Word: osaka
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...Joji Obara was born in 1952 to an impoverished Korean family in postwar Osaka. His father had been a scrap collector, then a taxi driver who worked his way into owning a fleet of cars and a string of pachinko parlors from which he amassed a fortune. Perhaps mindful of the discrimination faced by Koreans, when the young Obara - then known by his Korean name Kim - was asked to pen a farewell sentiment in his junior-high class yearbook, he wrote: "Upbringing is more important than family name...
...high school, a Yokohoma prep school affiliated with prestigious Keio University. To facilitate Obara's entry to the school his father purchased the Den'en Chofu mansion and sent the boy to live there with a maid. When Obara was 17, his father died, leaving holdings in Tokyo and Osaka...
...major league teams, which draw more than 72 million fans annually, exist purely for profit. They maintain extensive farm and scouting systems and are run by people with years of experience in the pro game. Japan's teams, concentrated mainly in the Tokyo and Osaka areas, exist primarily to advertise the products of their corporate owners - like the pork sold by the sponsors of the Nippon Ham Fighters. They invest sparingly in player development: only one farm team per franchise is the norm, and teams are often operated by officials from the parent company who know little about the game...
...valued player is yet to defect and the team has even gone on a buying spree in recent years, picking up top players from other squads via free agency. But Watanabe's words are scant consolation to fans of Orix or of Shinjo's team, the Hanshin Tigers of Osaka, where good replacements are not readily available. The fact is, overall attendance has been slipping. TV ratings have fallen. And some baseball officials have expressed concern about the deteriorating quality of play...
...like Silence and The Samurai are superb accounts of East failing to meet West. Because of his Christian preoccupations, Endo has become one of Japan's best-known writers overseas. The most underrated of the great Japanese modernists in the West is Junichiro Tanizaki, whose portrait of a prewar Osaka family, The Makioka Sisters, is one of the landmarks of 20th century literature. He is undervalued in the West, I think, in part because his work, which stretches over half a century, is not easy to characterize, ranging as it does from fantasy to domestic realism...