Baseball as Spirit Discipline:
The Autobiography of Sadaharu Oh 

When baseball was brought to Japan in the nineteenth century—introduced by American Horace Wilson, it was first played in 1873 at what is now Tokyo University, and is now the most popular team sport in the country—the game naturally developed its own uniquely Eastern traditions, conventions, and rituals. American baseball fans might be surprised, for instance, not just by ballpark vendors hawking sushi and sake, but also by broadcasters who may offer both a tremendously sophisticated analysis of a player's statistical record and speculation on the implication of his blood type for his performance, A and O popularly believed to be good for hitters, B best for pitchers; by legions of fans wearing kimonos in team colors who begin to arrive six hours before a game, organize themselves into squadrons led by white-gloved cheerleaders, and bang drums and blow whistles on cue for nine innings; by managers who resign in order to save face after a losing streak; by players who begin "spring" training in January and whose seven-hour workouts may include exercises such as the infamous 1,000 Fungo Drill, a torturous three-hour routine meant to instill “fighting spirit.” American players are well- known for their inability to adjust not just to Japanese customs and culture off the field, but to the very shape, rhythms, and conventions of the game they thought they knew. Sluggers like Bob Horner grumble about pitchers who throw breaking balls when behind in the count—it’s pitching backwards, they complain, not what they're supposed to do, it’s not real baseball. A number of players have been humiliated and outraged by managers who remove a fielder in the middle of an inning after making an error, baffled by coaches who may advise a wild pitcher to drink more water, a sore-armed infielder to throw more, a slumping batter to make a yamagomori, a retreat to the mountains.1

The literature of Japanese baseball exhibits the same blend of East and West, of the familiar and the strange. An excellent example is the autobiography of the Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh, whose magnificent twenty-two year career—868 home runs, 2,209 RBI, nine Golden Gloves, nine Most Valuable Player awards—won him even the grudging respect of his American counterparts. “He would have hit for power and average here,” Don Drysdale said of Oh; "He was a good player, I guess," conceded Bob Gibson (Oh 272-273). Oh's autobiography is in part a conventional ballplayer's life "as told to" an American journalist: here, for example, is the traditional blocking father who wants an engineer for a son, not a first baseman, joyfully won over at last by his son's devotion and the game's beauty. Oh's book, however, is primarily an account of a spiritual odyssey in which the mastery of baseball, like any of the traditional Japanese arts—archery, swordsmanship, flower arranging, the tea ceremony—is not an end in itself but rather instrumental to cultivating the spiritual discipline, illumination, and self-forgetting that are the hallmarks of Zen Buddhism.

Like all spiritual autobiographers, when Oh examines his life at some distance, he is able to perceive a coherent design which he himself is not the author of and the workings of a force beyond himself, what Oh calls Fortune. Though admittedly skeptical of "the invisible world," Oh expresses a deep belief that Fortune, "however mysterious its origins, is as real as the ground you walk on, its effects as palpable as touch" (26). Oh remembers, for example, that as a youth he was told by an evil-eyed psychic first, always to keep the image of a dragon near at hand, and, second, to change his name for year. And so for a year, to the consternation of his family, he was Hisoshi Oh, and to this day, he keeps a statue of a dragon for protection. Oh likewise locates the hand of Fortune in his failing by a single point the entrance exam to the school which would have prepared him for a career in engineering; instead, he attended Waseda Commercial High School, one of Japan's baseball factories, and concludes, “One more point on that exam and I would have lived a different sort of life. There is no question of that. At the time, however, all I or my family could see was the stern and cheerless face of misfortune” (31).

