92 S5592u 58-01162 Shoriki Miracle Man of Japan
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
92 S5592u 58-01162 Uhlan ShorikI miracle man of Japan LONG LOAN 6- SHORIKI Miracle JVfan. o Japan. MATSUTARO SHORIKI RJK Miracle Man of Japan A BIOGRAPHY by Edward Uhlan and Dana L. Thomas FOREWORD BY BOB CONSIDINE Illustrated A Banner Book EXPOSITION PRESS NEW YORK EXPOSITION PRESS INC., 386 Fourth Avenue, New York 16, N.Y. FIRST EDITION 1957 by Exposition Press Inc. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Copy right under International Copyright Union. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress catalog-card num ber: 57-9226. Foreword MATSUTARO SHORIKI, the somewhat incredible subject of this arresting biography, is one of the top wonders of the Asiatic world. His "lives'* exceed those of the mythical cat and the legendary Bengal lancer. His closest associates through succes sive decades even successive generations often find it dif ficult to think of him as an individual. He is not what every Japanese schoolboy wants to be: he appears to be what every Japanese schoolboy individually wants to be. To put it simply and give Shoriki's career its proper scope, let us say he is at once the entrepreneur of Japan's budding atomic-energy pro gram and of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball club, which must be the longest suspension bridge in human performance. When I had the great honor of visiting with him shortly before last Christmas a meeting arranged in Tokyo by the seventy-one-year-old wonderman's good friend Marvin Stone, Far Eastern Director of International News Service he told me with equal satisfaction that he was vigorously fighting Com munist infiltration in Japan and that he, the rugged septua genarian, had just learned a new maneuver in judo. Shoriki's range of interest has become legendary. But it seldom, if ever, fails to astound. Admiral Arthur W. Radford, after listening to Shoriki ex pound on atomic energy for an hour (the Japanese politely but firmly told the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that the British were clearly ahead of America in the matter of building more economical reactors), exclaimed: "Mr, Shoriki, 1 you are to Japan what Lewis Strauss is to my country/ 6 SHORIKI Shoriki smiled and thanked the American, when the words there was more to the smile than were hastily interpreted. But o the United satisfaction over being linked with the chairman States Atomic Energy Commission. For Shoriki, the compli to ment had a timeless ring. He had been compared many in fields. Yet Americans, many times, many years, and many Americans once jailed him! called "the William In the publishing field he was Randolph Hearst o Japan" for decades. In baseball he was, at first, "the Judge Landis and Colonel Jake Ruppert of Japanese baseball/' and in later years "the Ford Frick" and whichever American club-owner was current and choice. In the matter of television he is "the David SarnofF." There is almost no end to this liken tell in their ing. The biographers here ably you why, searching examination of this man in whom the juices of vision find ex pression in great achievement. When most of our crop of present major-league baseball stars were in the contemplated or nursing stage, the most versa tile Asian of them all was bringing the Big Time to his crowded and appreciative homeland. San Francisco's pride and joy, Lefty O'Doul, led the parade of major-league stars to Japan, under Shorikf s auspices. Then the immortal Lou Gehrig. By 1934 Shoriki had persuaded the likes of Babe Ruth, Jimmy Foxx, Earl Whitehall, Moe Berg, the educated catcher, and other stars to make the then semi-endless trip to Nippon. They were received with an enthusiasm that made them blink, and that has been true of subsequent emissaries. Indeed, Ruth be came such a towering figure in modern Japanese folklore that the U.S. Navy for a time considered using him as a one-man peace committee to persuade Japan to surrender during the weeks leading up to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Americans were richly paid in money and experience by FOREWORD 7 those Shoriki his blood. The pre-Pearl-Harbor trips. paid with spring after he introduced Ruth and Co. to the Japanese people to their delight, generally he was ambushed by a gang of ultra-nationalist toughs and left for dead in a Tokyo alley. The chief scar he inherited from that brutal assault runs from the crown of his nude pate down along the side of his smooth to well face into the neck. It appears to have been inflicted by a broadsword, at least. This was the possible token of the rising tide of fierce