Matsui... Nomo... Sasaki... Ichiro... the so-called American "National Pastime" has developed a decidedly Japanese flair. Indeed, in this year's All-Star game, two of the starting American League outfielders were from Japan. And for the third straight year, Ichiro - the fleet-footed Seattle Mariner - received more votes for the All-Star game than any other player in the game today. Some 15 years ago, in the bestseller "You Gotta Have Wa," Robert Whiting examined how former American major league ballplayers tried to cope with a different culture while playing pro ball in Japan. Now, Whiting reverses his field and reveals how select Japanese stars have come across the Pacific to play in the big leagues. Not only have they had to deal with the American way of life, but they have individually changed the game in dramatic fashion.

Ichiro lives in New York City with his Japanese mother. His father, an American soldier, was killed in Iraq. Now, Ichi’s mom has decided they should move back to Japan to live with Ichi’s grandfather. Grandfather becomes Ichi’s tour guide, taking him to temples as well as the Hiroshima Peace Park, where Ichi starts to question the nature of war. After a supernatural encounter with the gods and creatures of Japanese mythology, Ichi must face his fears if he is to get back home. In doing so, he learns about the nature of man, of gods, and of war. He also learns there are no easy answers—for gods or men.

Ichiro Suzuki has had a storied baseball career in Japan and the United States. Since signed to the major leagues in 2001, the right fielder has racked up batting records for the Yankees, Mariners, and Marlins. Through fascinating details about his personal and professional life, full-color photos, and direct quotations, baseball fans and report writers will be inspired by this biography of a top player driven by a strong work ethic and devotion to charity.

"In Seeing Stars, Dennis J. Frost traces the emergence and evolution of sports celebrity in Japan from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. Frost explores how various constituencies have repeatedly molded and deployed representations of individual athletes, revealing that sports stars are socially constructed phenomena, the products of both particular historical moments and broader discourses of celebrity. Drawing from media coverage, biographies, literary works, athletes’ memoirs, bureaucratic memoranda, interviews, and films, Frost argues that the largely unquestioned mass of information about sports stars not only reflects, but also shapes society and body culture. He examines the lives and times of star athletes—including sumo grand champion Hitachiyama, female Olympic medalist Hitomi Kinue, legendary pitcher Sawamura Eiji, and world champion boxer Gushiken Yokoō—demonstrating how representations of such sports stars mediated Japan’s emergence into the putatively universal realm of sports, unsettled orthodox notions of gender, facilitated wartime mobilization of physically fit men and women, and masked lingering inequalities in postwar Japanese society. As the first critical examination of the history of sports celebrity outside a Euro-American context, this book also sheds new light on the transnational forces at play in the production and impact of celebrity images and dispels misconceptions that sports stars in the non-West are mere imitations of their Western counterparts."

Ichiro...Nomo...Hasegawa...Hideki Matsui...one by one they have come to America and made their mark as incredibly gifted and popular ballplayers. But this new wave of athlete-led by the sensational Ichiro Suzuki, whom many refer to as the best all-around player-is just the tip of a fascinating iceberg. Illuminating a deep and very different tradition of baseball, Whiting shows why more Japanese players will be coming to America...and how they will forever transform the way our game is played. Grandly entertaining and deeply revealing, The Samurai Way of Baseball is a classic book about sports, business, and stardom-in a world that is changing before our eyes.