June 02, 2016
Poetry in motion
The game is kyougi (competitive) karuta, the latter word borrowed from the Portuguese carta during the Edo period and applied to Japanese playing cards in general. Here it refers specifically to the game of "singing karuta" or uta-garuta.
To be sure, even in Japan, more people know about karuta than can play with it with any competence. The Tokyo high school baseball regionals involve hundreds of teams. Only a dozen or so can muster enough members to compete in the Tokyo karuta regionals.
They'd all fit in a single gymnasium with room to spare.
The centuries-old game is based on a Heian period poetry collection known as the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu ("One hundred poems by one hundred poets"), compiled by the court noble Fujiwara no Teika in the 13th century. Not the kind of game that makes the average teenager sit up and take note.
In competitive karuta, given the first three lines of a waka, players pick the card with the last two lines. Skilled players can identify cards by the first one or two syllables of the poem. The game involves lots of memorization, short-term spatial memory, sharp hearing, and good reflexes.
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| The reader card is on the right. The player card on the left is written in kana, a purely phonetic syllabary. (Courtesy Tofugu.) |
The best players become experts in assimilation and coarticulation, the phonological processes by which the articulation of one phoneme influences the pronunciation of the next. That way, two poems that begin with identical syllables can be differentiated before the second syllable is spoken.
Fifty cards of the one hundred are randomly selected, each player receiving twenty-five, which they arrange in front of them. They have fifteen minutes to memorize the cards before the game begins. So players line up their cards to maximize ease of location and speed of identification.
A reader proceeds through a full, randomized deck (there are CDs to practice with: set the player to shuffle play), meaning that fifty cards will not be in play. Mistakenly choosing a "dead" card will cost one of your own.
A live card can be—is often—selected from the group with a sweep of the arm. With well-matched players, quick reactions matter, so this sweeping motion may be executed with considerable force, sending the cards flying. Multiple cards can be selected if the target card is included.
Towards the end of a match, a player can group his remaining cards together and hit them all at the same time; though if none of those cards are the right card, a penalty is exacted.
A player can also reach over and grab a card from his opponent's side (which requires being able to read the cards upside down), and then give his opponent one of his own (again, a strategic move). The first person to empty out his side wins.
The result is a formal poetry reading combined with a fast-moving athletic performance that gives competitive karuta a "chess boxing" vibe. It really is "poetry in motion." Oh, and that anime series? It's Chihayafuru. More about it next time.
Related posts
Play ball!
Chihayafuru
Hollywood made in Japan
Labels: anime, baseball, chihayafuru, history, japan, japanese culture, literature, nhk, personal favs, sports
April 07, 2016
Major league politics
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| "Mini-Super Tuesday" GOP results (Mainichi News). |
And after every big primary, the former gets even more attention.
Whatever the United States does is hugely important to Japan's national interests. Along with the sprawling navy base at Yokosuka, a whopping 20 percent of Okinawa's land mass is taken up by U.S. military bases (too much, frankly).
But considering the local political geography, Japan knows that good fences (enforced by U.S. military muscle) make good neighbors. The Okinawans certainly don't like it, but the Japanese government won't be chanting, "Yankee, go home!" anytime soon.
There's also the sheer weirdness value. This is a case of "American exceptionalism" that is literally that.
Almost all democracies on the planet are governed by some sort of parliamentary system that effectively does away with these sorts of at-large elections and political free-for-alls (imagine if the president were elected by Congress).
And yet I'm struck by how different the commentary isn't. Japanese news coverage proves that that the mass media echo chamber knows no boundaries. Whether inside-the-beltway or inside-the-Yamanote, the mindset is remarkably the same.
"If it bleeds, it leads" is universal, and the nightly news in Tokyo could convince you that Japan is as violent a place as Detroit. Except that what you are seeing are reports distilled from a population of 130 million and condensed into a single broadcast.
It's as if every news bureau on the planet has a crime and mayhem and Donald J. Trump quota to fill every evening.
NHK likes illustrating stories about Trump with the least flattering stock photos on file. To be sure, Trump's inexplicable Japan-bashing is a tired relic from the 1980s. But NHK also plays up Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric as if it were shocking to the senses.
Unmentioned is that (outliers like North Korea aside) Japan has the toughest immigration policies on the planet. Trump should boast that he's going to make America great again by implementing Japan's existing immigration laws, word for word.
On the other hand, another unshakable truth about Japanese propriety is that, however unlikable, a notable public figure still gets an honorific if his status warrants it. So along with all the other candidates, it's Trump-shi. More about what that means next week.
Labels: baseball, japan, japanese tv, nhk, politics
March 24, 2016
The Big Windup!
It's too stupidly easy to score in basketball, too stupidly difficult in soccer and hockey (soccer and hockey are what happen when human beings attempt to illustrate Brownian Motion).
What sets football, baseball, golf (and sumo) apart is the pacing. The punctuation. The pauses. The paragraph breaks. Winning depends on more than fine-tuned twitch responses, which, while demonstrating impressive physical prowess, make for a lousy narrative structure.
Granted, I rarely watch any sports event all the way through. Not even the Super Bowl (unless there's nothing else better on). But I will watch a sports movie all the way through. Especially a decent baseball movie.
The structure of baseball, the strategy of the game, the timing and pacing, allow it to become the drama itself. This is hardly news in Hollywood: The Natural, The Bad New Bears, The Sandlot, Bull Durham, The Rookie, and For Love of the Game, to start with.
And it's no less true of the sports drama in Japan, where baseball constitutes its own wide-ranging subgenre. And it is certainly applies to The Big Windup! based on the award-winning manga by Asa Higuchi.
As with many baseball stories, The Big Windup! concentrates on the "battery," the combination of the pitcher and catcher. It's a setup that brings to mind Bull Durham, with Tim Robbins as the cocky young pitcher and Kevin Costner as the veteran catcher showing him the ropes.
Except that Higuchi starts this game with a screwball, giving us a protagonist who's an emotional basketcase. Ren Mihashi, the starting pitcher, is well-nigh pathologically insecure. Imagine the Tim Robbins character instead played by Woody Allen. Seriously.
As it turns out, Ren has no pitching speed but does have exquisite control, a skill that's gone unappreciated. Catcher Takaya Abe is certain he can use it to great effect—if he can keep Ren from dissolving into an angst-ridden puddle before getting to the mound.
Yes, this could become monumentally annoying, but Higuchi knows better than to deliver the same pitch over and over. Having established a character trait, he doesn't pound it into the ground. Because this is, first and foremost, a sports melodrama.
The opening episodes consist of putting the team together, tossing in a couple of dumb teenage jokes, establishing the school as the underdogs (an all-freshman team), gearing up to face the overwhelming favorites in the regionals of the Summer Koshien tournament.
After that, it's all baseball, baseball, baseball. In fact, the entire first season consists of two games—that go on longer than would the actual games.
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| The Yankees should hire her. |
The players in The Big Windup! think about nothing but baseball.
Now, I have a hard time believing that professional athletes think that much while they're playing the game, let alone high school freshmen. And yet this deconstruction of the sport at practically the atomic level works for a non-sports nut like me.
If you want to comprehend the egghead appeal of baseball, The Big Windup! is the perfect tutorial.
