Wally Yonamine The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball Wally Yonamine Robert K. Fitts Foreword by Senator Daniel K. Inouye UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLN AND LONDON © 2008 by Robert K. Fitts All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fitts, Robert K., 1965– Wally Yonamine : the man who changed Japanese baseball / Robert K. Fitts ; foreword by Senator Daniel K. Inouye. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-1381-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Yonamine, Wally K., 1925– 2. Baseball players— Japan—Biography. 3. Baseball players—United States—Biography. 4. Baseball—Japan. I. Title. gv863.77.a1f584 2008 796.357092—dc22 [B] 2008006869 Set in Minion by Bob Reitz. Designed by Ray Boeche. In memory of William Hoffman, because grandpops are special And for Vera Hoffman, who always said I should become a baseball writer Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Prologue: A Gamble 1 1. “Just a Country Boy from Olowalu, Maui” 7 2. Football Star 19 3. The San Francisco 49ers 34 4. Lucky Breaks 48 5. Of Seals and Bees 63 6. A Winter of Uncertainty 73 7. Debut 84 8. The Jackie Robinson of Japan 91 9. Settling In 117 10. Lessons from Santa Maria 136 11. Gaijin Dageki Oh— Foreign Batting Champion 161 12. World Travelers 174 13. Hard Labor 187 14. Lucky Seven 211 15. Young Giants 226 16. End of an Era 248 17. Coach 259 18. Yonamine Kantoku 271 19. Sometimes Nice Guys Do Finish First 282 20. Suketto 301 21. Hall of Fame 312 Appendix 321 Bibliographic Essay 323 Index 333 Illustrations Following page 160 1. Yonamine playing for Farrington High School, 1944 2. Yonamine as a San Francisco 49ers running back, 1947 3. Yonamine as the Salt Lake City Bees’ center fi elder, 1950 4. Yonamine signs with the Yomiuri Giants, 1951 5. Yonamine as the 1952 Japan Series Top Hitter 6. Yonamine and Naito at a ryokan, 1951 or ’52 7. Yonamine’s famous hook slide, 1951 8. Yonamine in a yukata and geta 9. Yonamine marries Jane Iwashita, 1952 10. Yonamine scores with a hard slide, 1951 11. The Giant killers, Sugishita and Kaneda 12. Tetsuharu Kawakami, Yonamine’s rival 13. The Yomiuri Giants Nisei players, 1955 14. Yomiuri Giants stars, circa 1956 15. Yonamine in the mid-1950s 16. The Yonamine family, circa 1958 17. Yonamine instructs the Chunichi Dragons 18. Yonamine wins the Central League pennant, 1974 19. The Yomiuri Giants, 1978 20. Yonamine, Jane, and their grandchildren, circa 2000 Foreword In 1947 Wally Yonamine began his trailblazing professional sports ca- reer, fi rst with football, and later—and most notably—with baseball. Two years earlier, World War II had ended, but the confl ict was still fresh in our nation’s consciousness. When the war began, Americans of Japanese ancestry weren’t per- mitted to serve in our nation’s armed forces. We were classifi ed as 4-c, “enemy aliens,” and 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and placed in internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gun guard towers that were located in desolate parts of the country. It was within these camps that Japanese Americans played baseball. The American pastime was a way to ease the pain of their confi nement and a symbolic way of holding on to their Americanism. As a Nisei from Hawaii, my decision to volunteer to wear the uni- form of our nation was an easy choice; Hawaii’s Japanese Americans were not subjected to the sort of massive roundup that occurred on the West Coast. To this day, I still wonder if I would have been so eager to serve if my parents and family members had been unjustly incarcerated. When the war ended, Japanese Americans had proved, with much pride and sacrifi ce, that their courage and patriotism were beyond question and that Americanism was not a matter of skin color or eth- nicity. But while we helped to win a war abroad, we soon discovered that much social progress still needed to be accomplished at home. In 1947, when I entered politics to make Hawaii a more equitable society, Wally Yonamine became the fi rst player of Japanese descent x foreword to make the roster of an American professional football team, the San Francisco 49ers. He immediately became a source of pride and a symbol of what Americans of Japanese ancestry could accomplish in mainstream American society. His achievement, coming so soon in the postwar years, gave much hope to the Japanese American com- munity and opened the door to greater acceptance by all Americans. Later, Wally would become a sports pioneer on the international stage. A wrist injury led him to abandon football and turn to baseball. In 1951 he became the fi rst American to play in the Japanese major leagues when he joined the Yomiuri Giants, a franchise as storied as the New York Yankees. His arrival in postwar Japan came at a time when Japanese nationalists were still