Shohei communicates primarily through her interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, who is also her right hand 24 hours a day. There is a pattern in our exchanges: I say something, Shohei understands part of what I say, Ippei translates the rest. Shohei takes a deep breath and concentrates on the questions; then he says something that makes Ippei giggle. They work like a whisper game. This is the first time that you have put words to (and translated) your life experiences and it may be something new to you. I get the feeling that he follows me through everything, but I don’t understand almost anything he says, except for the occasional yakyu¯ (baseball) or Ichiro-san, the name of another Japanese player.
From his earliest childhood, Shohei ha sido un yakyu¯ sho¯nen, a child who eats, sleeps and breathes baseball. She grew up in O¯shu¯ in Iwate Prefecture, a region of rolling mountains and farmland that is “far away from it all, in the middle of nowhere,” says Shohei, the Japanese equivalent of growing up in the Midwest. between cornfields. His father played in the Japanese Industrial League, at the car factory where he worked alongside his mother, and was also the coach of Shohei’s small team. In Japan, when fry matches begin, players remove their caps and bow to their coach, hosts, fans, and then the field, a tradition that explains the videos showing Shohei picking up trash from his temple. He attended one of the best baseball institutes in the country, and gained national attention at age 18., when they timed him on television throwing a straight ball at 166 km / h to another teenager who looks like he has seen the future: not his as a baseball player, but that of the brilliant kid on the mound.
In his teens, he toyed with the idea of moving to the United States, but ended up signing for a professional team, the Hokkaido¯ Nippon-Ham Fighters, only when they agreed to let him play as a pitcher and as a hitter, something neither the Japanese nor the Japanese teams were looking for. the Americans who were watching him. During the five years he was with the Fighters, Shohei He became the star of the Japanese professional baseball league, an MVP and a future world hitter. The Fighters are from Sapporo, the capital of Hakkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, a place swept by gusts of icy wind from Siberia and where, in general, “the weather is harsh”, less in the middle of baseball season. When he lived in the team residence, he sent his payroll to his mother, who put about $ 1,000 into the account every month, but Shohei barely touched the money. His fame in Japan grew, but his life was oriented to achieve a series of very specific goals around baseball.. In high school, your coach asked you to document your goals from year to year (at 26, win the World Series and get married; At 37, my first son started playing baseball; At 38, the stats drop, time to think about retiring). It was all clear to me. Life thus ran between the Sapporo residence and the Sapporo Dome, an existence of glorious baseball asceticism.
When we arrived at the port of Newport Beach, Shohei photographed the luxury yachts docked at the pier on the phone. Her face was shocked and she giggled innocently, as if these displays of recreational wealth were still a novelty to her.. The marina adjoins Balboa Island, the most authentic area of Newport Beach, where the frozen banana stand from the series is located. Arrested Development and that encapsulates the lifestyle that inspired television fiction The O.C. There were flags of the University of Southern California on some balconies. There were Land Rovers, Mercedes, and custom golf carts. Some streets were named after precious stones. The sun was beating down hard, the hills were burning, and the rain was a distant, dreamlike memory. Nothing to do with the huge icebergs of Hokkaido¯.
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