To be sure, this focused attention isn't monomaniacal. There are cute extraneous touches, like the baseball moms huddled together in the stands. And despite her ridiculous proportions, part-time manager Momoe is never depicted as anything but an excellent baseball tactician.
Even the quirky cheerleading culture in Japanese baseball gets its due (it's pretty much that way in real life too, only louder and more annoying).
Along the way, The Big Windup also clarifies the substance of dramatic conflict. There's more to a plot than how the tale ends. According to Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt, "stories are not spoiled by spoilers." Knowing the ending can enhance enjoyment of a story.
So it could be that once you know how it turns out, it's cognitively easier—you're more comfortable processing the information—and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story.
As somebody who has only a glancing interest in who wins most sports contests (spoiler: Nishiura High wins), I can confirm that the difference between an interesting Super Bowl and a boring Super Bowl (the majority, it seems of late) has nothing to do with who wins.
It's all about how the game is played.
Related links
The Big Windup (CR Hulu)
The national Japanese pastime
Play ball!
Labels: anime reviews, baseball, japanese culture, movies, pop culture, soccer, sports
March 17, 2016
The national Japanese pastime
It's March, and that means it's time for--no, not basketball--the National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament, also known as Spring Koshien. Together with Summer Koshien, the bigger open tournament in August, it is the sporting event in Japan, a cultural (and television) institution.
The last twenty years of economic malaise took a lot of the air out of golf, though Japanese golf players have become competitive internationally. Soccer has recently rocketed past baseball in terms of sheer popularity. Sumo has the historical deepest roots (albeit now being dominated by Mongolians).
But baseball has truly become a Japan's "national pastime," occupying the same cultural and social space as football does in the U.S. (and particularly in states like Texas).
Baseball came to Japan in the mid-19th century with the opening of Japan and caught on quickly. Babe Ruth toured Japan with the American League All Stars in 1934. The first national high school championships were played in 1915, and moved to Hanshin Koshien Stadium in 1924.
The Koshien baseball tournaments equal the popularity of NCAA "March Madness" and the football bowl games. The summer tournament is open to every high school baseball team in the country, so at the beginning of every season, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of going to Koshien.
And with American baseball teams using Japan as a kind of super-minor league system, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of playing in the Majors as well.
 |
| Courtesy Japan Times. |
The last twenty years of economic malaise took a lot of the air out of golf, though Japanese golf players have become competitive internationally. Soccer has recently rocketed past baseball in terms of sheer popularity. Sumo has the historical deepest roots (albeit now being dominated by Mongolians).
But baseball has truly become a Japan's "national pastime," occupying the same cultural and social space as football does in the U.S. (and particularly in states like Texas).
Baseball came to Japan in the mid-19th century with the opening of Japan and caught on quickly. Babe Ruth toured Japan with the American League All Stars in 1934. The first national high school championships were played in 1915, and moved to Hanshin Koshien Stadium in 1924.
The Koshien baseball tournaments equal the popularity of NCAA "March Madness" and the football bowl games. The summer tournament is open to every high school baseball team in the country, so at the beginning of every season, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of going to Koshien.
And with American baseball teams using Japan as a kind of super-minor league system, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of playing in the Majors as well.
Labels: baseball, education, history, japanese culture, sports
March 10, 2016
Play ball!
In Japan, though, the sports drama is a hugely popular manga and anime genre (often adapted to live action). And no athletic endeavor or game gets left out.
From Captain Tsubasa (soccer) to Yawara! (judo) to Hikaru no Go (go) to Kuroko's Basketball to Free! (swimming) to Ashita no Joe (boxing) to Haikyu!! (volleyball) to Prince of Tennis to Princess Nine (baseball) to Over Drive (bicycling) and Initial D (street racing), and even Chihayafuru (the poetry-based card game of karuta).
We're barely grazing the surface. The My Anime List website dug up over 500 titles in anime alone. These series are certainly products of their times, both reflecting and arousing interest in their area of interest. As a case in point, each broadcast episode of Yawara! included a countdown to the Barcelona Olympics
Ashita no Joe debuted in 1968 and defined the boxing drama in the public imagination eight years before Rocky. In 1981, Captain Tsubasa presaged the huge popularity of soccer today. Basketball is interesting, in that Japan remains noncompetitive at the professional level outside Japan. But Kuroko's Basketball (2008) is a massive hit.
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| "Even if it's just for a moment, I'm gonna burn so bright it'll dazzle everyone. And all that'll be left is pure white ash." |
If real sports don't strike your fancy, there's always Angelic Layer, a futuristic version of Rock'em Sock'em Robots. And Eureka 7, in which jet-powered hoverboarders save the planet. Bizarrely enough, Girls und Panzer somehow manages to turn armored war games into a high school extracurricular activity.
And yet no sport can match the enduring popularity of baseball. The roots of baseball's appeal in Japan go deeper than the simple cinematic appeal. Even more than home-grown sports like judo and sumo, baseball is woven into the fabric of modern Japanese society. The reason is high school. More about this next week.
Related links
Chihayafuru (CR)
Free! (Yahoo CR)
Girls und Panzer (Yahoo CR)
Hikaru no Go (Yahoo)
Haikyu!! (Yahoo CR)
Kuroko's Basketball (CR)
Princess Nine (CR)
Labels: anime, anime lists, baseball, chihayafuru, japanese culture, manga, movies, pop culture, sports
December 22, 2014
Two chirps for cricket
I get One World Sports in my international satellite package. Its unofficial motto: "Covering all the sports too boring and obscure even for ESPN2." Like soccer, which I discuss at length here.
Some of the "obscure" sports are popular American sports played elsewhere (Japanese baseball, Chinese basketball). But most are obscure for good reason, such as snooker (nine-ball with a bunch of needlessly confusing complications).
Darts, though, is fairly interesting simply because of the math involved.
Then there's table tennis, which looks terrible on television. They should use an orange ball or try that puck-tracking technology once employed in a futile attempt to make hockey interesting to the American sports fan.
Badminton is better. The shuttlecock slows itself down by design. It still suffers from being a "volley" sport: an object gets smacked back and forth (and back and forth and back and forth) until somebody misses.
Volleyball is the best "volley" sport. The ball is big, easy to follow, and each team can do something interesting with the ball before hitting it back. Thus the athletic skills on display rise above the purely reflexive.
But no matter how impressive the skills, in the end it's the same thing over and over. Volley sports are definitely more fun to play than they are to watch (beach volleyball having found the obvious solution to that problem).
But there is one not-made-in-America sport worth watching. Cricket! Well, cricket matches with all the boring stuff taken out (true of sumo too: a day's worth of boring live sumo coverage can be wrapped up in thirty exciting minutes).
The roots of baseball are obvious in the sport. Baseball "fixed" cricket the same way American football fixed rugby: by making it, to quote George Will, "a game of discrete episodes" that provides for numerous "contemplative" moments.
Such moments of collective contemplation lead to offensive and defensive strategies that require the players to act together in a coordinated way over time, producing, for example, the always entertaining double play.
Because there are only two bases in cricket, there's no way to plan for or execute a base-running offensive strategy during play. Once the batting order is decided, its all up to the batsman to hit the ball as often as possible.
And some of them can really hit that ball! Cricket essentially turns batting practice into a sport. Now, as batting practice goes, it's pretty interesting.
The equipment makes it fairly easy to hit the ball. The ball is heavier and harder than a baseball, and it's bounced to boot, so it's difficult to hit well. Only the catcher wears gloves, so it's harder to catch too.
