-than-expected performance of the women’s team at the 2006 Winter Olympics. The women’s team also finished fourth at the 2008 World Championships, though they didn’t fare so well this year. (The women from China won instead.)

Ms. Kita and her crew started with a five-liter yakan, which is a Japanese-style kettle. (There are different sizes, but they all look the same.) They cut three holes in the bottom of the kettle and inserted casters to allow it to roll. To make sure it moves along smartly, they put 2.5 kilograms of ballast inside.

The players stand nine meters away from the target (which in curling is called the house). The house in yacurling has a diameter of 0.65 meters. The winner is the player who can roll the stone (yakan) closest to the center. Unlike curling, the stone is recovered after each toss, so strategic placement and knocking the the other team’s stones out of the way aren’t factors in this game.

The inventors worked out the kinks at a local sports club on Saturdays and were delighted to discover that it was harder than they thought it would be. Now they hope to get other people interested.

For the sake of comparison, a curling stone is from 17 to 20 kilograms in weight (and costs several hundred dollars). The house is 3.7 meters wide, and the players stand from 45 to 46 meters away.

Yacurling looks like an inexpensive way to have fun to me. Of course it’s just a game rather than a new sport, but who wouldn’t want to try it at least once?

About that name—Japanese vowels have only one pronunciation each. The Japanese A is always pronounced like the A in “father”. Curling in Japanese is rendered ka-ri-n-gu, so the first two syllables in yakan (N at the end of words is a separate unit) are pronounced the same as the first two in yaka-ringu (yacurling).

The reports didn’t say whether it was an individual sport or a team sport, so I don’t know if the team members use a mop on the floor to help the kettle roll home!

Afterwords:
The more I think about this, the more it reminds me of something the members of my college fraternity would have cooked up. One night well past the witching hour, two of the members stole a wheelchair from a nearby hospital (I know, I know), and within 24 hours, we were having contests in the living room to see who could do a wheelie the longest (i.e., ride around balanced on the two back wheels with the front wheels in the air).

Personality disorder or genetic disposition?

The media are less a window on reality than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.
- Paul Weaver

LET’S HAVE a thought experiment: Imagine you are a journalist and you are to interview Japanese figure skater Asada Mao at a meeting of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

The 18-year-old Ms. Asada, who was just graduated from high school, is the third-ranked figure skater in the world. She has won the Japanese national championships three years running and was world champion last year. Ms. Asada is the only woman to have successfully performed two triple axel jumps in the same program at an official competition.

But as part of this thought experiment, you will be interviewing Ms. Asada when she was still only 16 years old.

A normal person might ask how she got involved in figure skating, to what she attributes her success, what daily training routine enables her to perform at that elite level, what she does for fun when she’s not figure skating, and how much longer she plans to complete.

But Gebhard Hielscher, the former Tokyo correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and a member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan—in fact, the former head of the organization—chose to ask a different question when he interviewed the 16-year-old girl in April 2007:

For instance, when you are in the U.S., are you asked, you know, about your being a Japanese, or your country has done some very bad things, and your Prime Minister is not honest or something?

A normal person can guess what she said even before they hear the answer:

I’m training in Los Angeles right now, but everyone is very friendly and they talk to me a lot.

The reason a normal person could predict her answer is that most people behave the same way when they want to get acquainted with people or make new friends, whether they live in Los Angeles or Lagos, Kuala Lumpur or Kingston, or even, I daresay, in Berlin.

That’s because normal people everywhere want to enjoy themselves and the companionship of other people. They already understand that people in every country have “done some very bad things”, and that politicians everywhere tend not to be honest. That’s why there’s an expression about people who live in glass houses and stone throwing.

It wouldn’t occur to normal people to make an innocent 16-year-old girl uncomfortable in front of a room full of foreigners old enough to be her parents.

But Mr. Hielscher did.

Let’s try another thought experiment. Why on earth would he?

