Word: besuboru
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Matsutaro Shoriki, 84, Japanese newspaper publisher who brought the grand old game of besuboru to his homeland; of a heart attack; in Tokyo. In 1924, Shoriki purchased the dying Tokyo daily Yomiuri (circ. 40,000) and as a promotional gimmick sponsored visits by American baseball teams featuring such stars as Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. The tours were overwhelming successes, and the game soon became as popular in Japan as in the U.S. Today, Yomiuri's circulation is 5.1 million, in no small part because of the thoroughness of its baseball coverage...
...today, where in working class neighborhoods up to 80% of the population still lacks private facilities, more than 1,600,000 men and women immerse themselves companionably every evening in the steaming vats of the city's 2,608 sento or public bathhouses. There Suzuki-san discusses the besuboru pennant race, and his wife, behind a flimsy partition (a late 19th century concession to Occidental prudery), catches up on the neighborhood gossip. The kids make the usual deafening racket but, as one sento enthusiast puts it knowingly, "When everybody is naked, camaraderie just naturally follows...
Pray Boru! Immodest as his words may sound, Shoriki is right. His optometrists consider him terribly myopic, but time after time he has proved himself dazzlingly farsighted. In the 1930s he introduced besuboru to Japan by bringing Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmy Foxx and Lefty O'Doul to the Orient for a barnstorming tour. An ultranationalist fanatic later hefted a broadsword and hacked a 16-in. scar into the left side of his head for permitting foreigners like the Bambino to desecrate sacred Meiji Stadium, but Shoriki went on to form Japan's first professional baseball league...