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You Gotta Have Wa | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Whiting
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $1.37
You Save: $13.58 (91%)
New (21) Used (59) from $1.37
Avg. Customer Rating:  25 reviews
Sales Rank: 160253
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Vintage Departures Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 067972947X
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3570952
EAN: 9780679729471
ASIN: 067972947X
Publication Date: October 3, 1990
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: 1st Vintage Departures Ed. 1990 Paperback. Orders usually ship on or before next business day. May have highlighting. We send best copy available.
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Product Description
An important element in Japanese baseball is wa--group harmony--embodied in the proverb "The nail that sticks up shall be hammered down". But what if the nail is a visiting American player? Here's a look at Japanese baseball, as seen by baffled Americans
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| Customer Reviews: Read 20 more reviews...
 Baseball and culture June 17, 2008
Sure, the book is dated, but the truths and cultural differences highlighted remain in tact. The Japanese way, the concept of the group, the irrational approach to practice still remain. Few books get to the idiosyncracies of the Japanese as well as this one does. Not a lot of "eastern wisdom" or "zen baseball" but the cold hard truth about the weaknesses of the Japanese way.
 Japanese Baseball Demystified August 12, 2007
With the influx of Japanese stars into the US Major Leagues, many sports fans are becoming intrigued by the league across the Pacific and the ballplayers who play in it. Reading this book, along with Mr. Whiting's two others, Chrysanthemum at the Bat and The Meaning of Ichiro, will give you the best understanding availible. This book focuses more on the relationship between Japan and the American ballplayers who play over there, but there is a lot on Japanese players, the history of the game in Japan, and the culture of Japanese baseball. It was written in the late 1980s, but still is informative to a reader 20 years later.
Homu Ran! May 8, 2007
What a fun book this was! It's very quick and easy reading - a fast reader can get through it on a plane trip or on a Sunday afternoon. I also gave it to a family member who was laid up with an illness, and he found it to be a good distraction. I myself picked this book up originally because I was interested in Japanese-American cultural conflicts and issues. I also just so happen to enjoy Dodger basu-baru.
This book has some very entertaining stories and pictures. My favorite is a picture of a Japanese catcher being taught how to crouch behind the plate by squatting above a board with spikes pointing up toward his privates! Ouch!...that's one way to keep focused! There's also a funny shot of all the Japanese team managers dressed up in samurai armor and sort of scowling at the camera - they look fearsome, all right!
The book did give me the kind of information I was seeking, though. Through the prism of baseball, it deals with some of the most important contrasts between American and Japanese culture. For example, the Japanese are much more likely to play when injured, for to do otherwise is "weak". This book tells the story of a pitcher with a torn ligament in his pitching arm who tried to "pitch through the pain", and could not get help from the Japanese sports doctors. He finally had to go to the US to get treatment, starting a rush of Japanese athletes who sought consultation and surgery here in the US that they were ashamed to seek in Japan.
I was also very interested in the story about how baseball came to be introduced to Japan (though an American schoolteacher). Before long, Japanese youth were being subjected to intense training in baseball which rivals that for martial arts.
Some posters here have mentioned that the book is two decades old, and somewhat out-of-date in terms of the players discussed. I didn't really mind that, and found it, all-in-all to be a very enjoyable and interesting read.
 The most thorough (yet sadly outdated) account of Japanese Baseball you can find January 26, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As a long-time Japanese baseball fan, I was very excited to finally receive this book and start reading it. Robert Whiting has done an excellent job of finding material that is usually not accessible for the average foreign fan of Japanese baseball, simply due to the fact that everything is written in Japanese.
Whiting has succeeded in creating a very enjoyable and very interesting "summary" of Japanese baseball as a whole, and really portrays just how differently the game is played and thought of in the East. In particular, the mentality of Japanese baseball that he describes, along with the accounts of many of the players were eye-opening.
It's just such a shame that the book is published in 1988, with no revisions forthcoming since then, because, as is inevitable with time, baseball in Japan has moved on.
In the modern game, the popularity of the "Yomiuri Giants" which Whiting talks at length in his book are declining - so much so that they have trouble filling the stadium or even getting good ratings on TV. In fact, baseball as a sport in Japan as a whole has been on a gradual decline in the face of Soccer, which, when Whiting wrote "You Gotta Have Wa", was unthinkable.
There have also been great shifts in terms of the power of Japanese baseball: away from the Giants to other teams, and the players union even went on strike in objection to the loss of player jobs following the merger of the Orix Bluewaves and Osaka Buffaloes. Whiting wrote however that the player's union would never consider striking, as that was the Japanese player's mentality. This signifies just how much the game has changed in Japan. Further, the systems have been edited to incorporate playoffs, and foreign coaches in Japan are now found at three clubs - a vastly different landscape to the one which Whiting reported on so excellently twenty years ago.
Even though the book is outdated however, it is still a very enjoyable and very thorough account of baseball and the mentality of baseball in Japan. For anyone with an interest in the sport in Japan, I would highly recommend reading it, as very little else is available which is of a similar quality to "You Gotta Have Wa".
But when reading, I just cant help but feel how worthy a book this would be if updated with information on the modern game. With stars like Matsui, Matsuzaka and Ichiro now plying their trades in the US, Whiting would have a lot to talk about.
I recommend it: Just realise that the game has moved on a little from then.
what other country would name a baseball team the Ham Fighters December 7, 2006
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
There is no doubt that the author has a firm grasp of Japanese culture. For that I would give him five stars. His knowledge of baseball is only passing for a professional writer, and make cause hard core baseball fans to be left wanting for more detail.
The book was written in the late 1980s and reads a bit dated, but the stories of how a select group of American ballplayers attempt to integrate into Japanese style baseball is still interesting and worth a read during the long baseball-less winter. It was also written before the days of all-star players like Ichiro came from Japan to America and dominated. During the 1980s, you could be a semi-over the hill overweight American and still hit 340 with 40 homers in Japan.
The author's knowledge of Japan was first rate and his obviously lived in the country for a long time. The book is about baseball, but is really about how the Japanese culture is still struggling to integrate culturally with the rest of the world. I would reccomend it for the baseball reader who is looking for something unique.
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