The batsman stands right in the strike zone. Hitting him is fair. That's why cricket batsmen are padded up like hockey goalies.
Runs are scored by running back between the two bases. One "strike" and the batsman is out. He can also get thrown out and caught out (like baseball). Hit a part of his body in the strike zone and he's out.
On the other hand, there's no foul territory. It's impossible for the defense to cover the outfield, and a good batsman can hit the ball where the fielders aren't. Though that does make defensive plays all the more remarkable.
The equivalent of a ground-rule double in baseball scores 4 points in cricket. An actual home run is worth 6 points. You can see why cricket produces scores in the hundreds.
Cricket also has the coolest, so-very-British terms for stuff in sports, like wicket, maiden, overs (always plural), beamer and yorker. A batsman isn't "out." He's "dismissed." How polite.
Cricket consistently creates highlight reel moments. The bowling (pitching) is wild and crazy. One batsman can score a hundred runs and the next zero. Catching "foul tips" and pop flies without gloves is pretty impressive.
But again, cricket's one major failing is the inability of the offense to mount any kind of strategy beyond the batter order. Cricket needs another base, and should switch sides every out or every set number of overs.
As far as that goes, it'd be interesting to score baseball the same as cricket: each base reached equals a run. A home run would score 4 and a base hit would score 1. It'd definitely revitalize the Ichiro Suzuki style of "small ball."
Some of the "obscure" sports are popular American sports played elsewhere (Japanese baseball, Chinese basketball). But most are obscure for good reason, such as snooker (nine-ball with a bunch of needlessly confusing complications).
Darts, though, is fairly interesting simply because of the math involved.
Then there's table tennis, which looks terrible on television. They should use an orange ball or try that puck-tracking technology once employed in a futile attempt to make hockey interesting to the American sports fan.
Badminton is better. The shuttlecock slows itself down by design. It still suffers from being a "volley" sport: an object gets smacked back and forth (and back and forth and back and forth) until somebody misses.
Volleyball is the best "volley" sport. The ball is big, easy to follow, and each team can do something interesting with the ball before hitting it back. Thus the athletic skills on display rise above the purely reflexive.
But no matter how impressive the skills, in the end it's the same thing over and over. Volley sports are definitely more fun to play than they are to watch (beach volleyball having found the obvious solution to that problem).
But there is one not-made-in-America sport worth watching. Cricket! Well, cricket matches with all the boring stuff taken out (true of sumo too: a day's worth of boring live sumo coverage can be wrapped up in thirty exciting minutes).
 |
| Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. |
The roots of baseball are obvious in the sport. Baseball "fixed" cricket the same way American football fixed rugby: by making it, to quote George Will, "a game of discrete episodes" that provides for numerous "contemplative" moments.
Such moments of collective contemplation lead to offensive and defensive strategies that require the players to act together in a coordinated way over time, producing, for example, the always entertaining double play.
Because there are only two bases in cricket, there's no way to plan for or execute a base-running offensive strategy during play. Once the batting order is decided, its all up to the batsman to hit the ball as often as possible.
And some of them can really hit that ball! Cricket essentially turns batting practice into a sport. Now, as batting practice goes, it's pretty interesting.
The equipment makes it fairly easy to hit the ball. The ball is heavier and harder than a baseball, and it's bounced to boot, so it's difficult to hit well. Only the catcher wears gloves, so it's harder to catch too.
The batsman stands right in the strike zone. Hitting him is fair. That's why cricket batsmen are padded up like hockey goalies.
Runs are scored by running back between the two bases. One "strike" and the batsman is out. He can also get thrown out and caught out (like baseball). Hit a part of his body in the strike zone and he's out.
On the other hand, there's no foul territory. It's impossible for the defense to cover the outfield, and a good batsman can hit the ball where the fielders aren't. Though that does make defensive plays all the more remarkable.
The equivalent of a ground-rule double in baseball scores 4 points in cricket. An actual home run is worth 6 points. You can see why cricket produces scores in the hundreds.
Cricket also has the coolest, so-very-British terms for stuff in sports, like wicket, maiden, overs (always plural), beamer and yorker. A batsman isn't "out." He's "dismissed." How polite.
Cricket consistently creates highlight reel moments. The bowling (pitching) is wild and crazy. One batsman can score a hundred runs and the next zero. Catching "foul tips" and pop flies without gloves is pretty impressive.
But again, cricket's one major failing is the inability of the offense to mount any kind of strategy beyond the batter order. Cricket needs another base, and should switch sides every out or every set number of overs.
As far as that goes, it'd be interesting to score baseball the same as cricket: each base reached equals a run. A home run would score 4 and a base hit would score 1. It'd definitely revitalize the Ichiro Suzuki style of "small ball."
Labels: baseball, sports, television
June 30, 2014
Why Americans like sports
As with most Theories of Everything, this will be an exercise in massive generalizations, gross oversimplifications, and carefree stereotyping.
For example, I'll leave out popular sports like skating and gymnastics (except at the end) where the "score" depends on an ultimately subjective evaluation of an athletic performance.
My next leap of logic is to define the popularity of a sport by the amount of regular weekend coverage on network television. Events periodically covered, like the Olympics, the World Cup, and Grand Slam tennis tournaments, don't count.
That makes limiting the field easy, leaving us with: football, basketball, baseball, golf, and NASCAR.
Two complaints commonly voiced about soccer are low scores and ties. Ties, yes. But football and baseball games can also be low scoring. A baseball game where a single pitcher allows no hits, errors, or runs is described as "perfect."
One of the biggest complaints voiced in turn about American sports is more telling: all that stopping and starting and time-outs that stretch a one-hour football game to three hours.
While I would agree that time-outs get mightily abused in basketball and football (and baseball could use some speeding up), the stopping and starting actually gets to the heart of the matter.
Because the stopping and starting is what makes a sport popular on American television. Specifically, the strategy of stopping and starting.
Yep, that's why the crashes matter in NASCAR too. Not only as a model of evolutionary bottlenecking, but because pitting at the right time--under green or risking waiting for a yellow--can make the difference at the end of the race.
All sports make you wonder what will happen next. The most popular American sports invite the viewer to anticipate the strategies each team will take next, and then watch to see if those predictions pay off when play resumes.
Thus the sport has to appeal to the armchair quarterbacks and backseat drivers and wannabee coaches and managers, who also demand that their predictions and expectations pay off quickly.
American football is designed to do just that, which has made it the blockbuster of spectator sports in America. As does golf, which commands comparably tiny audiences but is given saturation coverage most summer weekends.
Any paunchy, middle-aged man can imagine what he would do on the golf course if he had a swing like Tiger Woods, because every once in a great while, that paunchy, middle-aged man will hit a golf ball as well as Tiger Woods.
No, not imagine playing. Imagine strategizing: in this situation, that is what I would do. It's what every little kid playing sandlot football does when squats down in the huddle and traces a down-and-out on the palm of his hand.
The time-outs and game breaks give the coaches and players time to plan the next moves, the viewers time to take a breather and wonder, and the commentators time to examine the stats and discuss all the options when play resumes.
I had a World Cup game on last week as background noise (if anybody scores, it'll get replayed). No discussion of on-field strategies ever came up. Because there was nothing to discuss except what was happening right now.