What other reason could there be than to demonstrate his own moral superiority that he presumes was granted by through his adoption of a specific political agenda? Even though it’s apparent the man lacks social skills and common sense, he surely must know how normal people interact. He surely must realize that normal people have their own lives to lead and their own futures to look forward to, and therefore don’t care about events that ended and were resolved more than 60 years ago—nor is there any reason they should. That’s particularly true for a 16-year-old whose parents weren’t alive at the time of those events, and whose grandparents, if alive, were probably younger than she is now.

The reason he asked the question wasn’t to reveal contemporary American attitudes toward the war, nor to uncover how Japanese visitors to that country are treated. It wasn’t about raising awareness of events of the rapidly receding past, nor to seek truth and justice.

The Japanese who frequently read this website might not believe this, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with Japan, either. Repeatedly dredging up selected parts of Japan’s history is just one of many means to the same end.

Instead, it has everything to do with using the event as a pretext to steal the spotlight. It has everything to do using that spotlight to indulge a vain and condescending elitism derived from his sociopolitical views, and to bask in the approval of an audience of foreign journalists that he assumes—probably correctly—shares those views. It has everything to do with humiliating anyone who might have other ideas, even a teenager too young, too far removed from what for her is the distant past, and too involved with living today to care. It has everything to do with mounting the stairway to what he assumes is a higher moral plane than the unthinking, uncaring rabble.

It’s all about showing us how wonderful he is because he is one of the self-anointed politically elect.

The key here is the unspoken assumption that Japanese behavior was–and remains–so detestable that it would be perfectly understandable if people in another country were to confront children about it during casual social encounters. Happens every day!

Perhaps the most pathetic aspect of the incident is that he doesn’t realize how transparent his behavior is.

It is a recognizable phenomenon that people of this type often gravitate toward the news media as a profession. That line of work enables them to advance their views through the conduct of advocacy journalism, which prevents normal people from making up their own minds by telling them only part of the story—either true or made up from whole cloth. It allows them to lead the sheep to the pen and to the conclusion they want them to reach.

Is this a form of personality disorder that might be called the Little Jack Horner Syndrome? (He stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum, and said “What a good boy am I!”) Or, because it seems to be present in every country and can be traced back for at least a couple of centuries, is it a genetic predisposition?

That this man was selected to be chairman of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan and thought it perfectly natural to ask this question of a teenager in front of his peers has much to say about the membership of that organization and the nature of the profession itself.

Once again: If your knowledge of Japan is derived from the news media, everything you know about Japan is wrong. And now you know one of the reasons why.

Here’s another thought experiment: guess which part of the political spectrum Mr. Hielscher identifies with.

Normal people won’t have to be told that, either.

He is (or was) head of the Tokyo office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. The namesake of the organization was a former President of Germany and a member of the Social Democratic Party who bequeathed money in his will to create the foundation. The party’s yearbook from 1926 explains its objectives:

“The Friedrich Ebert Foundation pursues the goal of giving young, empowered proletarians government aid to fund an education at state-accredited institutions. As a basic principle, only those people who have a recommendation from the party organization will receive funding.”

In other words, you have to spout the party line to get the money.

The foundation also has a museum and study center housed in the Karl Marx House in Trier. The center was established, in part, to study the life and works of Karl Marx and the history of socialism.

That does not mean everyone in that part of the political spectrum behaves the same way—they can’t all be that pushy and vulgar—but rather that most of the people who behave this way are found in that part of the spectrum. If you want to see a duck, look in a marsh instead of a downtown office building.

And if you want to see the incident, here’s the Youtube video. It lasts 53 seconds.

Mr. Hielscher asked another question first:

Do you have a boyfriend? If you don’t have a boyfriend, who would you like to be your boyfriend?

Ms. Asada answered that she didn’t have a boyfriend, but ducked the second part. The girl missed her chance. She should have told him that her social life isn’t his business. But that would offend his sense of entitlement as a journalist, based on the mistaken presumption that he has the inalienable right to ask anyone any question at any time.

It’s pointless to engage these specimens in logical argument, present facts for their attention, or attempt honest debate. They are not interested in inconvenient facts, and will try to deny or denigrate any facts presented that prove them wrong. As the man said, they can’t handle the truth. They are not interested in honest debate, either. They are only interested in congratulating themselves on their superior humanity, asserting the inferiority of those who think otherwise, and ultimately exterminating any views other than their own.

