Nostalgia
Discussion in the Open Talk forum
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This is a site about Pro Yakyu (Japanese Baseball), not about who the next player to go over to MLB is. It's a community of Pro Yakyu fans who have come together to share their knowledge and opinions with the world. It's a place to follow teams and individuals playing baseball in Japan (and Asia), and to learn about Japanese (and Asian) culture through baseball.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Some rights reserved.
That's cool!!! The Hankyu Braves!!!
They were a terrific team in the late '70s. Fukumoto, Katoh, Minoda, Shimatani, Adachi, Yamaguchi Takashi, and Yamada. They were terrifying.
I was born and raised in Tokyo, and was a die hard Giants' fan since the late '60s. The V9 Giants were my heros like most of the Tokyo kids growing up in that era. My favorite Giants' players being Doi Shozo and Oh.
When Nagashima retired and became the manager and lost to the mighty Braves two in a row, I was devastated. But at the same time, I started to realize that the world of NPB was unfair. Even though the Giants kept losing under Nagashima, they were still Japan's team. They got all the commercial endorsements. They were always the media darling. As a rebelious teenager, I was getting sick of it.
At the same time, I was getting more interested in the magnificent players in the other league, the Pa-League. Particularly the Hankyu Braves because of their magnificent players. I used to visit my grandparents who moved out of Tokyo in the mid-1970s to my aunt's house in Nishinomiya every summer and often watched the Braves play at Nishinomiya Kyujo. My allegiance switched at that point.
The V9 Giants were gone (except Oh, my eternal hero) and became a bunch of swell-headed, media-hogging, mediocre players who thought they were the greatest (Sadaoka, Shinozuka, Nakahata, etc.). And then, the Egawa incident occurred which put the final nail in the coffin of allegiance to Yomiuri. Since then I despise the Yomiuri Giants.
Even though I live in NY and cheer for Matsui and individual players like Bernie, I just cannot make myself a Yankee fan, the evil empire. Sorry I just can't.
My favorite MLB team is the St. Louis Cardinals since they were the first team I saw when they were visiting Japan in the late 1960s. They had terrific players like Bob Gibson and Lou Brock. As a child, they symbolized the power and speed of MLB and I've been a red-bird fan since then.
Did you know that in "Kyojin no Hoshi," the character "Armstrong Ozuma" was modeled after Brock and Gibson?