Rather, soccer teams are described as personalities that shape the player interaction and the game as a whole. Nothing can be said about what will or won't happen at minute 1 or minute 89, except that 22 players will be kicking a ball around.
Want to "live in the moment"? Then soccer is for you. The moment is all you've got and it lasts for an hour and a half. As Dan observed in my last post on the subject:
I previously compared soccer to basketball, except with goaltending. Other than the obvious comparison to hockey, soccer also like tennis, slowed way down. Once the ball is in play, the action is real-time and mostly reflexive.
It's all about the now, and what the players are going to do right now is impossible to predict.
The offense will either do something brilliant--on the spur of the moment--or the defense will do something stupid--on the spur of the moment. This is what makes soccer a "performance" sport rather than a "strategy" sport.
The gymnast not falling off the balance beam, the skater not falling at the end of a jump, can be the difference between winning and losing. But while "not falling" may be a pleasant surprise, it isn't a strategy. It's a desire (or a desperate hope). It's all about the surprise at something unexpected happening.
Of course, in the end, all popular sports are performance sports judged by their highlight reels. But "American" sports (as defined above) are highlight machines designed to produce high-performance moments that negate the mistakes. Don't be the goat!
Soccer is watched for the unanticipated occurrences of its unpredictable performances, where a single bad roll of the dice can decide a championship.
The American football fan watches a game knowing there will probably be a couple of great passes, a couple of great runs, a couple of great interceptions, a couple of big hits, a couple of long kicks, and a couple of touchdowns.
As the clock winds down, the team behind will take bigger and bigger chances with bigger and bigger plays, and some of them will pay off, but as part of an overall strategy.
The soccer fan knows that something will happen. Maybe even a goal! Maybe. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe this time . . . Well, lotteries are hugely popular around the world too, despite the long--and totally random--odds.
For example, I'll leave out popular sports like skating and gymnastics (except at the end) where the "score" depends on an ultimately subjective evaluation of an athletic performance.
My next leap of logic is to define the popularity of a sport by the amount of regular weekend coverage on network television. Events periodically covered, like the Olympics, the World Cup, and Grand Slam tennis tournaments, don't count.
That makes limiting the field easy, leaving us with: football, basketball, baseball, golf, and NASCAR.
Two complaints commonly voiced about soccer are low scores and ties. Ties, yes. But football and baseball games can also be low scoring. A baseball game where a single pitcher allows no hits, errors, or runs is described as "perfect."
One of the biggest complaints voiced in turn about American sports is more telling: all that stopping and starting and time-outs that stretch a one-hour football game to three hours.
While I would agree that time-outs get mightily abused in basketball and football (and baseball could use some speeding up), the stopping and starting actually gets to the heart of the matter.
Because the stopping and starting is what makes a sport popular on American television. Specifically, the strategy of stopping and starting.
Yep, that's why the crashes matter in NASCAR too. Not only as a model of evolutionary bottlenecking, but because pitting at the right time--under green or risking waiting for a yellow--can make the difference at the end of the race.
All sports make you wonder what will happen next. The most popular American sports invite the viewer to anticipate the strategies each team will take next, and then watch to see if those predictions pay off when play resumes.
Thus the sport has to appeal to the armchair quarterbacks and backseat drivers and wannabee coaches and managers, who also demand that their predictions and expectations pay off quickly.
American football is designed to do just that, which has made it the blockbuster of spectator sports in America. As does golf, which commands comparably tiny audiences but is given saturation coverage most summer weekends.
Any paunchy, middle-aged man can imagine what he would do on the golf course if he had a swing like Tiger Woods, because every once in a great while, that paunchy, middle-aged man will hit a golf ball as well as Tiger Woods.
No, not imagine playing. Imagine strategizing: in this situation, that is what I would do. It's what every little kid playing sandlot football does when squats down in the huddle and traces a down-and-out on the palm of his hand.
The time-outs and game breaks give the coaches and players time to plan the next moves, the viewers time to take a breather and wonder, and the commentators time to examine the stats and discuss all the options when play resumes.
I had a World Cup game on last week as background noise (if anybody scores, it'll get replayed). No discussion of on-field strategies ever came up. Because there was nothing to discuss except what was happening right now.
Rather, soccer teams are described as personalities that shape the player interaction and the game as a whole. Nothing can be said about what will or won't happen at minute 1 or minute 89, except that 22 players will be kicking a ball around.
Want to "live in the moment"? Then soccer is for you. The moment is all you've got and it lasts for an hour and a half. As Dan observed in my last post on the subject:
There is a good portion of a game [of soccer] where there is no offense. Rather the players just push the ball forward and then fall back into defense. Why exhaust oneself to score a goal when the odds are so steep against it happening? [As a result], much of what happens in the game is inconsequential and everyone knows it.
I previously compared soccer to basketball, except with goaltending. Other than the obvious comparison to hockey, soccer also like tennis, slowed way down. Once the ball is in play, the action is real-time and mostly reflexive.
It's all about the now, and what the players are going to do right now is impossible to predict.
The offense will either do something brilliant--on the spur of the moment--or the defense will do something stupid--on the spur of the moment. This is what makes soccer a "performance" sport rather than a "strategy" sport.
 |
| Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. |
Of course, in the end, all popular sports are performance sports judged by their highlight reels. But "American" sports (as defined above) are highlight machines designed to produce high-performance moments that negate the mistakes. Don't be the goat!
Soccer is watched for the unanticipated occurrences of its unpredictable performances, where a single bad roll of the dice can decide a championship.
The American football fan watches a game knowing there will probably be a couple of great passes, a couple of great runs, a couple of great interceptions, a couple of big hits, a couple of long kicks, and a couple of touchdowns.
As the clock winds down, the team behind will take bigger and bigger chances with bigger and bigger plays, and some of them will pay off, but as part of an overall strategy.
The soccer fan knows that something will happen. Maybe even a goal! Maybe. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe this time . . . Well, lotteries are hugely popular around the world too, despite the long--and totally random--odds.
Labels: baseball, soccer, social studies, sports
June 23, 2014
Making soccer worth watching
Every four years when the World Cup rolls around, American Exceptionalism once again rises to the fore as Americans by and large demonstrate their exceptional indifference to the world's most popular team sport.
To be sure, that's becoming less true by the year. Even Salt Lake City has a professional soccer club. And soccer is certainly a good way to get kids to run around outdoors without the risk of bodily injury from playing American football (and the huge cost).
The World Cup rings up respectable ratings in the U.S. simply by being rare enough and weird enough to draw in the curious. Thanks to its sheer excess and pageantry, the Olympics likewise gets millions to watch sporting events we never would otherwise.
Even so, most World Cup matches don't draw enough attention to escape the walled garden of ESPN. Meanwhile, NHK shuffles its schedule to broadcast World Cup matches (which, for licensing reasons, viewers of TV Japan are spared from viewing).
At times like this, I, who do not care that much about sports in general, am happy to care even less about soccer. But in the abstract, I am intrigued.
My international satellite TV package includes One World Sports. It reminds me of ESPN way back in the day when ESPN would carry any obscure athletic activity to fill 24 hours of programming. Stuff like cricket, snooker, badminton, and darts.
Plus lots of soccer.
So channel surfing around, now and then I'll end up watching five minutes here and there. At first, I was impressed by all the skillful passing going on. And then I realized it was mostly going on mid-field. And then I realized that nothing else was happening.
