Word: ichiro
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...TIME: What do you think about Japanese players like Ichiro Suzuki playing in the U.S. Major Leagues? Koizumi: It's the dream of Japanese players. I'm very happy they can play equally with American players. We used to think the Americans played at a much higher level. The national sport in Japan is sumo, but the Japanese love baseball even more. Baseball is America's national sport, but it has become Japan's national sport as well. Japanese fans watch the Japanese players in America with interest and joy. The American games on TV are more popular than...
Fast-forward to the year 2001, a decade into Japan's seemingly endless post-bubble recession, and talk of an RWS has all but disappeared. Eight of Japan's best players are now wearing U.S. major league uniforms, including new Seattle Mariners' signee Ichiro Suzuki, perhaps the greatest pure hitter the Japanese game has ever produced. And Japan's national sport seems in danger of becoming a farm system for the American majors. Until this year, only pitchers had ventured abroad, notably Hideo Nomo who took his corkscrew delivery to L.A. in 1995 and won Rookie of the Year honors...
...rash of defections. The so-called posting system gives a player still a year or two shy of free-agent eligibility the opportunity to sign up with a major league team - if that team agrees to pay his Japanese club a negotiating fee. Last year the 27-year-old Ichiro became the first Japanese star to use posting. From the deal, his team, the Blue Wave, earned a crisp $13 million. To some observers such tactics smack of price-fixing, market discrimination and possible violation of antitrust law: if the player does not like the U.S. team negotiating the deal...
This year may be criti-cal. With two Japanese playing for the Seattle Mariners - Ichiro and vet-eran star reliever Kazuhiro Sasaki - Japan's pub-lic broadcasting company, nhk, may set a record for the most televised U.S. major league games in a single year. Says veteran sportswriter Kozo Abe, who has covered baseball on both sides of the Pacific: "The Japanese are finally beginning to realize how much better American big league baseball is - in real competition, that is, not goodwill games - in terms of power, speed, technique and depth. That could spell doom for Japan's game...
...Tokyo, he enhanced his reputation as a calculating dealmaker. His critics describe him as Machiavellian, willing to break bread with anyone if it furthers his cause. In 1998, when Obuchi was having trouble holding together a fragile multi-party coalition, Nonaka approached an arch-enemy, Ichiro Ozawa, whose defection from the LDP in 1993 ushered the party out of power for the only time since its inception in 1955. Nonaka had called Ozawa a "devil" for that insult. But he went to Ozawa, hat in hand, and persuaded him to rejoin Obuchi's coalition. Once the relationship was cemented...