'Big 3' Homegrown Heroes in the Big Leagues Turn American Baseball Into a Major Import
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
TOKYO, March 25 -- Baseball opened its season here Tuesday with an extra-inning corker of a game that showed off hometown hero and Boston Red Sox pitching ace Daisuke Matsuzaka, one of three Japanese superstars who have made the American big leagues part of people's lives across Japan from April to October.
By staging its third season opener in Japan since 2000, Major League Baseball paid tribute to what has become a golden era of Japanese players in the United States.
The credit goes largely to three of Japan's greatest-ever players. They are Matsuzaka, Ichiro Suzuki, a center fielder and hitting phenomenon for the Seattle Mariners, and Hideki Matsui, a slugging outfielder for the New York Yankees.
"Major League Baseball is now at the zenith of its popularity in Japan because of the Big Three," said Akira Hirakata, a senior manager at Dentsu, the Tokyo advertising firm that sells American baseball to broadcasters and advertisers in Japan.
Because of the Big Three, 550 American baseball games a year are broadcast on television here. About 300 of them are carried without commercial interruption, allowing Japanese viewers to gaze between innings at their beloved stars as they sit quietly in the dugout or stand around on the field. These players, unlike their American counterparts, are rarely caught on camera spitting, picking their noses or scratching themselves in manly places.
Because of the Big Three, American baseball -- that is, coverage of what Japanese stars did that day in the United States -- usually appears first on the evening news here, before coverage of Japan's own professional baseball.
And because of the Big Three, Japanese-language advertising signs now adorn major league stadiums from Seattle to Tampa.
The signs are unintelligible to most Americans, but when viewed by a growing audience on Japanese TV, they are selling everything from bulldozers to eyeglasses to weight-loss massages.
The annual sale of America's pastime to the Japanese got off to a rousing and satisfying start in Tokyo on Tuesday night, unless you are a fan of the Oakland Athletics.
Matsuzaka, who helped the Red Sox win the World Series last fall but looked nervous here in front of adoring fans, gave up two runs in the first inning to Oakland before settling down to pitch four scoreless innings.
The Red Sox tied the game with a solo home run in the ninth and won it in the 10th on a two-run double by Manny Ram¿rez. Another Japanese player, winning pitcher Hideki Okajima, helped seal the game for the Red Sox with scoreless relief pitching in the bottom of the ninth inning.
The golden era of Japanese players in the United States might have only just begun, according to Robert Whiting, an American journalist and author of "You Gotta Have Wa," a book about Japanese baseball.
"The level of high school baseball in Japan is the highest in the world," Whiting said Tuesday night at Tokyo Dome. "There is a constant stream of talent coming up."
A total of 32 Japanese players have played major league baseball -- and 15 of them were on team rosters as of mid-March. Five are making their debuts this year.
Whiting said there are now at least 50 players in Japan with the talent to make the jump -- and nearly all of them are eager to do so. Under current rules, they cannot go to the States until they have played nine seasons in Japan.
"The really good players in Japan all want to go the major leagues because of the money, the prestige and all the hassles of playing in Japan," he said. "In Japan, you have to carry your own bags, travel by train and stay in second-class hotels. You also have to put up sometimes with abusive coaches and excessive practices."
The first Japanese player in the American big leagues, a pitcher named Masanori Murakami, appeared in a handful of games for the San Francisco Giants in 1964.
It took 30 more years before a Japanese player, pitcher Hideo Nomo, became a star, playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Still, daily national television coverage could not be built around a pitcher who plays just every fifth game. For American baseball to break through on TV in Japan, it needed a Japanese position player, someone who played every day.
Ichiro filled that bill beyond all expectations in Seattle in 2001. He had one of the greatest seasons of any player in the history of baseball. As a leadoff hitter, he won a batting title and a Gold Glove, along with honors for Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player.
As important for Japanese viewers, Ichiro embodied the virtues of Japanese baseball at its best -- disciplined and skilled, focused and artful, modest and reliable.
Major League Baseball's revenue from Japan tripled in Ichiro's breakout year, and growth has been strong and steady since then, according to Jim Small, managing director of MLB in Japan.
The American games that draw the largest Japanese audiences are watched on NHK, the national broadcaster, which allows no advertising. As with the BBC, its programming is paid for with fees collected from everyone who owns a TV.
But Japanese advertisers, hungry for the attention of the 5 to 6 percent of Japanese viewers who regularly watch MLB games, have found a way to reach baseball fans.
They buy advertising space -- for ads that are often written in Japanese script -- inside American ballparks.
Then they study the fielding positions, hitting proclivities and lineup order of Japanese stars. The object is to calculate where inside a stadium and when in the course of a game an Ichiro or a Matsui might appear on TV with the company's sign in the background.
The most famous hit in the seven-year history of this Japanese guessing game was struck on behalf of Komatsu, a company that makes bulldozers.
When Matsui joined the Yankees in 2003, Komatsu bought a sign in Yankee Stadium.
Before deciding where to place it, Komatsu reviewed the trajectory of the 332 home runs Matsui had hit in Japan for Tokyo's Yomiuri Giants. It bought space for a sign in the upper deck of right field.
Matsui hit his second home run as a Yankee on April 14, 2003. It flew over the Komatsu sign.
A Komatsu advertising manager, Tooru Nakayama, watching the game at home in Tokyo, remembers throwing his arms in the air and shouting:
"Jackpot!"
Major League Baseball exports opening day to Japan to capitalize on the popularity of the Big Three -- and to try to move beyond them.
"The most important reason for bringing the Red Sox and the A's to Japan is to deepen the popularity of Major League Baseball beyond the appeal of Ichiro, Matsuzaka and Matsui," said Small, who runs the organization's office here.
Japan is by far the MLB's most lucrative international market, producing 60 percent of its foreign earnings.
"We have the casual fan in Japan who will watch a game on NHK because Ichiro is playing," he said. "We are trying to take those casual fans and slide them over into the hardcore fan category of people who care about rivalries like Boston-New York."
Still, branding outside of Japanese stars is a challenge.
Some of the advertisers who buy signs in American ballparks count on Japanese fans not knowing very much about U.S. baseball rivalries or U.S. geography.
"I don't think the Japanese audience even knows where the games are being played," said Hiroshi Kado, an advertising executive at Dandy House, a Tokyo-based men's salon chain that sells facial hair removal and weight-loss massages.
Dandy House has figured out how to ride the popularity of the Big Three on the cheap. It buys most of its ads in small-market stadiums in the states.
Instead of spending several hundred thousand dollars to put a sign in Yankee Stadium, it buys stadium ads in small-market American League towns such as Tampa and Kansas City, which cost $20,000 to $30,000.
If the ads are the rotating kind that appear behind home plate only for a couple of innings a game, Dandy House guesses when Ichiro or Matsui might come up to bat (based on their place in the lineup) and buys those innings.
It also tries to calculate what cut-rate stadium pitcher Matsuzaka might start in.
It guessed right last year in Matsuzaka's first MLB start -- Kansas City.
"We were in TV news footage of Matsuzaka's first pitch," Kado said.
Before the chain began its ad campaign in 2003, the Japanese public regarded the company's weight-loss-via-massage business as "slightly phony," Kado said. "But branding our image with Major League Baseball has helped to bring our customers to us with ease."
At Tokyo Dome on Tuesday night, fans seemed to agree that an ad in an American stadium could give any product class.
"Even if it doesn't lead to a purchase, it will definitely improve a company's image," said Daisuke Hamada, 39, a magazine editor with seats behind home plate. "Personally, I think those companies are really cool. The ads enhance their standing in society."
Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.
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