If the ball got anywhere near the goal, the defense simply fell back into the goalie box and turned the game into human bumper pool. Once everybody crowded in there, there was no "strategy," only a lot of randomly lunging and knocking the ball around.
And occasionally even knocking it into the net. A goal in soccer occasions such elation because it is such an unusual occurrence. As The Simpsons so aptly described the sport: "It's all here: fast-kickin', low scorin'. And ties? You bet!"
Then it struck me: soccer is what basketball would look like if goaltending was allowed. There was no shot clock. And the fast break was prohibited.
We'd be talking boring, low scoring games where the offense would somehow have to power through to the basket and slam the ball through the hoop without fouling anybody, or catch the defense so out of position it was incapable of blocking the shot.
Meaning that the most interesting games in soccer, paradoxically, are those when one team completely outclasses its opponent, or neither team has much of a defense (the very definition of a dull contest in football, basketball, or baseball).
But these are problems that can be easily fixed.
Getting rid of the offside rule is only the first step. The dumbest rule in all of sports, it's emblematic of a game absurdly weighted in favor of the defense (second dumbest: the secret time clock).
A physically bigger goal would help (in hockey too), twice as wide and arced (or make the blasted field smaller). That still wouldn't eliminate the bumper pool defense.
Here's what soccer really needs: basketball's 3-second and goaltending rules. In soccer, though, the 3-second rule would apply to the defense. Call it the "onside" rule:
Corner kicks would be like free throws. Nobody (except the goalie) could step into the goalie box until the ball was kicked.
These changes would make strategy and tactics a critical part of the equation. That is, setting up and executing specific plays with a high likelihood of producing desired results, rather than devolving into a life-sized illustration of Brownian motion.
During a corner kick, where would the offense position themselves? Would they group together or spread apart? Would the defense cover them man-to-man or attempt zone coverage? The kicker would need to signal where or to whom he would kick the ball.
A player dribbling the ball downfield would similarly need to decide whether to enter the goalie box, drawing the defense along with him, or pass to a teammate behind the defense but not in the goalie box, making possible a one-on-one fast break.
And while I'm at it, I'd allow hitting the ball with the hands, volleyball-style. Because deliberately hitting a fast-moving object with your head is really, really stupid.
Of course, one could counter that at some point, soccer would cease to be soccer. But consider how often the rules of basketball have changed over the past fifty years: the size of the key, the three-point shot, the zone defense, the shot clock, jump shots.
Come to think about it, basketball still favors the offense too much. Goaltending should be permitted if a defensive player jumps from outside the paint. That should make the game more interesting.
Not that I'd be likely to watch in any case (unless I was really bored and there was nothing else on).
To be sure, that's becoming less true by the year. Even Salt Lake City has a professional soccer club. And soccer is certainly a good way to get kids to run around outdoors without the risk of bodily injury from playing American football (and the huge cost).
The World Cup rings up respectable ratings in the U.S. simply by being rare enough and weird enough to draw in the curious. Thanks to its sheer excess and pageantry, the Olympics likewise gets millions to watch sporting events we never would otherwise.
Even so, most World Cup matches don't draw enough attention to escape the walled garden of ESPN. Meanwhile, NHK shuffles its schedule to broadcast World Cup matches (which, for licensing reasons, viewers of TV Japan are spared from viewing).
At times like this, I, who do not care that much about sports in general, am happy to care even less about soccer. But in the abstract, I am intrigued.
My international satellite TV package includes One World Sports. It reminds me of ESPN way back in the day when ESPN would carry any obscure athletic activity to fill 24 hours of programming. Stuff like cricket, snooker, badminton, and darts.
Plus lots of soccer.
So channel surfing around, now and then I'll end up watching five minutes here and there. At first, I was impressed by all the skillful passing going on. And then I realized it was mostly going on mid-field. And then I realized that nothing else was happening.
If the ball got anywhere near the goal, the defense simply fell back into the goalie box and turned the game into human bumper pool. Once everybody crowded in there, there was no "strategy," only a lot of randomly lunging and knocking the ball around.
And occasionally even knocking it into the net. A goal in soccer occasions such elation because it is such an unusual occurrence. As The Simpsons so aptly described the sport: "It's all here: fast-kickin', low scorin'. And ties? You bet!"
We'd be talking boring, low scoring games where the offense would somehow have to power through to the basket and slam the ball through the hoop without fouling anybody, or catch the defense so out of position it was incapable of blocking the shot.
Meaning that the most interesting games in soccer, paradoxically, are those when one team completely outclasses its opponent, or neither team has much of a defense (the very definition of a dull contest in football, basketball, or baseball).
But these are problems that can be easily fixed.
Getting rid of the offside rule is only the first step. The dumbest rule in all of sports, it's emblematic of a game absurdly weighted in favor of the defense (second dumbest: the secret time clock).
A physically bigger goal would help (in hockey too), twice as wide and arced (or make the blasted field smaller). That still wouldn't eliminate the bumper pool defense.
Here's what soccer really needs: basketball's 3-second and goaltending rules. In soccer, though, the 3-second rule would apply to the defense. Call it the "onside" rule:
Aside from the goalie, no defensive player shall remain inside the goalie box for more than 3 seconds unless the ball or an offensive player is also inside the goalie box.
Corner kicks would be like free throws. Nobody (except the goalie) could step into the goalie box until the ball was kicked.
These changes would make strategy and tactics a critical part of the equation. That is, setting up and executing specific plays with a high likelihood of producing desired results, rather than devolving into a life-sized illustration of Brownian motion.
During a corner kick, where would the offense position themselves? Would they group together or spread apart? Would the defense cover them man-to-man or attempt zone coverage? The kicker would need to signal where or to whom he would kick the ball.
A player dribbling the ball downfield would similarly need to decide whether to enter the goalie box, drawing the defense along with him, or pass to a teammate behind the defense but not in the goalie box, making possible a one-on-one fast break.
And while I'm at it, I'd allow hitting the ball with the hands, volleyball-style. Because deliberately hitting a fast-moving object with your head is really, really stupid.
Of course, one could counter that at some point, soccer would cease to be soccer. But consider how often the rules of basketball have changed over the past fifty years: the size of the key, the three-point shot, the zone defense, the shot clock, jump shots.
Come to think about it, basketball still favors the offense too much. Goaltending should be permitted if a defensive player jumps from outside the paint. That should make the game more interesting.
Not that I'd be likely to watch in any case (unless I was really bored and there was nothing else on).
December 03, 2012
Perseverance makes perfect
This NPR story highlighting the differences between Eastern (Asia) and Western (U.S.) approaches to classroom learning accurately sums up the prevailing attitudes in Japan, where it is
It's an ethos and a state of mind summed up in the verb ganbaru, often expressed in the volitional form: ganbarou! (がんばろう！), meaning to persist, to hang on, to stick it out. But there are limits to what sheer effort can accomplish, and dangers in not acknowledging them.
Until they saw the wisdom of the "American style" of training, Japanese baseball coaches regularly burned out pitchers and exhausted players in the mistaken belief that perseverance alone made perfect. As described in this New York Times story, Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda
To be sure, the hand-wringing in Japanese educational circles over the stubborn persistence of ganbaru-based pedagogies and the dearth of more "creative" options is real too, but nothing compared to the industrial-scale educational angst on this side of the Pacific.
