This story originally ran in the Japanese newspaper Yukan Fuji in 2017.
TOKYO — The year 2017 marks the 40th anniversary of my career as a writer of Japanese baseball. It was in 1977 that my first book The Chrysanthemum and the Bat was published. The hardcover came out in June in English in New York and the Japanese translation came out four months later. Since then I have written 25 books in Japanese. Seven of them were published in English in North America.
Most Americans know me by my book You Gotta Have Wa. Most Japanese know me from Kiku to Batto. Readers of Yukan Fuji will know me by “Sakura to Seijoki” book collections.
A lot has happened in 40 years. When I wrote C&B everyone was talking about Sadaharu Oh having shattered Hank Aaron’s career home run record. MLB teams wanted Oh but as he put it, “The fans never would have allowed it, even if the rules had been changed to permit it at times. We were supposed to defeat the Americans in a Real World Series. That was the goal.”
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