Word: ichiro
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...BATMAN In the past, a katana, a Japanese sword, was a samurai's soul. The warriors may be long gone, but the samurai spirit lives on--particularly among Japanese professional baseball players. Take the Seattle Mariners' All-Star center fielder Ichiro Suzuki. Between games, Ichiro gives his bat the katana treatment: keeping it protected in a sealed aluminum case. After every game, he takes it to his locker and shows his gratitude for its service by going through the ritual of cleaning...
...Ichiro's reverence for the bat came to him during a 1992 visit to the wise man of batmaking, 64-year-old Isokazu Kubota, master craftsman for equipment manufacturer Mizuno Technics Corp. Over the past 49 years, Kubota has made custom-designed wooden bats for more than 1,500 professional players, including Pete Rose and Hideki Matsui...
...political battles. And it's not just a Bush here or a Kennedy there: roughly one-third of Japan's sitting parliamentarians come from political nobility. Hereditary leadership doesn't just plague the LDP, which has ruled Japan virtually uninterrupted for half a century, but opposition parties as well. Ichiro Ozawa, the head of the Democratic Party of Japan, is the son of a former Cabinet minister...
...scandal over the mishandling of more than 50 million pension-fund accounts. None of these crises, Abe maintained, directly prompted his plans to depart once the LDP chooses a new PM next week. Instead, Abe put most of the blame on a snub by one man: opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa, whom the PM claimed had refused to meet to discuss a stalemate over whether Japan would continue to refuel American military vessels participating in the U.S.-led war on terror. "Even though I had requested a party-leader talk, Ozawa rejected my overture," said Abe in his resignation speech, implying...
...Minister's health had been suffering - though they offered no details - but Abe's surrender just three days into a new Diet sessions seemed less compromise than a failure of political nerve. "In my almost 40 years in politics, it's the first time I've seen this," said Ichiro Ozawa, the leader...