It was Fortune, too, Oh believes that led him to Hiroshi Arakawa, part batting coach and part Zen master, a kind of spiritual Charlie Lau, the teacher to whom Oh attributes all his success and to whom he dedicates his life story. Oh's first meeting with Arakawa foreshadows their entire relationship. On November 30, 1954—Oh cannot forget the exact date of this meeting that changed his life forever—Arakawa, at the time an outfielder for the Mainichi Orioles, happened to walk his dog past the field where Oh's junior high school team was playing. In the presence of a major league ballplayer, Oh felt filled with “fighting spirit” and pitched and swung the bat as powerfully as he could. Between innings, Arakawa called Oh aside. “How come you pitch left-handed and bat right-handed?” he asked. Oh was speechless—"sounds gurgled in my throat but I had no words” (27). “You look left-handed,” Arakawa told him. “Why don't you try to hit left-handed the next time you come up?” (28). Oh did just that and experienced a new ease and naturalness. He doubled to right center. After the game Arakawa spoke briefly to Oh about his plans for high school—he suggested that Oh consider Waseda—and then disappeared: “We shook hands, and I bowed deeply to him. Then with his dog, he turned and walked away. It seemed like only a few feet between where we were standing and the darkness surrounding the field. I tried to call to him. But I couldn't. Just like that, he was lost in the shadows as surely as if he had evaporated” (29).

Arakawa reappears years later as batting coach of the Tokyo Giants when Oh is a struggling young player, in the midst of what he describes as a “three-year free fall,” mired in a horrendous batting slump, despairing that he will ever fulfill the tremendous expectations of the Giants fans, who play on the translation of Oh's name from the Chinese and chant “Oh! Oh! Sanshin Oh! (King! King! Strikeout King!).”2 When they meet again, Arakawa is once again disconcertingly direct. He observes Oh in the batting cage—Oh is convinced that he has put on a terrific show—and Arakawa only mutters, “Terrible... For God's sake, you should be playing with a much bigger ball. Why don't you try basketballs?” (114) He leaves Oh alone for four days, dumbfounded, barely able to sleep or eat, and when, it seems, the pupil is at last ready to learn, he returns. “If you really want to make it as a pro,” Arakawa tells him, “you will do exactly as I say for three years” (115). Thus begins the classic pupil-teacher relationship in the traditional Japanese arts, the teacher inscrutable, almost clairvoyant in his knowledge of his student, sometimes maddeningly unpredictable and enigmatic, and the pupil, uncritically devoted to his master and to his art. Oh does indeed write of Arakawa with the “implicit trust in a superior master and his incomprehensible ways” that Carl Jung believed could only exist in the East—try to imagine an American bonus baby entering into a three-year discipleship with one of his tobacco-chewing coaches. “Arakawa-san is deeper than my knowledge of him,” Oh writes. “And hence you may wind up getting an incomplete picture of him. To this day he is always a step ahead of my seeing. Twenty years after we began working together, my thoughts of him are almost hopelessly run together, so that the end of our relationship is the beginning and vice versa. What do I honestly know?” (112)

Oh’s training with Arakawa, from an American perspective at least, is far from conventional. While we may expect a struggling young hitter bedeviled by a hitch in his swing to spend long hours in the batting cage under the watchful eye of a coach, we may be at a loss to understand why such a player might study Noh drama or Kabuki, pore over the biography of a famous Samurai warrior, study swordsmanship, or interrogate a master of the martial arts about the secrets of his technique. Yet that is exactly what Oh does. From the perspective of Arakawa or any other devotee of Zen or the traditional Japanese arts, however, it makes perfect sense. Mastery in haiku or painting or swordsmanship or the tea ceremony—or baseball conceived of as an art—is spiritual not technical. And even though the training itself is relentlessly practical and hands-on, the aim is always more than simply the perfecting of technique or the developing of skill alone: Zen is above all, in the words of D. T. Suzuki, an “actional approach to enlightenment” (9).