How normal people should deal with them might well be the subject of another thought experiment.

Thanks to Aceface for the tip.

Kageura to hang up his spikes

IT’S OFFICIAL: Kageura Yasutake (62) will retire from the Japanese major leagues at the end of the current season, bringing to an end the longest baseball career in Japanese history at 37 years. Mr. Kageura will have played all 37 of those seasons with the Hawks’ franchise, first for the Nankai Hawks in the Osaka area, and now for the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks in Fukuoka City.

L-R: Kageura, Mizushima

Kageura was signed as an undrafted free agent in 1972 and his career began as a pinch-hitter nonpareil. He is known for using an extra long bat dubbed the monohoshizao (clothesline pole), as well as his love of Japanese sake. He is so pickled from his nightly drinking expeditions, the story goes, that he sends up a spray of sake whenever he hits the ball.

He became one of the starting nine after the franchise moved to Fukuoka City and emerged as the team’s premier slugger, winning the Triple Crown three years in a row. He enjoys the rare distinction of playing with his son, a pitcher, on the same team this year. His uniform number, 90, is expected to be unofficially retired.

The player’s taste for the grape—or in this case, rice—began during his high school days. Appearing in a regional high school championship game, he used garlic to hide the smell of liquor on his breath, and despite a mammoth hangover, hit a mammoth, 508 ft. walk-off home run. While circling the bases after his winning hit, however, he vomited on the field. The smell of sake was so overpowering the umpires (this being high school) disqualified him and removed the runs from the scoreboard.

Mr. Kageura announced his decision to retire while having a drink at the bar run by his father-in-law. It was made public in the 860th installment of the comic Abusan in the 5 April edition of Big Comic Original published by Shogakkan. (The publication is known as a comic book for adults. That does not mean they run X-rated content; rather, it means that the book publishes comic stories for adults rather than children.)

Abusan is Kageura’s nickname and is derived from the Japanese pronunciation for absinthe. (Some people mistakenly write it as Abu-san, which works in Japanese as Mr. Horsefly.) The comic was created and is still written and drawn by Mizushima Shinji. Familiar even to contemporary college students, the series is known for incorporating actual events in Japanese baseball into the story and the appearance of current players, managers, and team owners. It is so widely known that a new manager of the Fukuoka Hawks joked that his first comment after looking over his roster of players was, “What happened to Kageura?”

Some say one reason for the comic’s popularity is that Japanese salarymen identified with his character, particularly in the 1970s. He played for a team in the less popular Pacific League during the age of supremacy of the Central League’s Tokyo Yomiuri Giants, his role as a pinch hitter rather than as a star endowed him with an Everyman quality, and he was a serious drinker.

Abusan and his batting title award

Ordinarily, I might not have brought this story up, except that there’s a real-life connection—I’m casually acquainted with the former pro ballplayer who is the model for Abusan. That’s Nagabuchi Yozo, an outfielder, DH, and briefly a relief pitcher for the Kintetsu Buffaloes and Nippon Ham Fighters. Mr. Nagabuchi won the batting title in 1969, his first full year in the major leagues, with a .333 average.

Here are his career statistics for those of you who read Japanese. He usually batted third and played right field, and wound up with a lifetime batting average of .278. Mr. Nagabuchi was very much the contact hitter: he seldom struck out or walked, and even better, rarely hit into double plays.

The real Abusan once described his motivation for playing major league baseball:

“When I played for Toshiba (as a Toshiba employee in the company leagues), my monthly salary was 30,000 yen, but I had an outstanding bar bill of 200,000 yen. There was no way I could pay that off, so I thought the only thing to do was to sign a pro contract. I figured it would be enough if I played for just a year or two, so I signed for a low (annual salary of) 3.3 million yen.”

Most of that is probably true, except that Kintetsu drafted him in the second round that year, and he had already flunked one pro tryout two years before that.