A big part of the problem in the U.S. are conflicting ideologies that ricochet back and forth between assertions of inborn genius and the child's mind as a blank slate, the Panglossian belief that given the right pedagogical touchstone, kids can be programmed like computers.
The more realistic Asian approach has recently found pop-science acceptance in the "10,000 hour rule." However equalitarian it may appear, though, at the end of the day, how perfect practice makes you will correlate to inborn talent or IQ or whatever gifts God blessed you with.
10,000 hours of practice can make most people competent at a skill. Only a few will become truly excellent. Yes, Mozart practiced a whole lot, but chain the average child to a piano bench and he'd chew his arm off before getting anywhere close to the 10,000 hour mark.
There will come a point of diminishing returns when you have to decide how much more work is going to make the difference. In most cases, you're going to hit a plateau that is fine for a hobby but short of professional grade. (Not that there's anything wrong with hobbies.)
Giving up at what you thought you wanted to do with your life is often a prerequisite to discovering what you're actually good at, what is actually worth spending your time and effort on. The art and talent of cutting your losses and quitting deserves a lot more respect.
No matter how hard they study, no matter how many cram schools they attend, no matter how often they retake the entrance exams, most Japanese kids aren't going to make it into an elite university. A system that encourages them to waste their time trying is seriously flawed.
Except that in Japan, the blame is placed almost entirely on the kid who fails, not on the system. He just didn't ganbaru enough.
The NPR story misses this huge irony. A ganbarou! culture ultimately consigns responsibility to the individual. Americans see educational failings as institutional, while the Japanese portray them as personal. Maybe it's those attitudes we need to swap most of all.
assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process. Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle.
It's an ethos and a state of mind summed up in the verb ganbaru, often expressed in the volitional form: ganbarou! (がんばろう！), meaning to persist, to hang on, to stick it out. But there are limits to what sheer effort can accomplish, and dangers in not acknowledging them.
Until they saw the wisdom of the "American style" of training, Japanese baseball coaches regularly burned out pitchers and exhausted players in the mistaken belief that perseverance alone made perfect. As described in this New York Times story, Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda
is one of the last of a cohort of Japanese players who grew up in a culture in which staggeringly long work days and severe punishment were normal, and in which older players could haze younger ones with impunity.
To be sure, the hand-wringing in Japanese educational circles over the stubborn persistence of ganbaru-based pedagogies and the dearth of more "creative" options is real too, but nothing compared to the industrial-scale educational angst on this side of the Pacific.
A big part of the problem in the U.S. are conflicting ideologies that ricochet back and forth between assertions of inborn genius and the child's mind as a blank slate, the Panglossian belief that given the right pedagogical touchstone, kids can be programmed like computers.
The more realistic Asian approach has recently found pop-science acceptance in the "10,000 hour rule." However equalitarian it may appear, though, at the end of the day, how perfect practice makes you will correlate to inborn talent or IQ or whatever gifts God blessed you with.
10,000 hours of practice can make most people competent at a skill. Only a few will become truly excellent. Yes, Mozart practiced a whole lot, but chain the average child to a piano bench and he'd chew his arm off before getting anywhere close to the 10,000 hour mark.
There will come a point of diminishing returns when you have to decide how much more work is going to make the difference. In most cases, you're going to hit a plateau that is fine for a hobby but short of professional grade. (Not that there's anything wrong with hobbies.)
Giving up at what you thought you wanted to do with your life is often a prerequisite to discovering what you're actually good at, what is actually worth spending your time and effort on. The art and talent of cutting your losses and quitting deserves a lot more respect.
No matter how hard they study, no matter how many cram schools they attend, no matter how often they retake the entrance exams, most Japanese kids aren't going to make it into an elite university. A system that encourages them to waste their time trying is seriously flawed.
Except that in Japan, the blame is placed almost entirely on the kid who fails, not on the system. He just didn't ganbaru enough.
The NPR story misses this huge irony. A ganbarou! culture ultimately consigns responsibility to the individual. Americans see educational failings as institutional, while the Japanese portray them as personal. Maybe it's those attitudes we need to swap most of all.
Related posts
Dragon Zakura
Ganbarou! Japan
Feeling (too good) about ourselves
Labels: baseball, education, japanese culture, pedagogy
April 28, 2011
Baseball according to Drucker (7)
Drucker in the Dug-Out [sic], the anime version of 「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 ("What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?"), debuted this week on NHK (alas, only in Japan). It's being produced by veteran anime studio Production I.G. The official website is in Japanese, but Production I.G. has an English summary, and the Japan Times did an English write-up. I'd like to see a major U.S. studio or network license it, if only for the novelty value. Say, CNBC. Or PBS could run it alongside Nightly Business Report.
Related posts
Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)
Labels: anime, baseball, business, japan, moshidora, sports, television
April 25, 2011
Baseball according to Drucker (6)
"What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?" (now commonly abbreviated to "Moshidora") by Natsumi Iwasaki turned into 2010's unexpected best-seller, which spawned an anime series, and now a live-action feature film starring Atsuko Maeda.
She's a member of the fabulously popular girl group AKB48, 2010's best-selling pop group. This is called synergy!
Iwasaki previously worked on the business end of the AKB48 production machine and reportedly patterned his lead character after group member Minami Minegishi. As it turns out, though, "the role was given to Maeda because of her greater visibility and experience as an actress."
In other words, Minegishi had zero acting talent, while Maeda had greater than zero acting talent. Not to mention her other assets.
She's a member of the fabulously popular girl group AKB48, 2010's best-selling pop group. This is called synergy!
Iwasaki previously worked on the business end of the AKB48 production machine and reportedly patterned his lead character after group member Minami Minegishi. As it turns out, though, "the role was given to Maeda because of her greater visibility and experience as an actress."
In other words, Minegishi had zero acting talent, while Maeda had greater than zero acting talent. Not to mention her other assets.
Related posts
Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Pop chart domination
Labels: baseball, japan, moshidora, movies, pop culture, sports
April 11, 2011
Ganbarou! Japan
Quite coincidentally (it's been in pre-production for several months, and was scheduled to start three weeks ago), but perhaps quite appropriately, the current Asadora is a Showa drama. It follows the heroine from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Showa dramas typically depict Japan (symbolized by the protagonist) struggling through the ashes of WWII to reclaim her place in the world. They're romanticizations, to be sure--not that exaggerated--of an era when everybody put their shoulders to the wheel.
It's an ethos and state of mind summed up in the verb ganbaru: "to persist, to hang on, to stick it out." You now see the volitional form on banners everywhere: Ganbarou! Japan (がんばろう！日本). Such as at the spring national high school baseball tournament.
Showa dramas typically depict Japan (symbolized by the protagonist) struggling through the ashes of WWII to reclaim her place in the world. They're romanticizations, to be sure--not that exaggerated--of an era when everybody put their shoulders to the wheel.
It's an ethos and state of mind summed up in the verb ganbaru: "to persist, to hang on, to stick it out." You now see the volitional form on banners everywhere: Ganbarou! Japan (がんばろう！日本). Such as at the spring national high school baseball tournament.
