Say Wa

Santa Monica

Well, it’s their loss. Baseball fans and those passionate about international, cross-cultural exchanges had every reason for euphoria last night at Dodger Stadium. The championship finale to the World Baseball Classic between Japan and Korea was the pièce de résistance. Those who spurn this still-awkward tournament with all its growth pains are missing a point. This is larger than traditional American baseball. It’s an emergent phenomenon that one treats with the unfolding, patient delight of so much of Far Eastern culture.

The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Shaikin, a wonderful baseball scribe by the way, writes today that fans of both sides “exuded passion and spirit for 10 of the most memorable innings ever played at Dodger Stadium, a weirdly wonderful mix of baseball game, rock concert and pep rally.” You bet, although this is not a new thing for those of us who have enjoyed béisbol in the Caribbean and besuboru in Japan. (See March 7, 2009 entry Recurring Dreams and Nightmares.) The games evoke the joyous feeling and colorful sensibility of a world-class soccer match without any of the hooliganism, drunken self-indulgence and angry nationalism.

Tonight’s game came against the backdrop of memories and histories of brutal Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula on and off for centuries. One can only imagine from Chavez Ravine, adjacent as it is to LA’s Chinatown, what emotions were stirring in Little Tokyo and Koreatown here as well as in Tokyo and Seoul. After all, the Japanese won the 2006 WBC and yet the Koreans had twice beaten the Japanese in this tournament and served up starting pitcher Jungkeun Bong – dubbed “the Japan killer.” Still, many of the young Korean and Japanese fans at Dodger Stadium tonight seemed far more interested in baseball rivalry than political revenge. With Korea’s loss, we will never know whether the team would have planted their flag on the mound with a certain self-righteous albeit understandable indignation, as they had in previous victories over Japan. Well, for tonight at least, the Japanese side successfully displayed great "wa," or team harmony.

For more on Japanese baseball, see the three Robert Whiting books below. My introduction to the culture came via his first entry, You’ve Gotta Have Wa.

p.s. Photos from the tournament will come later. The small device for transferring photo files to my computer was crushed under the weight of some wonderfully exuberant Korean fans seated next to me.