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Media Monster The Yankee with the most reporters and paparazzi on his tail isn't Derek Jeter. It's 29-year-old rookie Hideki Matsui, who's bigger in Japan than GodzillaPosted: Thursday July 10, 2003 4:34 PMBy Charles P. Pierce Issue date: July 14, 2003
There are some 80 of them here, an odd lot of reporters, camera people and technical personnel, all from Japan and all gathered outside the visitors' dugout at Fenway Park. They are outfitted in the finest threads that globalized MallAmerica has to offer. Many of them are desperate for a smoke, and all of them are here to chronicle the life and times of a single man, albeit one whose face appears on teacups all over Japan. Above them, long boom microphones give the pack the look of one giant bedenimed insect.
And they do. All of them. When the Yankees come out and Hideki Matsui joins his teammates in their stretching exercises on the grass, entangling himself in one of those long rubber bands that are now popular with athletic trainers (but that look for all the world like toys out of the specialty closets at the Mustang Ranch), the media blob billows outward to record every loosening hammy. But none of them ever crosses Hirooka's line -- which is something that cannot be said of any other passel of reporters covering any other person at any other place in the country. "I am very busy handling Japanese media," says Hirooka, who covered Matsui as he became a national icon with the Yomiuri Giants. "I have to make a good relationship between the [New York] beat writers and the Japanese media. Hideki was worried about that -- if he comes to the New York Yankees, then lots of Japanese media will come to the United States, and Hideki doesn't want [that] to bother his teammates or the Yankee people. He doesn't want that to bother the beat people." It already has been an eventful day. Pedro Martinez has been scratched as the Boston starter with an injured back muscle. This, of course, affects not only the Red Sox but also the Yankees, the rest of the East Division and the entire American League. Here, though, inside the Matsuicentric bubble, it means only that tonight Matsui will not be facing the great Martinez for the first time as a major leaguer. In Japan, 13 hours ahead of Boston, several million readers are just now waking up and reading several hundred stories about a confrontation that will not take place. None of the reporters is as disappointed as Yasushi Washida, a magazine writer who has flown in this morning specifically to write a long story about the Matsui-Martinez moment. Instead he will write about Matsui and Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, who first played against each other in a high school all-star game in California. "I have come right here from the hotel," Washida says. "I will go home tomorrow." Nobody -- not Mickey Mantle on his worst, whiskeyed morning -- ever has come to the ballpark groggier than Washida.
"There probably are too many of us," says Yusuke Kamata, a TV producer with Fujisankei Communications who's covered the major leagues for four years. "But he has never complained. When he is 0 for 5, when he makes two errors, when he hits a home run, he talks to us. That makes everyone's job so much easier. The most surprising thing is that he talks to us every day." Their internal journalistic clocks are on Japanese time. Their deadlines make game stories irrelevant almost before they're written, and anyway the only story is Matsui. In Japan everything that happens to the Yankees -- nay, everything that happens in the major leagues -- is reported in the context of how it affects Matsui. When Yankees manager Joe Torre, improvising against a spate of injuries, moved Matsui up to the second spot in the batting order for a game in late May, the story was not that Bernie Williams had a bad knee or Derek Jeter a balky hamstring but that Matsui had never batted second in his ... entire ... career. After every game they set themselves up in a place apart from their American colleagues -- in an unused locker room in Yankee Stadium, outside the clubhouse in a damp brick corridor here in Fenway -- and Matsui speaks to them for 10 minutes. (He talks with the U.S. media through an interpreter, a young Arizona grad named Roger Kahlon, who was born and raised in Tokyo.) Then he goes back into the clubhouse, and his attendant press corps seems to disappear right into the walls. "They don't come into the clubhouse," says Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay. "They might come in one at a time, but they don't flood the place. They've made so little difference, except on the field before a game, when you see how many they are." "Most of us find different things to write about," says Ric Kitaka of the Kyodo news service. "Some of us write about his fielding. Some of us write about his baserunning." For his part Matsui manages to pull off the difficult emotional parlay of being both amiable and infrangible. "I am used to this fuss," he says. "I have lived with it since I was in high school and 55,000 people came to see the championship game." So maybe this is the way to solve the chronic problems that baseball players have with the media and vice versa: simply assign each player his own traveling press corps, a group of journalists whose only job it is to record his daily doings and to view all of baseball through the prism of one man's journey through the season. The player gets familiar with his writers, and the writers get invested in his career. If the player's average dips below .250, the reporters find out how far that New York expense account will travel in Triple A. It's not like there aren't precedents in American journalism. It's the way we cover presidential campaigns: a couple of hundred reporters, all coughing and sneezing and cursing and stumbling as they walk backward through some godforsaken New Hampshire mill town in the middle of the winter, all of them chronicling the