Free The Meaning of Ichiro by Robert Whiting

small-town and small-minded about Seattle’s past—which
     was not inconsiderable. The events portrayed in the bestselling novel
Snow Falling on Cedars,
a story of a murder set in Puget Sound in the 1950s amidst lingering memories of World War II and internment camps, were
     not altogether fictional—involving as they did racial prejudice, forbidden love and a falsely accused Japanese-American fisherman,
     a lifelong resident of the area.
    Against that background, a kind of historical watershed occurred in 1991 when then-Mariners owner Jeff Smulyan was on the
     brink of moving his team, a perennial loser with depressed attendance, to Florida. In an effort to keep the club where it
     was, a group of Seattle politicians and business leaders led by Slade Gorton prevailed upon Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi,
     whose firm’s American branch was based in Redmond, Washington, to buy a majority share in the franchise. Yamauchi, an eccentric
     Kyoto aristocrat whose passion for the board game
go
far exceeded his minimal interest in
bsubru
and who had never been to Seattle to see the Mariners play, agreed to do it as a “gift” to the community.
    However, the idea of a foreigner, or rather a
Japanese
foreigner, buying an MLB team was not warmly received in the country at large, thanks to the growing economic friction with
     Japan. At that particular time, Japan was at the height of its economic power. Its firms were buying up U.S. landmarks like
     Rockefeller Center, Pebble Beach golf course and Columbia Pictures. The U.S. trade deficit with that country was so huge,
     courtesy of burgeoning Japanese automobile and electronics exports, that many Americans had begun complaining of a “Japanese
     invasion” and the threat it posed to the future of the faltering U.S. economy. It was a time when the rhetoric flew hot and
     heavy.
    In January 1992, for example, in response to U.S. Japan-bashers, the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament in Japan had
     termed the Americans “lazy and illiterate,” while Shintaro Ishihara, a popular novelist turned politician, claimed that Japanese
     could always make a better product than the Americans. That latter remark prompted U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings to retort
     undiplomatically that Ishihara was forgetting who made the atomic bomb. In a visit to a weapons factory in South Carolina,
     Hollings suggested employees “draw a mushroom cloud and put underneath it: Made in America by lazy and illiterate workers
     and tested in Japan.” In a highly charged incident some months earlier, a group of U.S. lawmakers had been photographed smashing
     a Japanese car with a sledgehammer.
    Against this background, Philadelphia Phillies owner Bill Giles declared his opposition to the sale of the Mariners to Nintendo.
     “It’s a patriotic issue for me,” he sniffed, while Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent announced it was not in
     the best interests of Major League Baseball to have foreign ownership by any other than a Canadian organization. A poll conducted
     at the time revealed that 70 percent of Americans queried were opposed to having Japanese own a major league franchise.
    However, Seattleites, for their part, were beginning to view their region as part of the Pacific Rim. Not only did Asians
     constitute by far the largest minority in the Puget Sound area, the territory was dependent on the exports of Microsoft and
     other companies to Japan and the rest of the Asian economies. Many jobs also depended on the very Japanese imports that were
     taken to task in the country at large. There were enough folks who appreciated Nintendo’s record as an upstanding member of
     the corporate community in the Pacific Northwest to successfully push the idea of Japanese ownership through, although it
     did not survive completely intact.
    Although the major leagues had eventually agreed to Yamauchi’s acquiring 60 percent of the Seattle franchise, they did so
     only on the humiliating