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Tuesday,
July 4 at 10 p.m. – P.O.V. presents Kokoyakyu:
High School Baseball
(Rochester, NY) – Pure sports spectacle? The
“thrill of victory and the agony of defeat?” Forget
Olympic athletics, American pros and even Friday night
football in Texas. Look at high school baseball in Japan.
P.O.V. presents Kokoyakyu: High
School Baseball, airing Tuesday, July 4 at 10 p.m.
on WXXI-TV 21 (cable 11), the first English-language
film to examine the phenomenon, shows that baseball
has become a national rite of passage for the country’s
youth. For thousands of Japanese teens, their families
and teachers, as well as millions of spectators, the
annual tournament that begins with some 4,000 teams
and concludes with 49 teams competing for the national
championship at Koshien Stadium in Osaka manages to
be pure baseball, and purely Japanese.
In March 2006, Japan beat Cuba to win the first-ever
World Baseball Classic. While this came as a shock to
some, many baseball fans weren’t surprised. Japan’s
embrace of the sport, beginning in 1872 and today including
Japanese players like Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki and New
York’s Hideki Matsui in the American big leagues, is
well known. Babe Ruth and other American all-stars used
to travel to Japan in the 1930s to play against the
locals before adoring fans, in fact, in the very Koshien
Stadium where Japan’s high school yakyu (“field ball”)
tournament culminates every August. But just how strong
and deep the Japanese love of baseball is, how they
have remade the sport into an expression of their spiritual
and cultural values, won’t be as obvious. Unless one
has experienced what the Japanese refer to simply as
“Koshien.”
Kokoyakyu: High School Baseball opens up the
world of Koshien by following the fortunes of two teams
as they compete in regional games and then head for
the 2003 tournament (the 86th annual games). Tennoji
High School is a public school whose team is coached
by a dedicated and self-effacing teacher, Masa-sensei,
who becomes deeply involved in the lives and welfare
of his students and their families. Tennoji, with its
limited public school resources and location in the
most competitive region, always faces an uphill climb
to Koshien. Chiben High School, by contrast, is a well-heeled
private school whose team is coached by the “legendary”
Takashima, who has taken the team to Koshien more than
20 times and has won the national championship three
times. So successful has Chiben been that some of the
nation’s best high school baseball players go to great
lengths to attend the school and increase their chances
of competing at Koshien.
Both coaches are obsessed with baseball and the values
it teaches and demands of the students. Yet their different
temperaments seem to mirror the contrast between the
teams. The humbler Masa-sensei spares no feeling or
attention to personal detail as he guides his students
through a sports competition and trial-by-fire that
will mark them for the rest of their lives. The depth
of his emotional investment in his players becomes clearest
at the tournament’s end. The great Takashima brings
a more Olympian sensibility to the proceedings; as soon
as the tournament ends, he’s already thinking of next
year and the prospects for a Chiben championship. Kokoyakyu
also brings viewers into the lives of the players, from
the stars and captains to the second-stringers whose
struggles to make a contribution become, perhaps, the
purest expression of Japanese values in baseball.
In Kokoyakyu, the rules, uniforms and stadium
hoopla may seem all-American. Even the cheerleaders
and their uniforms, though borrowed from American football,
obviously derive from the U.S. But, in what may be a
revelation to Americans, especially American kids involved
in sports, the intensity, discipline, earnestness and
unselfish dedication to team, school and family are
all-Japanese. High school baseball in Japan appears
to have sublimated the country’s traditional samurai
values in a markedly non-violent sport, whose essential
grace and emphasis on teamwork strike a deep chord in
Japanese hearts.
In what may be the most non-American touch of all, the
Koshien tournament is kept rigorously non-commercial.
Although the Koshien playoffs attract 60,000 fans per
game to the stadium and are broadcast in full for 11
days on national television to millions of viewers,
there are no commercial endorsements of any kind. The
broadcasts air on public television, and no commercial
recordings of the games are allowed. The stadium’s owners
donate use of the facility (and bump the games of the
hometown pro team). Virtually everyone involved, from
umpires to trainers to coaches, donates his time. And
though a few of the kids nurse ambitions to play professional
ball, it’s quite clear that for the vast majority of
the young players, “Koshien” is a rite of passage that
calls on them to exhibit the highest Japanese values;
hard work, dedication, selflessness and good sportsmanship.
The same is true for the cheer squads, who marshal themselves
with discipline and conviction, and the coaches, schoolmates,
parents and fans who yearly brave searing heat or tune
their TVs and radios to this national celebration.
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