Japanese baseball then and then

Two pieces from Kris Kosaka in The Japan Times on the “national game there and here.

First he tells us about Robert Fitts’ new biography on Masanori Murakami, the first baseball player from Japan to play for a Major League team in the U.S. when he appeared for the San Francisco Giants in 1965.

Then we have a piece on Robert Whiting’s You Gotta Have Wa, which Kosaka considers “the definitive text on Japanese culture seen through the lens of sport.”

Japanese baseball then and then