larger world through the fortunes of one man. Of course Alfonso Soriano would have more people following him around than would Juan Rivera. And why not? How many reporters do you think are assigned right now to, say, Dennis Kucinich? Then again most of those other players are American. That could be a problem. Back in the Edo period, a slice of Japanese history that lasted from 1603 until the Americans barged in and the Meiji were restored in 1867, the nation turned radically inward. The people devoured what were called kawara-ban, one-page news sheets peddled on the street by hawkers known as yomi-uri. The kawara-ban had a distinctly tabloid flavor. They covered earthquakes and fires and tidal waves. Later they came to report on garish murders, lovers' suicides and the births of triplets, and they so luxuriated in the lurid that the feudal authorities of the time regularly shut them down. They also covered celebrities, especially actors in the Kabuki. In an essay published in a volume called The Electric Geisha, author Takao Yoshii argues that the kawara-ban were the first form of Japanese mass media. "Publications designed chiefly to entertain ... played a major role in creating the information society," writes Yoshii. "The same can be said of the information society today.... Little of the information given to us these days is urgent, and the amount of material directly related to life-and-death issues is relatively small." The descendants of the kawara-ban live on in Japan's modern mass media -- in which mass has a different meaning from the one it has even in the media-saturated U.S. Yomiuri Shimbun is the world's largest newspaper, with a daily circulation of more than 14 million. Japan has four other national newspapers, with circulations ranging from more than 12 million to two million; two evening tabloids with circulations exceeding 1.5 million and a third with more than 400,000 readers; and seven daily national sports newspapers with circulations above 100,000. There are five major TV networks and one national public television network, as well as a clutch of sports magazines with names like Number and Sports Yeah! In February the magazine Sports Nippon came close to channeling the spirit of the kawara-ban when, covering the breaking news of Matsui's root canal, it ran a picture of his gaping mouth on its front page. By then Matsui was one of the biggest stars Japanese baseball had ever seen. His celebrity began when he was in high school in Kanazawa, a town in the Ishikawa Prefecture of central Japan, and exploded LeBronically when he signed right out of school with the Yomiuri Giants. In the 10 seasons he played with the Giants, Matsui was an All-Star nine times and won three MVP awards. He hit 332 home runs. Through it all, he maintained an ease and a reserve that contrasted vividly with the media frenzy that attended his career. "It isn't too painful, really," he says with a nod and a smile, "the media." It can't be easy to keep a grip on your composure, however, when a former prime minister volunteers to be the president of your fan club. Matsui was not merely the most popular baseball player in Japan but also the most popular person in the country. He popped up on the teacups. He hit one home run that was so long that the mayor of his hometown called it an act of God. His preference in anime action series (Gundam) was analyzed, as was his taste in pornography. (One international magazine reported that Matsui has an extensive private library of adult videos.) And this was all before he decided to come here and sign aboard that ongoing festival of celebrity that once employed Babe Ruth and Reggie Jackson, that is owned by the closest thing that American plutocracy has to a carny act and that hired Billy Martin five times. "We're always at DefCon 4," says Rick Cerrone, the Yankees' director of publicity. "It doesn't take much to get us to DefCon 5." As soon as Matsui's three-year, $21 million deal was confirmed last December, Japanese reporters and photographers began staking out hotels and prowling Yankee Stadium. When the team finally introduced its acquisition at a press conference in a Midtown ballroom in January, more than 400 media types attended what was reckoned to be one of the biggest press conferences in the history of sports. Most of the Japanese reporters moved to the U.S. during spring training, first setting up shop in Tampa. Most of them left their families back in Japan. Their various outlets are now paying Manhattan prices to maintain them here. There was a brief uproar at the beginning of the season when the Japanese media discovered that Yankee Stadium is a no-smoking facility -- they are truly a bunch of chimneys -- and several of them found themselves briefly exiled down the block in the general direction of the Bronx County Courthouse. They have developed their own social circle. After home games many of them adjourn to Japanese bars and social clubs in Manhattan, especially Usagi, a surreptitious little club on the East Side that caters to them the way Toots Shor's old place catered to sportswriters back in the days when Elston Howard was as close as a Yankee ever got to being exotic. And they find themselves interviewed as much about Matsui by American reporters as Matsui is interviewed about himself. Their collective identity blurs with his. Gaku Tashiro of the newspaper Sankei Sports is living in a $3,000-per-month flat in Manhattan. "This is my one dream since I was a kid, to cover the major leagues," he says. "Usually I was watching the Yankees and Dodgers in the World Series in the 1970s, when I was young." Tashiro writes a daily column called "Yankee Museum." This is his second time in the U.S. with a Japanese baseball star; he first came here two years ago to cover the arrival of Ichiro Suzuki in Seattle. Ichiro was the prototype for this kind of coverage, and he came to dislike it so thoroughly that his relationship with the Japanese media permanently soured in 2001. When he first came