While Japanese baseball has seen a rise in public awareness over the past 15 years or so, mainly thanks to the influx of Japanese players in Major League Baseball,  its storied history goes back many more years and is much richer than most of us are aware. Just like the American game, it is filled with people who transcend the role of player or coach and become figures instrumental to the game’s development and success.

Such is the case for Wally Yonamine, a Hawaiian-born American who became not just a perennial batting champion contender and All-Star, but a coach, manager, and ambassador of the Japanese game and champion of baseball in both his native Hawaii and his adopted Tokyo.

Author Robert K. Fitts, who sat in the stands in 1994 when Yonamine was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, takes the reader on a 368-page biography of the life of Yonamine, from his early days in the sugarcane fields of Hawaii, to a budding professional football career cut short by injury, to an attempt to break into the Pacific Coast League that ended up routing him to Japan and the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants.

Yonamine, often referred to as the “Jackie Robinson of Japanese baseball” due to the prejudice and abuse he took from Japanese fans and players, originally thought of a life playing professional football. Having excelled in high school, he got a shot with the upstart San Francisco 49ers, but nerves got the best of him on the field and limited his playing time before a broken hand sustained while playing summer-league baseball led to his release the following season.

After returning to Hawaii, Yonamine kept playing both football and baseball in various leagues. While on a tour of the East Coast with the football playing Hawaiian Warriors, Yonamine suffered a separated shoulder, an injury that ultimately would cost him a shot at the Major Leagues.

However, all was not lost – while he wasn’t able to make it with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, a successful minor league season in Salt Lake City caught the attention of manager Lefty O’Doul, another pioneer in Japanese baseball. O’Doul thought Yonamine would have a shot by heading to Tokyo, and soon enough the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants came calling with a contract.

Yonamine brought a competitive nature to the Japanese game that hadn’t been seen before, and one that would shape the game for years to come. He challeneged certain cultural norms, and shook up the world of Japanese professional baseball to the point where executives first limited the numbers of Nisei, or American-born Japanese players, that a team could have, to wanting to ban their presence outright.

Wally Yonamine

His presence continued to be felt after he retired from playing, as he moved into coaching and managing, including leading the Chunichi Dragons to a Central League pennant before losing to the Lotte Orions in the Japan Series in 1974. Yonamine retired from Japanese baseball in 1988 after 38 years as a player, coach and manager.

It was 2003 when Fitts first met Yonamine, having interviewed him in the Tokyo pearl shop that he owns with his wife, Jane. It was during that interview that Fitts came up with the idea for Remembering Japanese Baseball, a book written in the same vein as Lawrence Ritter’s Glory of Their Times. That book went on to win the 2005 Sporting News-SABR Award for best baseball research.

After completion of the first book, Fitts asked permission to write a biography of Yonamine, resulting in this biography.

Fitts does a remarkable job assembling first-hand interviews, newspaper articles, and creates a book in which the life of Wally Yonamine almost jumps off the page.

There is an amazing amount of detail, such as play-by-play accounts of games, so much so that one could argue it too much for the average reader. However, it does provide a tremendous amount of context and history to the book, one that readers with an interest in Japanese baseball history will surely appreciate as it brings them right into the games and big moments of Yonamine’s career.

What struck me most after reading the book was Fitts’s ability to highlight the cultural aspects of the game and indirectly challenge my notions about the American way of baseball through his profile of the Japanese game. Yonamine was frequently challenged by the traditions and practices of the Japanese game both as player and coach, from having to miss the births of his children to having to wait to be embraced as a successful player due to his Nisei status. It was his ability to mingle his American upbringing with the Japanese culture that led to him becoming such an important figure in baseball.

After reading the book, when one looks at how the American game is structured, particularly with players coming from around the world and becoming stars in the American game, the differences both large and small become more apparent.

For instance, as Fitts explains at the start of Chapter 20, the Japanese often refer to foreign players as gaijin suketto, or “foreign helpers,” and that their role is explicit – to help their Japanese teammates, while not being held in high esteem by fans, the media, or the league. Yonamine went from being an unwelcomed foreigner, to embraced star, back to gaijin suketto upon entering the coaching ranks.

In the American game, players from not only Japan but all over Asia and Latin America have risen to tremendous prominence, and have not only dominated on the field but have risen to the coaching, management and executive ranks. Certainly no one would say that Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka or Albert Pujols would merit gaijin suketto status in the Major Leagues.

If you are a fan of works such as Robert Whiting’s The Chrysanthemum and the Bat and You Gotta Have Wa, I think you’ll get a tremendous amount out of reading Wally Yonamine. It is an expertly researched and crafted book that chronicles the life of Yonamine and shows how his influence shaped Japanese baseball and helped get it where it is today.

This is a must-read and a must-add to the bookshelf for those with an interest in the history of Japanese baseball, and a worthwhile read for any baseball fan looking to broaden their knowledge of this great game that has spread around the globe.