Raw Japan

Suzuki CEO: 80, going on 56

When Toyota and Honda replaced their retirement-age CEOs with executives in their 50s last year, they said the tough times called for young blood and a fresh start.

Not so at Suzuki Motor.

Nine days short of his 80th birthday and after 31 years heading the company that his wife’s grandfather founded, CEO Osamu Suzuki says his best days are ahead of him. If Suzuki is weary of the recurring question about succession plans — a question he’s probably fielded for the past two decades in his ripe age — he masks it well, coming up with a different analogy every so often. His latest favourite response? “100 is the new 70.”

“There’s an old saying in Japan that life maxes out at 70 years,” he told a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan today. “But that was in the days when the average life span was 50. Now it’s 100. These days, centenarians are a dime a dozen.”

Applying that formula, the genial, bushy-browed Suzuki said he considered his effective age to be 56 — that is, 70 percent of 80.

“The work starts here!”

Japan’s Boys of Summer

Eleven years ago I sat near a high school-aged Daisuke Matsuzaka as he used field glasses to watch a Japan-MLB All-Star game at the end of both leagues’ seasons.    I wrote a story based on that image about Japanese wanting to know “How good are we?” It was a question encompassing more than sport, as the same doubts existed for Japan in terms of corporate or diplomatic might, while the way the nation usually measured itself was in comparison to the U.S.   The 2009 baseball season, which began with Matsuzaka and Ichiro Suzuki leading Japan to its second World Baseball Classic title and ended with Hideki Matsui winning the World Series MVP in helping the New York Yankees to the crown, hasn’t ended that self-assessment. Instead it has widened it to “How good can we be?”   Matsui, whose decision to leave the Yomiuri Giants at the end of the 2002 was broadcast live across the island nation, hit a grand slam in his first New York home game but has been hobbled by injuries in seven seasons that may have made his Series heroics a Yankees coda.   Ichiro, who set the record in 2009 for most consecutive MLB seasons with 200 hits and delivered the winning RBI in the WBC title game, is the greatest baseball export Japan has produced so far, but his zen approach to hitting and perceived statistics orientation have not always resonated with fans or teammates.   Matsui, meanwhile, nicknamed “Godzilla” in high school for his power display at the national baseball championship, is less polished and a little more rough and ready. But he’s a player that nary a cross word has been said or written about, rather a “slugging salaryman” portrayal whose team focus is absolute, who even hit his sixth game Series homer to the Komatsu banner in rightfield.   An MLB-insider told me after Game Six of the World Series: “Ichiro Suzuki will be elected into the Hall of Fame, Hideki Matsui will not. But Ichiro will never achieve what Matsui did last night.”

Ichiro may not, but another Japanese player may, as the once distant fields of dreams across the Pacific have grown closer thanks to the countrymen’s feats in 2009, with Japan’s questions about how it rates becoming easier to answer.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Mike Segar

Call me “Crasher”

My nickname among the Reuters photographers in Tokyo is “Crasher”.

They call me that because I always seem to get pictures right at the moment of a crash whenever I cover motorsports.

One colleague sometimes teases me saying “You’ve got to stop pouring oil on the track,” and I answer: ”I would never use oil — I only use banana skins!”

In motorsports the most exciting moment you can capture in a picture is a crash.

That instant can be the difference between life and death, and it’s a picture that is most difficult to capture.

Colonel Sanders returns

After nearly a quarter century on the bottom of a Japanese river, Colonel Sanders has come up smiling.

Ecstatic fans of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team in 1985 tossed a statue of the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder into the Dotonbori River in Osaka, western Japan, when the perpetual underdogs won their first Central League pennant in 21 years.

 Tigers fans, who saw a resemblance between the Colonel and the team’s bearded American slugger, Randy Bass, jumped into what was then one of Japan’s most polluted rivers when the losing streak ended — and took the life-size statue along for the swim.

The Tigers went on to win the Japan Series championship in 1985, but have never done so again, prompting some to suggest the missing Colonel had cast a curse.

A diver checking for unexploded World War Two ordnance in the river as part of a clean-up found the Colonel’s top half on Tuesday, minus his hands, but still sporting his trademark string tie and grin.

“When I heard the statue had been found, I felt that history had ended,” Yoshio Yoshida, 75, the former Hanshin manager, was quoted by the Asahi newspaper as saying. “Recalling 1985, I’d like them to achieve the dream of being Japan No. 1 again.”

The Colonel’s smile might have widened, if it could, when his bottom half was recovered and reunited with the top on Wednesday.

Samurai night fever

Sports rivalries are bred by proximity, culture and history, and few match ups in Asia have more baggage or bragging rights at stake than baseball games between Japan and South Korea, the respective World Baseball Classic and Olympic titleholders.

Both crowns were sources of national pride, but Japan’s came in 2006 after losing twice to Korea before a semifinal victory over the Seoul side, which wasn’t enthused that a team it had beaten more than once could become  tournament champions.

The 2008 Beijing Games saw Tokyo and Seoul send their top non-MLB squads, but Japan returned medal-less and humbled, including a loss to Korea, whose gold made it the 2009 WBC regional favourite.

In the first rematch Saturday, Samurai Japan won 14-2, a laugher for everyone but the Koreans and pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who displayed the erratic control bedeviling his Red Sox career so far. The “called game” victory ensured the hosts would advance to the second round, while setting up a game against the stunned Koreans Monday, who blistered the Chinese in their next outing.

But pitching, a by-product of near year-round Asian training and why regional teams have fared so well in the early season tournament, was the story in Game Two, with Japan’s Hisashi Iwakuma allowing only two hits but leaving down 1-0.

Ichiro Suzuki woke up the slumbering Samurai with a late single, but Japan immediately followed with a “kanri yakyu” (businessman baseball) sacrifice bunt, even with one out. Japanese media in the Tokyo Dome nodded in acknowledgement, while the foreign press saw this as certain futility, essentially killing the comeback opportunity.

Hitting bottom

Ichiro Suzuki, arguably Japan’s greatest baseball export to Major League Baseball in terms of achievements, is facing what may be the worst spring of his combined Japanese and Major League Baseball career, with his image as the most prolific hitter of this era and a team-oriented star facing beanballs from both sides of the Pacific.

After a woeful season in which his Seattle Mariners lost over 100 games while dumping a full plate of managers, executives and players, Ichiro – who had a sub-par but not mediocre year – has heard a chorus of off-season chirping that the eight-year veteran was selfish, statistics-obsessed and playing by a different set of rules than teammates.

When you make $17.1 million on a team predicted by some to at least win its division that instead finishes dead last, there may be some explaining to do. But Ichiro decided to postpone the rebuilding process, again playing with Japan in the upcoming World Baseball Classic and holding off on the Mariners spring training until completing the WBC run.

Robert Whiting, author of “The Meaning of Ichiro“, told me that the rightfielder is being held accountable unfairly for the failings of the $100 million team.

“Who else on Seattle could carry his water? As for not being a team leader, well, I think it’s a cultural thing. The culture doesn’t work that way.”

After helping lead Japan to the 2006 WBC title, Ichiro’s participation this time was expected, but three years ago many assumed that he, and not the New York Yankees’ Hideki Matsui, would pass on the opportunity, not imagining that his hero, former Japan manager Sadaharu Oh, would ask him to play for the national side.