to Seattle and many of his games were televised live in Japan, his runaway success made Ichiro more of a celebrity back home than he'd ever been before. The demand for information about him exploded to nearly comic proportions; one magazine famously offered a seven-figure bounty for nude shots of Ichiro, who eventually cut off several Japanese reporters, causing a general uproar among the rest of them. Unlike Matsui, whose disposition in his interviews is so level that you could bowl on it, Ichiro became prickly and (worse) inaccessible. A split developed between the Eastern mystic image that Ichiro cultivates with the Western media and his fractious relationship with reporters from his own country. In contrast Matsui has courted the Japanese press shrewdly, taking the whole lot of them out to dinner in spring training and establishing ground rules to which he adheres every bit as firmly as any reporter does. Now, politely, the Japanese reporters following Matsui talk about Ichiro in the same way that their American counterparts talk about Barry Bonds. Because Ichiro became a superstar in America, they say, he acts like an American superstar. "When I tell people about Matsui," says Yusuke Kamata, "what I say is that he is very Japanese--calm, you know, very patient. Whatever happens in the game, he never changes." Perhaps because of the Japanese media's fondness for him and because of his constant accessibility, Matsui has been spared not only the most tabloidish excesses -- nobody is yet soliciting photos of Matsui in the shower -- but also harsh criticism for his slow start at the plate. After his grand slam in his first game at Yankee Stadium, which was televised live in Tokyo at 2 a.m., there was more than a little banjo music to his game. He seemed slow to adjust to big league heat, and through May he had hit more ground balls (118) than any other major league player. This was not what either Japan or George Steinbrenner, to name two very large, loud audiences, expected of him. In Boston, for example, Matsui made a fine play in the outfield, bending low on the run to spear a fading liner, rolling forward, popping up and making a strong throw in to hold a runner. On the night that Bernie Williams's knee moved Matsui up in the batting order, a U.S. reporter complimented him on the catch. "He is not here to make catches," the frazzled Isao Hirooka said as he rounded up the Japanese press and moved the congregation down the hallway beneath the stadium. "He is here to hit home runs, you know?" Indeed before Matsui got hot at the beginning of June, his lack of power became so notable that Fuji Evening News, a Japanese tabloid, ran a photo of Matsui, Soriano and Steinbrenner with Japanese words coming out of Steinbrenner's mouth saying, "Matsui's lack of power is disappointing. This is not the man we signed a contract for" -- which seems rather a paraphrase, if not an entirely implausible one. It's unlikely that Japanese reporters will turn on Matsui the way that some of them have on Ichiro, who did not come to the U.S. as the same kind of national icon. In a very real sense they are embedded reporters in Matsui's life. They have a stake in his career, and their lives here depend so completely on this one player that a self-contained world has developed, with its own customs and rules. Look at all of baseball -- and all of America -- through the ups and downs of one player, and all the others fade into the background. "Let's say Matsui gets sent down to Columbus," says Yoshi Tanaka of TV Tokyo America. "If he goes, I go too. I don't mind. Last summer I went and saw the Columbus Clippers and the Norfolk Tides. And do you know the Toledo Mud Hens? I like that team. I like that stadium, too." Tanaka is a round, friendly young man with a wispy beard. In exchange for his daily coverage of all things Matsui, he gets the rest of baseball -- and through it the rest of North America. His eyes are still wide. "That first trip," he says. "We go from Toronto to Tampa, and I don't know what to pack, so I just bring everything. America is a big place, you know?" On his visit to Fenway he walks all the way out to rightfield to sit in the red seat that commemorates a particularly monstrous Ted Williams home run. "This is a good stadium, too," he says. "I like the old ones." Tanaka and his colleagues will not see Columbus. Even before Matsui's June breakthrough, Steinbrenner was unlikely to set two continents at a roiling boil by shipping out as expensive an experiment as Matsui. More important, Matsui's unflaggingly even temperament bought him enough time to ride out what now looks like little more than an adjustment period in April and May. "It will take some time," he says, his voice never rising and his expression open and occasionally quizzical. "The pitching here is very good, and it will take me a little while to get used to it." And then he's gone, back into the clubhouse, while the Japanese reporters stand there murmuring, and then they're gone too, and all that's left is the sound of the clubhouse boom box filtering through the door -- Latin music, maybe, and then reggae. Some song from a different place, anyway. Later down on the East Side of Manhattan another door opens just a slice. An American reporter has descended the stairs and knocked at the sign of the golden rabbit on the discreet mahogany door of Usagi. (To find the place, the American has had to ask directions from a Korean grocer and a cabdriver from Ukraine.) A very large Japanese gent in a tuxedo bends himself through the door. He is asked if any Japanese journalists are there tonight, the ones who have come to America to live the Matsui life. "No Matsui tonight," he says, closing the door and leaving the American out on 49th Street in the rain, with a look on his face like he just missed the last train to somewhere special. He's good, though, this doorman. He knows kawara-ban when he sees it. Issue date: July 14, 2003
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