An Outfielder For Hiroshima

White are the trodden paths
Of baseball,
Among the tall grasses
Of summer.

Far, and beyond
The summer grass,
The baseball players are seen.

—Shiki Masaoka (1867-1902), translated from the Japanese by Nobuyuki Yuasa, University of Hiroshima

The most portentous resident of the city of Hiroshima (pop.: 400,000) is the 28-year-old Californian who plays in the outfield for its major league Carp. The city's fans, who in 1958 will pass in record numbers beyond the ticket takers at the brand-new Hiroshima Citizens' Ball Place, call him "Hweebah," which is the way the Japanese deliver "Fibber," which in turn was his father's version of "February," the month of Fibber's birth, in Fresno.

If nobody has ever called him by his proper name, Satoshi, which means, in Japanese, wisdom, and which much more accurately defines his character than Fibber, he has not complained. Indeed, although he has borne through life his full share of small disappointments, and—once at least—a measure of pure injustice, he has confounded fate as he confounded the rivals of his football days at Fresno State College, most of whom outweighed him by 50 pounds. "Nobody," he recollects, "ever hit me real solid."

Of Fibber Hirayama's spiritual past, however, the citizenry of Hiroshima hears nothing. His memory is notably weak in the matter of his own considerable achievement. To his father in Lindsay, California—Tokuzo, called George—and to his wife Jean in Hiroshima he has delegated the task of pasting up his scrapbooks, while Fibber himself, in the language of Carp Manager Katsumi Shiraishi, "plays baseball like baseball."

Therefore, the city's copious affection for him can only be ascribed to its conscious appreciation of his present talents. For three years he has been the Carp's gracefully aggressive right fielder, lead-off batter and spiritual focus, and in this year of promise he continues to be its vital center, as the Carp, who have never finished higher than fourth in the Central League, point their hopes toward the top brackets.

But this conscious appreciation, like all activity in a city whose devastation is so recent to memory, is in fact an expression of Hiroshima's profound necessity to achieve something much more ennobling than a mere pennant at baseball. Thorstein Veblen might have been describing the aroused temperament of this historic community when he spoke of a people "brought up against an imperative call to revise their scheme of institutions in the light of their native instincts, on pain of collapse or decay."

A way of life is sought which shall be more humane and democratic than the feudal pattern of the Oriental past. Yet it can be nothing so simple-minded as the blind adoption of all things American. In the person of Fibber Hirayama, whose ancestry is Japanese, whose techniques are American and who contains in fine balance within himself his double heritage, the humiliated but emergent city of Hiroshima glimpses in ideal fusion of West with East.

Three years ago, when Fibber Hirayama arrived with his bride in Hiroshima, he was greeted by 10,000 persons. He paled. "It was something terrible." Informed of the possibility of a small welcoming committee, he had earlier requested translation into Japanese of a speech which he had rehearsed upon the train from Tokyo and which, when silence was established, he delivered at Hiroshima station. When 10,000 people hallooed with laughter he was appalled. In beginner's Japanese he had attempted to say, "I am Satoshi Hirayama. I will do my best," but he afterward learned that he had committed the ludicrous error of misusing a word, which caused him to say: "I am Satoshi Hirayama and a splendid fellow."