seething at the United States. For them, Yonamine symbolized their motherland’s defeat, and he was branded a “traitor” because he was a Japanese American whose fore- fathers had dared to seek their future outside of Japan. The resentment even simmered among some of Wally’s team- mates. Moreover, Wally’s aggressive style of play unsettled many who were accustomed to Japan’s gentlemanly approach to baseball that in- cluded walking to fi rst base on a base on balls and not barreling into second base to break up a double play. But gradually, over the course of what would become a Hall of Fame career, Wally Yonamine won over fans and teammates, just as Jackie Robinson did in breaking the color barrier on America’s base- ball diamonds. In Wally Yonamine’s case, he opened the door of Jap- anese baseball to hundreds of non-Japanese and served as a bridge between Japan and the United States, strengthening friendship and understanding between the two countries. The acceptance and good- will fostered by Wally helped to heal the wounds between two war- time foes who today are longtime allies. On the playing fi eld, Wally Yonamine was a fi erce competitor. Off the fi eld, he displayed humility, grace under pressure, and a deep un- derstanding of the social advancements that could be achieved by his accomplishments on the fi eld and by how he conducted himself in all aspects of his life. foreword xi After his stellar career as a player and manager in Japanese baseball ended, Wally returned to his native Hawaii. He established a founda- tion that bears his name. It funds scholarships for student-athletes heading off to college and sponsors the tournament that crowns Ha- waii’s best high school baseball team. Even in retirement, Wally has found a way to inspire and positively infl uence younger generations. “I hit a home run with my life,” Wally Yonamine says. Indeed, he has. Not only for himself, but for all of us. Aloha, Daniel K. Inouye United States Senator Washington dc March 27, 2007 Acknowledgments I like to joke that Wally Yonamine is the reason I don’t have a job. I was a professional archaeologist specializing in nineteenth-century New York City when I fi rst met Wally in 2003. I had planned to write only a short article when I sat down to interview him at his pearl shop in Tokyo. After listening to his riveting tales of Japanese base- ball, a new idea came to me. With Wally’s help, I interviewed nearly thirty other former players and edited them into narratives similar to Lawrence Ritter’s Glory of Their Times. This became my fi rst book, Remembering Japanese Baseball: An Oral History of the Game. The day after completing the manuscript, I called Wally in Hawaii and asked if I could write his biography. The project took nearly three years, but it was never a chore. One of the great things about writing the biography of a truly won- derful person is the many people who offer to help. When I asked for an interview or a favor, the response was invariably “Anything for Wally.” Accordingly, I have many people to thank. I greatly appreciate the generosity of the following people for con- senting to be interviewed: Motoh Ando, Arthur Arnold, Don Blas- ingame, Mac Flores, Joel Franks, Garland Gregory, Carlton Hanta, Cappy Harada, Tatsuro Hirooka, Satoro Hosoda, Tadashi Iwamoto, Dick Kashiwaeda, Walter Kirumitsu, Ryozo Kotoh, Gene Martin, Glenn Mickens, Andy Miyamoto, Bill Mizuno, Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Futoshi Nakanishi, Hirofumi Naito, Don Newcombe, Steve Ontive- ros, Amy Yonamine Roper, Bart Shirley, Don Sinn, John Sipin, Lou Spadia, Shigeru Sugishita, Sumi Hosoda Tanabe, Robert Whiting, Clyde Wright, Isamu Uchio, Larry Yaji, Wallis Yonamine Yamamoto, xiv acknowledgments Akira Yonamine, Dean Yonamine, Jane Iwashita Yonamine, and Paul Yonamine. Edited versions of many of these interviews appear in Remember- ing Japanese Baseball, but with an important difference. Remembering Japanese Baseball is an oral history—I allowed the players to tell their stories as they remembered them, and I corrected only obvious fac- tual errors such as dates and statistics. For this biography, I checked the veracity of these stories and made changes as necessary. Readers who notice discrepancies between the two books should rely on the versions contained in this volume. Many people offered helpful suggestions and pointed me to un- tapped sources. I would like to especially thank David Block, Philip Block, Damon Byrd, Gary Engel, Amy Essington, Lloyd Feinberg, Beverly and Donald Fitts, Joel Franks, Gary Garland, Ted Gilman, Wayne Graczyk, Ruth Hirota, William Kelly, Walter Kirumitsu, Rob- ert Klevens, Marty Kuehnert, Bob Lapides, Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Yoichi Nagata, Ralph Pearce, Rob Smaal, Mark Watkins and Brenda Silver- man, Myrna Watkins, Michael Westbay, and Demetrius Wilson.