Related posts
Asadora
Showa nostalgia
Sendai earthquake
Labels: asadora, baseball, earthquake, japanese, language, showa period, tohoku earthquake
December 09, 2010
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 ("What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?") topped Japan's bestseller charts for 2010. (Hey, and I spotted it way back in March). No big surprise, then, that NHK has it slated as a ten part anime series. I have no idea when or if the book or the anime will reach the U.S., but you can read the introduction and first chapter here.
Related posts
Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)
Labels: anime, baseball, books, business, japan, moshidora, sports
July 08, 2010
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Blogger Tudor pointed out this Economist article about 「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 ("What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?"). A nice summary, though I have to say that only a slightly stodgy British periodical would describe a high-school heroine as "gamine."
Related posts
Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)
June 21, 2010
The World Cup (is half empty)
My thoughts on the World Cup after enduring the tedium of watching the U.S. playing the U.K. to a 1-1 tie (by "watching" I mean that the television was on while I did more interesting stuff). I consider myself an objective observer, as my general interest in all sports is minimal at best.
In short: soccer is an art house movie without a plot. You know it's over because it says "Fin" on the screen. (Hockey is an action movie without a plot, and is similarly pointless.) Soccer is what basketball would look like if basketball allowed goaltending and had an offside rule.
The solution (for hockey too) is to eliminate the goalie. "Offsides" would only mean being inside the goal box ahead of the ball (both defense and offense).
Americans being Americans, any sport that penalizes the fast break and the Hail Mary will forever be doomed to the sidelines. Though the real underlying difference is that Americans demand from their sports clear evidence of premeditated thought and a means of incremental evaluation.
A bunch of talented athletes improvising however brilliantly on the spur of the moment is not enough. Like improvisational jazz. Yeah, everybody "admires" improvisational jazz. Nobody actually listens to it.
An overall strategy revealed through well-planned and executed plays is the essence of American football. Americans want to see the generals directing those armies on the "playing fields of Eton," and will judge them by the wars they win. This it is true of baseball, golf, and even NASCAR.
This ability follow the deliberations and judge incremental outcomes is why boring sports like golf and baseball get so much network television coverage. Steve Sailer is spot on that golf courses "look like happy hunting grounds—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands."
Unlike tennis, which stupidly bans the coach to the bleachers. This is why tennis, aside from Grand Slam tournaments, doesn't get much network television coverage. The other being that tennis is a "fast-twitch" sport that depends largely on the other guy screwing up to score. Like soccer.
Basketball hovers halfway between both worlds, which may be why it is the one international "crossover" sport that America shares with the world—fast-twitch but offense-intensive. Plays are expected. Like the double play in baseball, "Stockton to Malone" was a beautiful thing to watch.
And you could expect to see it more than once.
In evolutionary-psych terms, Americans want to see a group of individuals acting as a single team. It's the heart and soul of every classic war movie, the platoon of rugged individualists coming together for the common good. Hence the most cutting criticism of all: "He's not a team player."
Because controlling actual "team play" is impossible in soccer (and hockey), these sports are necessarily about a team acting as a collection of talented individuals. Think of soccer as a way of subverting socialism. And sublimating collectivized religious and nationalistic passions.
Americans are shamelessly patriotic and openly religious (though are more Jeffersonian about it that they'll admit), and so don't really require another weekly groupthink where nothing happens and "all the fun is in getting there" (because there's no actual "there" there).
Getting caught up in the same-only-different drama of the competitive moment is enough. The only true American national theater is the sports stadium, and the one true national imperative is to "Win one for the Gipper."
In short: soccer is an art house movie without a plot. You know it's over because it says "Fin" on the screen. (Hockey is an action movie without a plot, and is similarly pointless.) Soccer is what basketball would look like if basketball allowed goaltending and had an offside rule.
The solution (for hockey too) is to eliminate the goalie. "Offsides" would only mean being inside the goal box ahead of the ball (both defense and offense).
Americans being Americans, any sport that penalizes the fast break and the Hail Mary will forever be doomed to the sidelines. Though the real underlying difference is that Americans demand from their sports clear evidence of premeditated thought and a means of incremental evaluation.
A bunch of talented athletes improvising however brilliantly on the spur of the moment is not enough. Like improvisational jazz. Yeah, everybody "admires" improvisational jazz. Nobody actually listens to it.
An overall strategy revealed through well-planned and executed plays is the essence of American football. Americans want to see the generals directing those armies on the "playing fields of Eton," and will judge them by the wars they win. This it is true of baseball, golf, and even NASCAR.
This ability follow the deliberations and judge incremental outcomes is why boring sports like golf and baseball get so much network television coverage. Steve Sailer is spot on that golf courses "look like happy hunting grounds—a Disney-version of the primordial East African grasslands."
Unlike tennis, which stupidly bans the coach to the bleachers. This is why tennis, aside from Grand Slam tournaments, doesn't get much network television coverage. The other being that tennis is a "fast-twitch" sport that depends largely on the other guy screwing up to score. Like soccer.
Basketball hovers halfway between both worlds, which may be why it is the one international "crossover" sport that America shares with the world—fast-twitch but offense-intensive. Plays are expected. Like the double play in baseball, "Stockton to Malone" was a beautiful thing to watch.
And you could expect to see it more than once.
In evolutionary-psych terms, Americans want to see a group of individuals acting as a single team. It's the heart and soul of every classic war movie, the platoon of rugged individualists coming together for the common good. Hence the most cutting criticism of all: "He's not a team player."
Because controlling actual "team play" is impossible in soccer (and hockey), these sports are necessarily about a team acting as a collection of talented individuals. Think of soccer as a way of subverting socialism. And sublimating collectivized religious and nationalistic passions.
Americans are shamelessly patriotic and openly religious (though are more Jeffersonian about it that they'll admit), and so don't really require another weekly groupthink where nothing happens and "all the fun is in getting there" (because there's no actual "there" there).
Getting caught up in the same-only-different drama of the competitive moment is enough. The only true American national theater is the sports stadium, and the one true national imperative is to "Win one for the Gipper."
Labels: baseball, culture, deep thoughts, politics, soccer, sports
June 05, 2010
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Good Morning, Japan reports today that 「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 ("What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?") has reached #3 on Japan's bestseller list. (See here and here for my samizdat translation of the prologue and chapter 1.) #1 is 1Q84 and #2 is a diet book.
UPDATE: covered in the Economist.
UPDATE: covered in the Economist.
Related posts
Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)
Labels: baseball, books, business, japan, moshidora, pop culture, sports
March 24, 2010
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
My translation of chapter 1 from 「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 ("What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?"). This isn't the whole chapter, only what's available in the Amazon preview (the prologue here).
The school year in Japan begins and ends in April (the same as the fiscal year). Except for a small number of private "American-style" high schools, public and private high schools require entrance exams and are ranked accordingly. I believe the rank of 60 cited below refers to the school's T score (偏差値).
UPDATE: ranked number 3 on Japan's bestseller list.
The school year in Japan begins and ends in April (the same as the fiscal year). Except for a small number of private "American-style" high schools, public and private high schools require entrance exams and are ranked accordingly. I believe the rank of 60 cited below refers to the school's T score (偏差値).
What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?
Chapter 1: Minami and Management Cross Paths
Minami attended a public high school in Tokyo. Hodokubo High--"Hodoko" for short--was located in the hilly Tama district at the western reaches of the Kanto Plain. The school building was perched atop one such hill with a commanding view of the surrounding countryside.
