Baseball Helps Japanese Town Heal
A 15-year-old local baseball star who aspires to play in college and one day turn pro, Rinnosuke spends his free time training—lifting weights and trying to perfect his swing—and grappling with the biggest decision of his life so far: to stay here or move to a bigger city inland to play high school baseball. It is a choice he will have to make without the category_idance of the person whose counsel he wants the most. “My dad always used to give me advice on baseball and what to do next. I don’t have that anymore,” he said. “I think that’s what I miss the most.” Rinnosuke’s father, Toshiyuki Yoshida, was dragged off by the swirling black waters that ravaged this coastal community on March 11. His body still hasn’t been found. Rinnosuke and his family now are contemplating a future far different from the one they once imagined.
Almost 20,000 people across Japan were lost within minutes to the massive earthquake and tsunami it spawned. In Rikuzentakata, nearly 2,000 of this city’s 23,000 residents were torn away by the rampaging ocean, including more than 40 volunteer firefighters and a host of city workers, politicians and business leaders. The waves took people like Mr. Yoshida, a civic-minded Rikuzentakata native who worked at a small-business association and was actively involved in the community. He belonged to the local fire brigade. And he was passionate about baseball, the American sport transplanted to Japan in the late 1800s. For 14 years, he coached the team at the middle school he had attended as a boy and where his younger son is still a student. Seven months after the disaster, survivors are still struggling to mend the holes ripped in Rikuzentakata’s social fabric by so many deaths. They are searching for replacements to run the city’s companies, operate its government, save its cultural institutions and nurture its sports teams. In many ways, the human rebuilding is a tougher challenge than the physical reconstruction of Rikuzentakata and other cities like it on Japan’s northeast coast. “With enough money, infrastructure can be replaced. For people, of course, it’s not that easy,” said Futoshi Toba, Rikuzentakata’s mayor, whose wife, Kumi, is among the dead. “The community needs to work together so the thoughts and ideas of the people who passed away can be carried on.”
As U.S. baseball fans focus on next week’s World Series, the sport is playing a critical role in sustaining the family Mr. Yoshida left behind in Japan: his wife, 41-year-old Kazue, and two sons Rinnosuke and Shinnosuke,16. Both boys are obsessed with baseball. Rinnosuke, a pitcher at Yonesaki Middle School, played this fall on a regional all-star team. Shinnosuke is a catcher and vice captain at Takata High School. Yuta Niinuma, one of Mr. Yoshida’s former protégés and a pitcher, is an assistant coach at the middle school and has become a mentor to the boys, especially Rinnosuke. He works with them in between his shifts at a local poultry processing plant. “It’s a way to pay back what his father taught me,” said Mr. Niinuma. High school baseball is a big deal in Japan. It commands the sort of attention and fan loyalty that high school football does in Texas and some other parts of the U.S. Glossy magazines in Japan are devoted to following school-boy ball players. The best are recruited straight to the major leagues. The sport has long been important in Rikuzentakata. One of the city’s proudest moments was when Takata High went all the way to the national championship tournament outside Osaka in the summer of 1988—Ms. Yoshida’s senior year. Hundreds of fans turn up for the team’s big games.
“I’ve been playing baseball since before I can remember,” said Shinnosuke. His father, who played outfield in high school and bragged about his base-stealing prowess, dressed his sons up in baseball uniforms for photos when they were still toddlers. Shinnosuke joined his elementary school team when he was 9 and Rinnosuke became determined to play like his big brother. His parents bought Rinnosuke his first glove for his 7th birthday. Mr. Yoshida, who taught his boys the basics of batting and fielding in the backyard, was a stickler for form. When Rinnosuke developed a habit of throwing side arm, his father had him sit straight-backed in a chair for hours, gripping a baseball in his right hand and lifting his arm, elbow first, so that he could learn the proper motion and avoid injury later. When they weren’t practicing with the team, father and son would head over to the middle school diamond. Mr. Yoshida would squat behind home plate, catching pitch after pitch and giving his son pointers. Rinnosuke would often throw 90 pitches in a session. “When I would get tense, he would tell me to relax more,” Rinnosuke said. As an assistant coach, Mr. Yoshida was known for his keen sense of humor and motivational comments. The head coach, Seiji Yoshida (no relation), said Mr. Yoshida played “good cop” to his “bad cop.”
When the tsunami hit that Friday afternoon, Mr. Yoshida, 43 years old at the time, was downtown for work and raced to help people climb to safety on the roof of City Hall. Witnesses later said that after category_iding some older residents up the stairs, he headed back down to rescue stragglers. He hasn’t been seen since. In the chaos after the disaster, Mrs. Yoshida, a city employee, was drafted for emergency relief work. The boys waited for their father to come home, or report for duty at the fire station. When he didn’t turn up after three days, they went with their grandfather to search for him. They made the rounds of all the evacuation centers but Mr. Yoshida’s name was nowhere to be found. With dread, the three went to the gymnasium at Rinnosuke’s school, which had been turned into a makeshift morgue. The boys were told to wait outside. Mr. Yoshida’s father went in alone to look at the mud-covered corpses laid out on the floor. His son wasn’t among them. “Because my dad is the kind of person he is, when he didn’t come home, I was already guessing what happened,” said Shinnosuke. “My grandparents took it really hard.” The family didn’t hold a funeral. As the months went by, they tried to return to the rhythms of daily life. At first, the boys said, it wasn’t clear whether they would play baseball again. Their town lay in ruins and their father was gone. Lying in bed at night after the disaster, Rinnosuke would sometimes sob, asking his grandparents who would teach him baseball now.