Mr. Nagabuchi is still a legend in Japanese baseball for his drinking exploits. He usually went drinking after every game and often played the next day with a hangover. There is even a story that he, like Abusan, threw up on the field during a game, although he was playing in the outfield at the time.

After his career ended, he returned to Saga and opened a yakitori shop that he and his wife still operate. It’s about a 10-minute walk from my house, and I was last there for a party in January. I came to Japan as an English teacher, and his daughter Kaori was in the first class I taught on my first day on the job. Kaori later married one of the other students in that class, and I attended their wedding reception.

The real Abusan is a relaxed, personable fellow who is very easy to strike up a conversation with. It’s no surprise that he’s very sharp about baseball, even the way the game is played in the United States. Before Nomo Hideo blazed the trail for modern Japanese players in the American major leagues, many Japanese fans had the mistaken impression that the American game was not really a team sport but played mano-a-mano between pitcher and hitter. I’ve heard Mr. Nagabuchi gently correct his customers on that score on more than one occasion.

Here’s something else that will come as no surprise: The name of his yakitori is Abusan. And most nights after he closes up about 11:00 p.m., he and his wife take a five-minute stroll down the street and around the corner to a koryori-ya (a traditional Japanese eating and drinking place), where he sits at the bar and drinks sake straight out of a glass.

Afterwords:

All the Japanese sources have his name pronounced as Nagabuchi, but I could have sworn that the family pronounces it as Nagafuchi (I was his daughter’s teacher, after all.) Then again, most people refer to him as Abusan, so I haven’t heard anyone use his family name in a while.

This discrepancy would not be unusual for Kyushu. It’s a little difficult to explain to people not familiar with the Japanese language, but there is a tendency, at least here in Saga, for people to dispense with the dakuon in their family names. For example, I know a man who insists that the proper pronunciation of his family name is Takaki. Everyone else in Japan says Takagi, so he lets it go without comment. I also know a man who pronounces his family name as Shinotsuka, rather than using the more common Shinozuka.

I’ve always been a bit disappointed that the Americans adopted the expression “walk-off home run” for a round-tripper that ends the game either in the bottom of the ninth or in extra innings. It’s actually a relatively new expression there. (I never heard it during my youth, and I watched and played a lot of baseball.)

I would have loved it had they adopted the Japanese term, which is “sayonara home run”. It’s something that everyone in the U.S. would immediately understand, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they understood it in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries that play baseball, too.

Too bad!

Wings of a man

FOR THE PAST WEEK, I’ve been spending an hour a day at a local organization here in Saga reviewing their video assets to see what can be uploaded to the web and used for publicity. One of the videos I watched this week was the film Ningen no Tsubasa (Wings of a Man), which the organization was responsible for producing.

Made in the mid-90s, the movie depicts a few years in the life of Ishimaru Shin’ichi, a native Sagan who was a star pitcher for the forerunner of the Chunichi Dragons in the early 1940s. He later became Japan’s only professional baseball player to die as a member of the kamikaze special attack squadron.

The movie was screened throughout Japan, particularly in schools, as it received the approval of the Education Ministry and the National Association of Parents and Teachers.

It was extremely well done for a low-budget, independent project. Not only is it worth watching on its own, it’s very educational for people with an interest in that period of Japanese history.

Some of the more noteworthy aspects include:

• A home plate umpire forgetting that it was no longer acceptable to use the enemy word sutoraiku for a called strike, and quickly switching to yoshi! (The word hazure was used to call a ball.)
• The baseball uniforms evolving into semi-military uniforms by mid-war
• The baseball players enrolling in night school at university to avoid the draft, until that deferment was ended
• The cruelty of some zealots in the Japanese military, both toward other soldiers and toward civilians
• Officers pressuring their men to “volunteer” as kamikaze pilots because a failure to do so would disgrace the entire unit
• Members of Ishimaru’s family and his fiancé’s family encouraging him to choose a path that would enable him to survive a war they realized Japan would lose.

In addition to being an eye-opener for those who don’t know much about those days, the film might delight those people who appreciate Japanese dialects. All the dialog in the scenes taking place in Ishimaru’s hometown is performed in very broad Saga dialect.