and unreasoning militarism in Japan. Shoriki fought this fanati cism the right down black path to World War II, protesting that it was not criminal to have a respect for all the peoples of the world, or even to encourage Americans to come to Japan so that they might have a better understanding o that country. It was for the latter faith that he was nearly killed. the In Far East, whenever editors speak of the great press lords of our age, they often mention Hearst and sometimes Beaverbrook. But they always mention Shoriki. His newspapers are among the great institutions of journalism anywhere. They go into more than 3,000,000 Japanese homes daily, flowing from plants in Tokyo and Osaka. When Shoriki took over his first paper, its circulation was less than 100,000 and its attitude toward the times both flabby and colorless. Shoriki's Yomiuri Shimbun sounded off with a voice clear and firm. It brought the Japanese newspaper reader a most literate person, by the way not only the news of the world, the hemisphere, the the area, nation and his city but, by dint of what publishers in the United States would consider an excruciating amount of extra work, the news of his neighborhood. Prizes rolled in as circulation zoomed. Shimbun means "newspaper/' As for Yomiuri, it is prac tically indefinable except that ancient town criers sometimes carried that title. There is nothing archaic about Yomiuri Shim- SHORIKI will send to a hun bun, however. On a big story, Shoriki up as as two dozen dred reporters into the field, bolstered by many will photographers. The army of news- and picture-gatherers and be transported by plane, helicopter, boat, jeep motorcycle. the It will get the story back by means ranging through spec trum from walkie-talkies to homing pigeons. even Shoriki is quick to sponsor worth-while projects, though his paper's subscribers may at first be bewildered. For example, competitors balked or looked vaguely out of windows when the United States State Department first searched for a Tokyo newspaper to sponsor its Atoms for Peace exhibit. Shoriki quickly accepted the challenge. It cost him better than $25,000 to build the exhibit hall, and probably much more than that in the course of explaining to A-bomb-blitzed readers that atom is not a sinister word. Shoriki's editorials s essentially, and news features lucidly explained President Eisenhower's great dream of spreading the wonders and benefits of nuclear energy. Shoriki found Japan, of all the nations of the world, perhaps most desperately in need of the peaceful products of the uranium and plutonium which killed, maimed or contaminated several hundred thousand of his countrymen in the ultimate hours of World War II. His faith was justified. More than 360,000 visited the exhibit. When Shoriki walked into the United States Embassy in Tokyo at the close of the exhibition (1955) to send his thanks to President Eisenhower through the American Ambassador, it have would been only human of him to recall a previous brush with American officialdom. Ten years earlier he was thrown into prison by U.S. Army Occupation forces. He was held with out trial for months as a twenty-one "war-crimes suspect/* then released with summarily a vague, mumbled apology. He was never formally charged. His "crime" seems to have been that, FOREWORD 9 once in that war he had hoped his country would not enter, he wished for its success. It is of typical Shoriki that he put these twenty-one months of confinement to good use. It gave him time for reflection and the to chart rest of his life, he says. Also, he picked up again the threads of his boyhood religion, Zen Buddhism, possibly the most contemplative religion of them all. Zen Buddhism has no theology. Its followers hold that the goal closest to truth " is the concept of emptiness/' Shoriki sat expressionless and motionless for as long as eight hours a day in his cell in Sugamo Prison. But he was no recluse. He knew his neighbors. When Japanese Ambassador Tani was about to leave Tokyo for Washington, Shoriki gave him a farewell party. At the proper time, and with straight face, Shoriki toasted the diplo mat. "My classmate at Sugamo University," he said fondly. Zen Buddhism's most notable exterior facet, friends of have is its Shoriki witnessed, true disciples' ability to relax without warning, and in the most all-out manner. Not long ago Shoriki was entertaining an American official at a banquet when suddenly his legs folded beneath him and Shoriki de scended fathoms deep into a trancelike repose. His guest sug gested that a doctor be called instantly, but a Shoriki aide ex plained that the boss was simply relaxing for a few minutes.