You Call Me DK!

(January 2020)

My first story ran two days later.

It was a carefully worded piece about rumors I had heard about how the border guard service in Russia had conveniently forgotten to process a request for information about three possible accomplices in the Mr. Slimeball case, until of course, a check for about $800 US mysteriously showed up.

I know exactly when it dropped because at 11:34 AM local time my mail program started filling up faster than I could read it. I mean, serious business here–they came in waves big enough that they made me think of that old TV clip with the Lucy chick who was working on the chocolate factory line when the treadmill ramped up, and she had to stuff them in apron and then her bra and then had to eat them in order to keep up. The only difference was that it was funny when she did it, and that I was getting not a bit of chocolatey goodness.

“What can we do?” the first one asked.

“Screw the [censored],” read the next.

“Someone should be shot and sent to Siberia,” said a third.

“Why the [blankety-blank] border guard involved in this, shouldn’t they be out shooting Mexicans?” said the fourth.

Sometimes you just shake your head.

But truth told, that was a pretty good question. One I had asked Ichihara earlier. “Why the border guard?” I had said.
He shrugged like he does, the shirt of his his softly rounded shoulder giving a nearly imperceptible movement. “It is Russia. They decided today that anything going into the country is something the border guard can address.”

So I went down to the bar that night and I had a conversation with a couple of fans there that spoke a bit of English.

[Here’s a hint: the Japanese people as a whole can feel a bit intimidating. They like their space, and they don’t seem to me to grow overly warm to strangers. But they like to speak English–or at least a lot of Japanese want more practice–so if you show up at a bar with a wad of yen and announce you wanna chat about baseball for a bit, you can get up a pretty good sized set of friends pretty quickly.]

I learned a lot that night.

Baseball in Japan is maybe an even bigger reflection of their cultural than it is in the US. The Japanese took it in a long time ago, and the truth is that all the things I love most about baseball are already things that I find myself loving about Japan. It’s a precise game that rewards brisk action taken under control. It’s a game where people matter, but the team’s success is the final arbiter of quality. It’s a game of numbers, for better or for worse, I suppose. Once I knew I was coming here, I read crapton on the game in Japan, and I watch videos and did my best to acquaint myself with what I was getting into, but I don’t think I actually got any of it until that night.

My best friend turned out to be a guy named Diaki.

“You call me DK!” he kept saying as my beer-loosened mid-western tongue kept screwing up (Hey, sue me. There can be a lot of syllables in a five letter name in Japan, andI was tired and already had a couple in me after dinner).

“You call me DK!”

He said he was thirty-one and he worked in a factory down the road a bit. He said he came here on his bike. “Much faster,” he said, grinning and eating nuts. He was built like a man who rode his bike a lot of places. Short, with classic dark hair and skin tone. He said he grew up in Hiroshima, which of course, gave me a pang of embarrassment. And as far as baseball went, he was an Edo man all the way through.

“Isn’t Hiroshima Hyakujuu country?” I asked.

“Hyakujuu … bah. They just threw money around without making sense. The Battousai,” he said, his eyes getting wide, “know what the game is really about.”

“What about Shin Seiki,” I asked him. “That’s all we ever hear about Japanese baseball in the US–if anything, that is. The “Eva Empire” strikes a chord with us.”

“Shin Seiki … bah. Don’t talk about Shin Seiki ’til they win their group six seasons a row.” He held up three fingers, then turned them around so I got the idea he was adding. “And we’re going to win it all again this year,” he said, sagely. Then he gave a sharp “hi!” and downed the last half of his beer in one gulp. “You do that for luck,” he said. Then he showed me how, and I followed his lead.

He talked a lot about Herb Martin, the guy they traded for this off season, and who DK said was going to lead his Edo Battousai to their next championship. I didn’t tell him that I thought Martin wasn’t what he needed to be for the Gloucester Fishermen while he pitched in the PEBA. The fact is that he was a guy traded to Hyakujuu in one of the Black Slipper Trades made by MSB, and then moved into the contraction draft, was picked up by Kawaguchi, and then traded to Edo made him appear to be a hot Mr. Potatohead rather than a savior. Just didn’t seem to be the place for such an opinion.

And who am I to say how a guy’s going to pitch in Japan?

Anyway, DK knew a lot about what it meant to be a baseball fan in Japan. And, it turns out, he understood a lot of what was going on in the Slimeball case, too.

And he was mad as a hornet over it, too.

I would not count him as one of those pro-merger fans that league officials are always talking about.

“Baseball is Japan’s,” he said, spinning amber beer in his glass. “We play it right. Not like Americans.” He paused and waved a distracting hand at me. “Not to take personal.” Then he went on a nationalistic diatribe that would have made a flat-worlder in the middle of Kansas proud.

At the end of the day I kind of got it, though. Ethnic tension is a multi-headed hydra, and true change takes considerably more than the waving of a pen against paper a few generations of time. It is to be hoped that baseball will have a hand in that, no?

Truthfully, I’m sure it’s not easy to be a worker in Japan these days. If ever. And, I have to admit that the fact that he was born in a city that my country nuked never seemed to really leave my brain completely. How could I judge him unworthy of wanting his own game?

Regardless of it all, DK didn’t seem to hold a grudge against me at all that night, and we talked through several rounds of beer. He threw down some cash too and we had sushi and some kind of grilled fish that came complete with scales and lips and a glazed eyeball that kept reminding me of the perch we used to catch back home in Duluth. DK said my skills with the chopsticks passed muster. Barely. “We will make a Japanese of you, yet!” he said, his eyes burning with pride.

I left the bar that night with a head full of real baseball stories, a promise to return, and enough veracity that I could write my story without having to rely on any direct statements from Yuni Ichihara–which was important.
And, yeah, I left the bar that night with all the ingredients of a future hangover.

Which I was nursing when the email started coming in.

And which hadn’t gone away forty-five minutes later when the pounding came to my hotel door. I looked out the peep hole to see three very white men standing there, each dressed in a very dark suit.

Coincidence?

I think not.