Wayne Graczyk of The Japan Times gave the film a favorable review when it appeared, but his article doesn’t seem to be on-line. Here’s another review from the excellent Kamikaze Images website.

It’s a shame that the movie exists only on videocassette (and probably the original film, somewhere), because it was made before the DVD era. The organization doesn’t have the funds to produce a large volume of DVDs, though they might be able to handle a one-off. Those people in Japan who still have video decks and are interested in borrowing a copy can talk to Mrs. Yamashita at 0952-25-2295.

It’s been more than 10 years since I saw the film the first time, and watching it again this week reminded me of something.

Anyone who can get through this film without crying—or at least being on the verge of tears—has got a heart of stone.

Uehara Koji in America

FORMER YOMIURI GIANTS star pitcher Uehara Koji signed a two-year contract in the off-season with the Baltimore Orioles. Uehara is the first Japanese player to sign with the Orioles, so both the team and its fans are intensely curious about his progress with the team now that spring training got started this week.

While I’m working on my next post, I thought I’d provide the links to several blog posts from different reporters covering the Orioles to give you an idea how things are going. The initial verdict: Everyone is very impressed with his sense of professionalism as a pitcher as well as his sense of humor.

Uehara delivers

Here are some reports from Peter Schmuck of the Baltimore Sun. (Yes, that’s his real name, and he has a sense of humor about it.)

Schmuck talks about Uehara’s first bullpen session here, saying that it was probably the most watched session in Oriole history.

This post provides more details on the session. Uehara says the American ball is slippier than the Japanese version, but that he’ll get used to it. His pitching coach, Rick Kranitz, jokes with him by saying that he just gave an interview to the Japanese media in Japanese, so now Uehara has to give an interview in English. The pitcher replied, “No problem!”

Roch Kubatko is a former Sun reporter now working for MASN, the sports network shared by the Orioles and the Washington Nationals. Here’s a quick note from his blog about Uehara’s first day.

This report describes how Uehara has taped a list of the names of all the players to his locker so he can get to know everyone quickly.

Kubatko chimes in on the first bullpen session here. Pitching coach Kranitz adds some more comments, saying he’s “very impressed”.

Here’s a slightly longer article by Spencer Fordin on the MLB website. He offers some quotes from Uehara’s new manager, Dave Trembley:

“One, it looks like he’s done it before,” said manager Dave Trembley. “He’s able to repeat his delivery, and that’s probably what’s allowed him to have the success that he’s had. He repeats his delivery, and he makes it look easy. I don’t think he broke a sweat. And obviously, that has occurred because he’s worked very hard. You can tell.”

In this blog post, Fordin describes the deal between Uehara and pitcher Jaimie Walker, in which Walker–a salty old Southerner–will teach Uehara a new English word every day, and Uehara will teach Walker a Japanese word.

What he doesn’t explain is that the first English word Walker taught Uehara was (1) unprintable in the newspaper and (2) so funny the whole team was laughing about it all day. Your guess as to what the word was is as good as mine!

Finally, in this post Fordin says that watching Uehara interact with his new teammates is fascinating.

Andy MacPhail, the Orioles general manager, is known for his insistence on recruiting players with solid personalities and good character, and it appears as if Uehara fits that pattern.

Other reports say that the Oriole players are “buzzing” about Uehara’s pitching ability, and that he’s better than they expected.

Still, it’s early in the spring, and how much success he will have against the toughest division in baseball (with the Yankees, Red Sox, and last year’s AL representative in the World Series, the Tampa Bay Rays) is still to be determined. But the first signs are encouraging.

Note: I don’t know how long those links are going last, so click them while they’re hot.

Clearing the air at sumo matches

SPORTS FANS around the world express their dissatisfaction with the turn of events on the playing field in different ways. Americans, for example, prefer to boo, while the Europeans whistle shrilly.

The Japanese don’t whistle, and it wasn’t until American baseball games were widely broadcast after pitcher Nomo Hideo went east in 1995 to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers that they picked up the booing habit. (There are still a lot fewer boo-birds in Japan than in the United States, however.)

