Book Review: Fitts, Robert K. Remembering Japanese Baseball. 2005.

Fitts, Robert K. Remembering Japanese Baseball. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

If you don’t know much of the sport as it developed in Japan, Remembering Japanese Baseball is probably not the best place to start learning.  It consists of transcribed interviews with 25 former players in Japan’s professional baseball league, ranging in time from the pre-war era to the late 1990s.  Of the 25 interviews, only five are with Japanese.  The title is a bit misleading, like a book called Remembering American Baseball containing interviews with players from Latin America and Asia.

Since publishing this collection in 2005, Fitts has gone on to write three books on Japanese baseball history:  a biography of the first American to play in Japan, the first Japanese to play in the US, and an account of Babe Ruth’s visit to Japan.  Remembering Japanese Baseball might be considered Fitts’ first notes for those projects, the groundwork that led him to and informed future research and writing.

The interviews follow a similar pattern:  a review of the player’s history prior to being recruited by a Japanese team;  the difficulties of living in a new culture;  differences between Japanese and American baseball; stories and anecdotes; leaving Japan and resettling in the US.  As the reader progresses through the text, certain themes emerge, but neither the author nor editor have done anything to highlight them. One example is how the sharing of information among teammates seems to have evolved over the course of decades.  Those who played in the early years remark on how information was often withheld from newcomers in the belief that this would negatively impact veterans, who might lose out on a bonus or raise because they no longer had an edge on the rookies.

As a research project in itself, important information is missing.  Fitts notes interviews were based on prepared questions, but these are not disclosed.  The reader is also not informed about how the interviews were conducted, under what conditions, in what locations, with what participants or observers present.  Transcription methods are not discussed.  Fitts indicates the texts were heavily edited, with questions omitted, material rearranged for narrative effect, and factual errors corrected.  Interview subjects were allowed to read transcripts prior to publication and suggest additions and revisions. It might be valuable to reproduce a sample of an unedited transcript in order to better understand how the material was edited.  Hopefully provisions have been made to preserve the original recordings and unedited transcripts for the benefit of future researchers.

Apart from such limitations, these interviews are still a valuable resource for fans and students of yakyuu.  The transcription and editing work appear to have been done with some care.  It is easy in such projects to flatten voices and points of view, to make everyone sound the same, but in many cases in this collection you can almost hear the players speaking in their own voices.  And they have some interesting stories to tell about the way things used to be.  For those new to Japanese baseball, these interviews may be best read in conjunction with Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa.

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