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

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

By this time, Nomura had come to some conclusions about the nature of racial discrimination. There was indeed a difference between the U.S. and Japan on that score, as he had come to realize from his time in California. The difference was that in the U.S. proper, there were so many diverse non-white groups (about 30% of the U.S. population was not white), and there were so many laws to protect minority rights that if you lived there, you could have a decent, successful mainstream life. In Japan, by contrast, if you had one drop of non-Japanese blood, then you were a foreigner and you were out in the cold, shut out of the better universities and companies, unless, of course, you hid your identity.

His father used to tell him: Be proud of being an American, because it’s the best country in the world. But it wasn’t until he actually went to America that he began to understand what his father was saying. Still, he could not decide if being an American citizen was something that he really wanted. Up until the age of 21, he had dual citizenship. Then, under American law, he was forced to choose one or the other. At the time, it had not been a difficult decision to make. He wanted to play baseball in Japan and not be subject to the restrictive gaijin waku rule. So he chose Japan. He had let Katsuya adopt him in 1977, taking the name Nomura and taking Japanese citizenship in 1977. But now, he wasn’t so sure he’d done the right thing.