But they definitely have their own way of making their feelings known when it comes to the national sport of sumo. Spectators attending sumo matches have been known to throw things at the ring, both in delight and anger, since the Edo period (1603-1868). In those days, the spectators would throw their haori, a short overgarment, into the ring to celebrate a win by their favorite rikishi. But the days of regular haori wearing are long gone. Instead of clothing, today’s Japanese are most likely to throw zabuton, the traditional cushions used for sitting on the floor at home.

The box seats, the prime seating areas at a sumo match, are usually sectioned off into groups of four, and the venue provides each of the seats in the box with a zabuton. Being handy and flingable, the cushions became a logical substitute for the haori, and they are hurled toward the ring by fans upset over a referee’s decision, the loss of a yokozuna (the top-ranked rikishi) to a lower-ranked opponent, or anything else that rubs them the wrong way.

That doesn’t mean the zabuton-throwing is condoned. The Japan Sumo Association, responsible for running the matches, broadcasts a request inside the hall every day of the six 15-day tournaments held during the year asking customers to refrain from abusing the furnishings. A similar written request is also printed on the daily list of scheduled matches distributed inside the hall. These have not been effective in eliminating the custom, however. It’s not easy even for the Japanese to end a centuries-old tradition just by asking nicely.

The reason for the request is that the square seat cushions don’t always fly in the direction they are flung, and someone could get hurt if they get hit by one. Says Dewano’umi, formerly known as the sekiwake Washuyama, now in charge of running the November Kyushu tournament:

“Throwing zabuton is dangerous. It’s astonishing that there haven’t been any accidents before. But it would be too late to take action after something (bad) happened. We thought of various ways to put a stop to it, and decided to make the zabuton in a shape that wouldn’t fly well.”

The new, difficult-to-throw zabuton made their debut at the Kyushu tournament at Fukuoka City’s Fukuoka Kokusai Center on Sunday the 9th. The space in the box seat areas have been expanded, and instead of having four individual square zabuton for each of the patrons in the box, they will be provided with double zabuton sets. These consist of two rectangular cushions measuring 125 centimeters (49 inches) by 50 centimeters and attached by a cord. A fan would have to be seriously upset to get one of those things airborne.

The reactions to the new cushions have been mixed. One member of a local Kyushu group with ringside seats (called suna kaburi in Japanese, or “covered with sand”) said, “I’ve been hit by flying zabuton before, and it didn’t hurt. But some people who have been hit said that it hurt a lot, so I’m glad they’re doing something about it.”

In contrast, one woman in her 20s from Fukuoka City who plans to attend the tournament said she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to see any flying zabuton because she thought it represented the real sumo atmosphere. A housewife in her 50s said she thought it was a bit frightening because people might decide to throw something else instead of the zabuton. (Are not those views representative of the classic difference between youth and age?)

The workers at the Fukuoka Kokusai Center, whose job it is to place them in the boxes and remove them after the matches, say that carrying the zabuton to the seats is more difficult than before, because two sets for four people weigh 4.8 kilograms (10.6 lbs). They did appreciate one benefit, however—the new cushions take less work to arrange in the box.

Others are worried that guys being guys the world over, some will try to throw them anyway, and the new types will be even more dangerous if they achieve some trajectory. But if the new zabuton work out, the association plans to use them in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, the other three cities where tournaments are held.

The whole issue was perhaps best summed up by another sumo association official, who said, “It’s not that people can’t throw them any more, it’s that they weren’t supposed to throw them to begin with.”

Nakamura debuts in NFL

LAST MAY, we ran this profile of Hiroki Nakamura, who was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League in the U.S. No Japanese has ever played in the NFL, but the American-born Nakamura’s father was Japanese and his mother is ethnic Japanese, and both were judo champions.

The Ravens played their first game of the season on Sunday. Nakamura, a defensive halfback, made the team and was credited with making one tackle. (It was probably on special teams, where he is expected to see most of his action this year.)

While he’s perhaps not a true pioneer, he’s close enough for horseshoes!