Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

The first time it happened was shortly after we were married. Satoko and I had moved from Tokyo to Ithaca, New York, where I enrolled in the graduate program in Asian Literature. On her first visit to an American dentist, the doctor looked at Satoko’s teeth and ordered a whole range of procedures. That was fine, but then several years later, when we went back to Japan so I could conduct my dissertation research, she went to a Japanese dentist. That doctor took one look at her American dental work and ordered it all ripped out and replaced: it was substandard, he said, and used materials that were unsafe.

A year or two later we were back in the States and the same thing happened again. The American dentist pulled out all of the work done by his Japanese counterpart and replaced it. We realized, of course, that with dentistry, we needed to choose sides. We could go with American dentists, or we could go with Japanese dentists, but we couldn’t do both, unless we wanted to submit repeatedly to unnecessary and expensive dental work.

While we were in Japan that second time, we had a tuberculosis scare. Someone with whom we had indirect contact was suspected of having TB. It ultimately turned out to be a false alarm (the person in fact didn’t have the disease), but before we learned that, we followed Japanese public health protocol and received BCG vaccinations. In countries that have had widespread tuberculosis epidemics, BCG shots are used because they provide a certain degree of protection against TB. In countries without widespread TB, they don’t use BCG shots, because they are not 100% effective and because they make it hard to distinguish who has the disease. Recipients of the BCG shot will show a positive result when given a Mantoux test, even if they haven’t been exposed to TB.

All was well and fine until we returned to the U.S. and Walter enrolled in kindergarten. The Los Angeles public school system required a Mantoux test for his medical forms, and when he came back positive because of the BCG shot, they required that he take a year-long course of heavy duty antibiotics, even though his chest X-ray was clean and even after we explained about the BCG shot had received a couple of years earlier.

We again learned our lesson: you don’t want to get caught between conflicting public health systems. It seems now that the increasing number of Japanese pitchers coming to play professionally in the U.S. are learning the same hard lesson. According to this fascinating article at NPB Tracker, the different regimes for maintaining the health of a pitcher’s arm are increasingly coming into conflict.

In Japan, the idea is to build up strength. If a pitcher throws 200 pitches everyday during spring training, he will easily be able to handle 100 or more during each game. If he develops a sore arm mid-season, well, the answer is to work his way through it. At the annual Koshien high school tournament, for example, it’s not too uncommon to see a star pitcher throw 200 or even 300 pitches over the course of a couple days.

In the U.S., on the other hand, pitches are treated like a precious finite resource, to be hoarded up and doled out as sparingly as possible. 100 pitches a game is increasingly the standard limit, and any injury to the arm is treated with rest. Any manager who allows a young pitcher, in particular, to go much beyond a hundred pitches in a game can expect to be immediately subjected to charges of putting the team’s future at risk.

Japanese pitchers, accustomed to the more-is-better system of arm maintenance in Japan, come to the U.S. and find themselves confronted with a completely foreign system. Not surprisingly, given their training back home, they feel like they are not being allowed to take the proper steps to steel their pitching arms. This can lead to misunderstandings and clashes.

I think the truth is that one system works better for some players, the other system for others. What I’ve learned from personal experience, though, is that the worse possible situation is to try to satisfy the requirements of both systems. Chose one side and stick with it.