1986. One of a 26-part series, “Faces of Japan,” produced for PBS by TeleJapan USA. 30 minutes.
Among high school sports in Japan, baseball generally reigned supreme in the second half of the twentieth century. The baseball team attracted the most number of would-be participants and drew the most attention from classmates, alumni, and community members. Baseball spread from elite “higher schools” and universities down to what were then middle schools from the turn of the twentieth century. In the summer of 1914, the Osaka Asahi newspaper, one of the first mass newspapers, sponsored the first open national middle school tournament. Its arch rival, the Osaka Mainichi newspaper followed with a spring invitational national tournament. In 1924, Asahi collaborated with the Hanshin Railway Company to build a huge stadium, named Kôshien, along the Hanshin rail line between Osaka and Kobe, and from the next year, both the spring and summer tournaments have been held in this 55,000-seat colossus. After World War II and the reorganization of secondary education, the middle school tournaments became high school tournaments, and now some 4000 high schools across Japan vie for the ultimate honor of appearing at Kôshien. They are lionized in the press for the purity of youth, and appearance at Kôshien is a memory (and a credential) that a boy will carry with him for life.
This documentary follows the efforts of Mito Commercial High School to qualify for the Kôshien summer tournament in 1985. The public school is located in Ibaragi Prefecture to the northeast of Tokyo, and has long been known for strong baseball teams; prior to that year, it had sent teams to the national tournaments six times, and its reputation attracts students from a wide area (who find relatives or other places to live within the district in order to qualify).
The documentary moves back and forth between the Ibaragi Prefectural Qualifying Tournament, in which Mito Commercial has made it to the finals, and the preparations before. Most high schools do not have extensive league competition; rather, their games are primarily in the form of knock-out tournaments (one reason why many schools adopt a “play-not-to-lose” strategy). Qualifying for the Kôshien summer tournament requires winning one’s local and then prefectural tournament (which are called “regional tournaments,” chihô taikai, because several prefectures have so many schools that they send two representatives). In Mito’s case, it competes with about 100 other high schools in Ibaragi Prefecture.
Like most schools, the baseball club is large—probably having sixty-to-eighty members. As you see, the tenth-graders (first year high school students) do not have a chance to play—or even practice (except for an occasional standout). They sweep the field, stack the equipment, chase the foul balls, and shout encouragement during practices and games—awaiting their chance as juniors. It is one way that the manager (who is often the only adult coach/supervisor) can weed out the large number of aspirants and get done the work of running practices.
The narrator announces early on that the secret of team success is “constant practice, rigid discipline, and obedience to a system of rank, hierarchy, and authority,” much of which is enforced among the players themselves. The longtime team manager, Mr. Koga, is also a math teacher at the school and seems to be a gruff but lovable type that some of you may yourselves have encountered in your athletic experiences.
There are also scenes of the (male) cheerleaders (boys who take advantage of their roles to bend the regulation school uniforms towards extra-wide trousers and pompadour hair cuts) and the “cheer girls,” a more recent innovation that copies U.S. styles.
The only player we meet is the senior captain and third-baseman, Tsuchiya. It is interesting that his mother is a single parent running a local bar, quite proud of her son. His conference with his guidance counselor is revealing, too, for the latter’s offer to talk to the president of a local bank about a job after graduation because he is a Mito Commercial graduate. Sports team membership counts.
Mito advances to the prefectural tournament and wins its first four games to reach the finals, against a frequent rival, Toride Second High School. The team prepares itself by going to a local Shintô shrine for a ceremony of prayer, offerings, purification, and receiving good luck charms (one suspects the videographers find this quaintly Oriental, but athletes among you may not be surprised by the general sentiment). The game goes deep into extra innings before Mito collapses and loses by two runs as its best pinch hitter pops up to end the twelfth inning. “The dream is over,” and we see and feel how crushing is the defeat to the losers. They are good sports (giving their huge good-luck crane chains to their opposite number on the winning team), and return to school for a sad ceremony. The seniors slowly clean out their lockers; as a commercial high school few will go to college, and I suspect that this is the end of their athletic careers. They must now turn their attention to finding adult jobs. Tenth-grade team members, however, who have been doing the grunt work since school started in April, are probably only too happy to move up a rank and get a chance to play for their own dream of getting to Kôshien.