The Okutama Mountains were visible from her homeroom window. On a clear day she could see all the way to Mt. Fuji.
The forests had been mostly cleared starting in the 1960s to make room for the Tama New Town bedroom community. Nevertheless, a few stands of trees had been left intact. Despite belonging to the Tokyo megalopolis, signs of nature were surprisingly abundant.
Hodoko was a college prep school. It had a ranking of sixty, which placed it in the top fifteen percent. Almost everybody passed their university entrance exams. It was a good enough school that several graduates could be expected to enter Japan's Ivy Leagues every year.
The differences between academic and athletic performance, though, were stark. Campus extracurricular activities enjoyed wide and enthusiastic participation, but none of the sports teams produced the kind of talent that could make it to a national championship.
The baseball team was no exception. It wasn't embarrassingly weak, and neither was it particularly strong. It simply didn't compete at a level worthy of Koushien. Only once, twenty years before, had Hodoko made it as far as the fifth round, to the Sweet Sixteen.
Most years, they were eliminated before reaching the third round. Nobody was harboring any high hopes this year either.
Minami knew all this. But even she was surprised when she walked into the clubhouse. "Humble" was the kindest way of describing the environment she found there. Forget Koushien--they wouldn't make it past the first round in this shape.
Shortly before Minami became manager, Hodoko lost in the summer municipal preliminaries and the seniors, right on schedule, quit the team to concentrate on their college entrance exams. Such a state of affairs was not unexpected. Still hardly anybody showed up for team practice.
Not because the team was taking an official break. Practices were scheduled. But without even bothering to concoct a good excuse and without any prior notification, most players just skipped the workouts.
That was the mood of the baseball team these days: Show up. Don't show up. Whatever. Nobody said they were free to do "whatever." Nobody said they weren't. Nobody was holding their feet to the fire either way.
Only five players came to practice the first day Minami did. The team had twenty-three members. That meant almost three-quarters were absent. Attendance didn't improve much the next week. And summer vacation would soon be upon them.
That got Minami's dander up. Carrying the status quo into the summer break was simply unacceptable. She needed to get a few things off her chest, seek agreement with her ideas, and hopefully garner some cooperation going forward.
So together with the coach, she gathered together the handful of team members and began her speech.
"I am going to take this team to Koushien."
That statement prompted a variety of responses. For every kid actually listening to her, her words were going in one ear and out the other of another. The majority joked and chattered aimlessly. But the one reaction they all had in common was overwhelmingly negative.
"That's out of the question," said the coach, Makoto Kachi.
He paused and continued, "In the ninety years since the Koushien tournament began, only one municipal high school in West Tokyo made it to Koushien. Needless to say, it was Kunitachi Metropolitan. West Tokyo is crowded with private school powerhouses like Obirin Prep, Nichidai Daisan, and Waseda Vocational, plus at least three others that have been in the Koushien championships. Getting into Koushien means beating those schools and more like them. A goal like that is completely disconnected from reality."
Jun Hoshide, the team captain, said, "Talk about setting the bar too high. We're not on the baseball team because we want to go to Koushien. We're here for the workouts, for the comradery, and for the memories, I guess. Some of us started out when we were kids and never shook the habit. Or were looking for a productive way to spend our afternoons. Talking up Koushien around here won't get anybody jumping on your bandwagon."
The catcher, Jirou Kashiwagi, added, "Yeah, not exactly a cakewalk, you know? I get where you're coming from. But go sailing off half-cocked with super high-minded goals and it's going to hurt a lot worse when you come crashing back to earth. How about something a bit more realistic, like making it past the third round?"
Then in a more subdued voice he asked, "I mean, are you serious? Do you really want to manage this team?"
UPDATE: ranked number 3 on Japan's bestseller list.
Related posts
Baseball according to Drucker (1)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)
Labels: baseball, books, business, japan, pop culture, sports
March 22, 2010
Baseball according to Drucker (1)
I love a good "Reese's moment" (You got peanut butter in my chocolate!). I had one the other day, watching a story on Good Morning Japan about how, in these uncertain times, businessmen were turning for inspiration to the classics. Such as Nietzsche (!).Or rather, books explaining Nietzsche. The professional explainer is a revered occupation in Japan. Like the grandpa in The Princess Bride, a good explainer sums up the important stuff, provides simple examples, and smooths over the big words and archaic syntax.
A comparison that springs to mind is the "Books That Changed the World" series (such as On The Wealth of Nations by P. J. O'Rourke). Except more popular. Professional explainers like cognitive neuroscientist Ken'ichiro Mogi sometimes seems as ubiquitous as Oprah.
Discussing other unique and not-boring books about business, they mentioned one with the title: 「もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーの『マネジメント』を読んだら」 or "What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?" written by Natsumi Iwasaki.
That strange juxtaposition got my attention. The next day, Today's Close Up (NHK's version of Nightline) was about Peter Drucker's influence on business culture in Japan. Like Edward Deming, Peter Drucker has found more honor in Japan than in his home country.
Featured was an interview with the author of the aforementioned book, Natsumi Iwasaki (岩崎夏海). He said that he'd gotten interested in the subject observing the difficulties players in MMOGs like Final Fantasy encountered organizing and managing teams.
"What if the girl manager of a high school baseball team read Peter Drucker's Management?" (ISBN 978-4478012031) is available from Amazon-Japan. They have a preview, so here's my translation of the prologue (I'll post the first chapter on Wednesday).
In Japan, the "managers" (assistant coaches who tend to non-coaching duties) of high school sports teams are usually girls. This excerpt from Kokoyakyu, a very good documentary about high school baseball in Japan, briefly features the team's girl managers.
What if the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team read Drucker's Management?
Prologue
Minami Kawashima became the manager of the school baseball team her junior year of high school. It was the middle of July, just before summer vacation.
It happened quite out of the blue. Until practically the moment before, she'd been just another ordinary student, uninterested in any after-school activities, let alone baseball. Being the manager of a high school sports team was the furthest thing from her mind.
Her junior year in high school--and days before summer vacation--was about the most least opportune time of the year to arrive at such a decision. But an unforeseen set of circumstances led her to make the plunge.
Minami had only one goal in becoming manager. And that was taking the team to the Koushien National High School Baseball Championships. This wasn't a vague or fanciful dream. It wasn't a wish. It was a concrete objective. It was her mission in life.
Minami didn't say, "I'd like to take the team to Koushien." She said, "I'm going to take the team to Koushien."
Which was all fine and dandy. But the truth was, she didn't have the foggiest idea how to turn this conviction into reality. As has been noted, she'd had zero contact with the baseball team before then, and wasn't quite sure what being the manager even involved.
But that didn't slow her down in the slightest. She naively assumed she'd figure it out along the way. Minami was the kind of girl who leapt before she looked.
That was certainly her state of mind when she became manager. Before thinking, "How does one take a baseball team to Koushien?" she'd already resolved, "I will take this baseball team to Koushien."
And having committed herself to that end, she did not pause to ponder. But turned directly to action.
Go to Chapter 1.
UPDATE: It's being made into an NHK anime series.
Related posts
Baseball according to Drucker (2)
Baseball according to Drucker (3)
Baseball according to Drucker (4)
Baseball according to Drucker (5)
Baseball according to Drucker (6)
Labels: baseball, books, business, good morning japan, japan, moshidora, pop culture, sports