A Baseball Missionary Goes with "Hitball"A former varsity baseball player promotes a simplified baseball game created in post-war Japan in Africa, as well as in Japan again.Narashino, Japan By Yas Mamemachi
He instinctively moved his paint brushes over the canvas, while something in his aesthetic mind was stimulated by the different types of music selected by DJ-painter Ken-G. Unlike good old baseball game, hitball is played with a rubber ball (a softer and smaller baseball made of rubber used mainly by pre-schoolers) and only three bases--home, first, and third. None of the “participants” use any baseball equipment, such as gloves and bats. They hit the ball with their bare hands and catch it with their bare hands. Before Japan became a global economic powerhouse, the most common style of baseball among Japanese children was hitball, or “three-cornered baseball.” Back then, baseball equipment was too expensive for many young parents to buy for their children. There were no real baseball parks and few local baseball clubs for children. Most children, especially those in rural areas, played hitball on school grounds and in front of shrines, instead. Today no one plays hitball in Japan. Most parents have never even heard the term, since they belonged to the post-economic miracle generation. Using this relic of the past, Tomonari has been developing the culture and spirit of baseball in Africa, as well as the renaissance of hitball in Japan. This former member of a leading varsity baseball team in Japan who works for a Japanese aid organization was endowed with sense of mission for baseball when he was transferred to Ghana in 1996. During a Sunday friendship baseball match between his local office team and Team Ghana (About 30 people played baseball in Ghana, which means all the players were on the national team back then), Tomonari demonstrated his skills and talent in baseball for the Japanese and Ghanan spectators. “After the game, one Ghana gentleman approached me and asked if I could manage the Ghana national baseball team,” says Tomonari. The gentleman was Eddie Blay, a former Olympic boxer who won the bronze medal in the men’s Light Welterweight division at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He is one of Ghana’s three Olympic medalists. Over the next three years he worked as the manager of the Ghana national team while carrying out his office work, and his contribution helped the team make it to the semi-finals of the African qualifier in baseball for the 2010 Johannesburg Olympics. In the process, he boosted the total number of local baseball players to about 800. A baseball missionary was born His memory of baseball in Africa was supposed to be completed after he had the honor of throwing out the first pitch at the first children’s baseball championship in Ghana right before he returned to Japan. However, “a chat with a local boy changed everything,” he says. When he asked the boy sitting next to him what he loved the most about baseball, the boy said “batting.” “I said, yeah, hitting the ball is fun. Then, the boy said that what he means is, once you are in the box, you are in the center of the game and the chance to be there is equally given to you whether you are a good player or not; that’s why he loves baseball the most.” "The chance to be in a batter’s box teaches fairness and the democratic process. I never thought about it that way before. His words reminded me that baseball is about more than hitting, throwing, and catching a ball,” says Tomonari.
After he came back to Japan, he established a non-governmental organization to work on the delivery of used baseball equipment to Ghana. The activity accelerated in cooperation with a leading Japanese retail business conglomerate and a world-class Japanese ad agency, as well as Major League Baseball in the United States. “The more gloves that went to Ghana, the more frustrated I became,” says Tomonari. “I wondered whether or not baseball could have been played in the future in Ghana without our help.” Then, one day he asked himself why baseball had never lost its popularity in Japan, even when the country was in its redevelopment stage. It didn’t take him much time to remember playing hitball as a child in Tokyo. Tomonari and his fellow NGO members visited Ghana and three other countries--Zambia, Uganda and South Africa—to explain how hitball is easy to play and educational for local school authorities. Many local teachers were very positive about the new sport. “Soccer can be played with one ball, just like hitball. However, unlike a soccer game, which takes up a large part of a school ground, hitball can be played at any of the four corners of the ground. The rules of the game can be negotiated easily between two teams. For instance, I remember a weaker team is sometimes given advantages, such as four, not three, outs to end an inning. The important thing is that as many children as possible have the chance to be in the batter’s box, and hopefully they will feel the same as how the boy I talked to felt, “he says. Hitball renaissance in Japan In order to further promote hitball in Africa, he planned international friendly hitball exchanges between Japanese and African children. Since he realized that hitball was a thing of the past, he started working on reviving hitball by playing it with friends in the parks in Japan. Tomonari has learned that recently no parks in Japan allow anyone, even children, to play with balls. This strict environment was brought about by a recent settlement of a lawsuit in which 60 million yen was for damages (approx. US$520,000). Two primary school children were playing catch in a park and unintentionally threw the ball out of the field, hitting another child in the park and causing his death at a hospital several hours later. The family of the deceased child sued the parents of the two children who were playing catch, and the case was settled with a payment of 30 million yen (approx. US$260,000). However, Tomonari was not deterred. The soft rubber ball used in hitball is not likely to hurt a child, even in a park, and he continues to work on his mission. He started looking for partner cities and towns that will support for his hitball renaissance project and expect the project to help boost their socio-economic development.
The city of Narashino is where he had the rare chance to make a presentation of his project for the mayor. The opportunity was provided through some arrangements with his old friend, a member of the city’s Junior Chambers of Commerce, which is partially in charge of the development of the city. The mayor was very excited about the project, and soon thereafter, the project became one of the city’s policies. Tomonari was very happy to watch the hitball “milestone” event authorized by the city of Narashino. However, he tried not to get too excited because “in case of Africa, I know it is a long way from playing hitball at a corner of a school yard to playing baseball and establishing it as a national industry—maybe it takes 20 to 30 years at least.” But he says he is ready to work on it the rest of his life “because I am a Japanese missionary for baseball. |
n June 24 in Narasino, a city that’s a two-hour train ride from Tokyo, a “hitball” game was held in cooperation with the city office. What is hitball? “It is a simplified form of baseball, perhaps created in Japan,” explains Shinya Tomonari, the hitball project organizer. He is also an organizer of the Association for Friends of African Baseball, a Japanese non-governmental organization that supports the development of baseball in Africa. He calls himself a missionary for baseball.
