The Making of an Agent - Chapter 2 (Part I)

The Don Nomura Story

This book, about super agent Don Nomura, the man who took Hideo Nomo to the Major Leagues and opened the long-closed door door to MLB for Japanese baseball players, was originally published in 1999 in Japanese by Bungei Shunju as

日出づる国の奴隷野球: 憎まれた代理人団野村の闘い

The Education of Don Nomura

The United States, being multi-racial and relatively open, is, it is safe to reiterate, a society that celebrates its differences, while Japan, by contrast, being a “homogeneous” society, is a place where people still seem to expend an inordinate amount of energy trying to be the same as everyone else. Although each of us is born with different and unique talents, no matter what country he or she comes from, Americans generally seem to regard it a person’s duty to fully develop his or her talents, whereas Japanese generally appear to feel it is society’s duty to treat everyone the same regardless of differences in ability (despite the heated claims by those members of the revisionist younger generation to the contrary). One can see this in many, many areas of life: schools, the corporations, the world of sports — and in all of these fields America and Japan are on opposite poles of the spectrum.

Given the atmosphere of rigid conformity that characterizes Japan, it takes gaiatsu (foreign pressure) it is often said, to change the way things are done in the country. Since one of the more rigid areas of Japanese society is the negative attitude of Japanese professional baseball toward player agents — player contracts are a family affair, team executives say, and outsiders have no business butting in, it would stand to reason it would take a special kind of gaiatsu to combat it, which was where Don Nomura came in. Being half-American and half-Japanese, and seething with resentment at some of the treatment had received because of it in Japan, he had all the right ingredients to challenge the system head on.