Despite the fact that we Americans cherish the idiosyncrasies of our ballplayers, from Willie Mays's basket catches to Joe Morgan's flapping arm, and even though American transplants tend to criticize Japanese baseball for its lack of personality, Oh's training, at least, seems more tailored to individual differences, less uniform than what his American counterparts receive. Walt Hriniak or Charlie Lau or Ted Williams may mass-market their hitting instruction in books, videos, and at clinics. In traditional Japanese arts, on the other hand, there is no “system of stereotyped techniques” (Suzuki 179). This explains perhaps why Oh suspects sometimes that Arakawa “made things up as he went along” (113).

Arakawa tells Oh that their task is to discover how to “apply the Japanese psyche to an American game” (117). So while Arakawa works with Oh in the batting cage on his hitch and expounds on the importance of downswinging, he also encourages Oh to read a book by a famous Noh actor on the theory and practice of his art. Then Arakawa informs Oh, “Time to move on” and leads him to a study of Kabuki. Soon afterwards he announces, “A discovery,” and together they turn their attention to the martial art of Aikido, literally the Way of Spirit Harmony, and in particular the concept of ma, the space between. To understand and master baseball's version of ma, the space between the pitcher and batter, Arakawa and Oh visit the founder of Aikido, Uwshiba Morihei Sensei, who tells them, the real task is to “eliminate the ma. Make the opponent yours. Absorb and incorporate his thinking into yours” (121). This leads to more study, more practice, more of Arakawa's teasing, cajoling, and philosophizing.

Indeed Arakawa's coaching sessions with Oh resemble nothing so much as those between the Zen master and monk, Dokusan, the face-to-face encounter with the Roshi which constitutes one of the three pillars of Zen. Philip Kapleau, a Westerner with more than twenty years' experience as a Zen teacher, explains that the private encounter with the master is neither interview, nor friendly meeting, nor theological discussion, nor counseling session. Instead, Kapleau writes, the master:

probes the student's understanding and realization, if any, and gives him pointers for future practice. With a more advanced student the “testing” is more active, as the teacher tries to evoke a demonstration of the student's understanding, not unlike the insertion of an irritant into an oyster to cause it to produce a pearl (45).

The most effective irritant Arakawa employs involves Oh's batting stance. In the middle of their training, Arakawa instructs Oh to assume a new stance, with his right leg raised slightly, leaving him standing on one foot:

“You see,” he said, “standing in this position, if you hitch, you will fall flat on your ass.” I stared at him, unable to reply. There was a twinkle in his eye. Was he up to something, trying to poke fun at me? I did not know. He must have seen the look on my face, because he began to laugh.

“It's all right,” he said. “It was only a suggestion.”

He had no other suggestions (117).

Later, when Oh feels himself utterly defeated and is left imagining on a rainy afternoon what life would be like without baseball, Arakawa does not suggest, he orders Oh to assume his one-legged stance in a game. Oh singles sharply and so begins a new phase in his athletic and spiritual development, learning “the meaning of what it is to hit on one foot.” Like a Zen koan, an intellectual puzzle with no logical response or reasonable solution, Oh’s new stance forces a new approach, pushes him to the point of total frustration, after which comes genuine understanding. “This business of standing on one leg,” Arakawa tells Oh, “we discover is a matter of life and death” (140).

At the heart of Oh's training is his two-year intensive study and practice of the ancient art of swordsmanship. Every morning from November to January he would leave at five o’clock in the morning with Arakawa for the dojo, the hall where swordsmanship is practiced but also a place devoted to religious exercise, its original Sanskrit meaning the place of enlightenment (Suzuki 128). There Oh practices those techniques of the swordsman with direct application to swinging a baseball bat—the stance, balance, grip, and especially important for a power hitter, the twisting of the hands at the moment of contact. Even more important, however, than these technical advances, valuable as they are, is the awareness, concentration, and intensity the swordsman cultivates through the practice of his art. “You cannot be ‘merely technical’ when you swing a sword,” Oh writes. “Practice with the sword demands intensity” (160). In both arts, swordsmanship and baseball, what is important, Oh concludes, is “the merging of the swing itself with the attitude behind it” (161). Oh here echoes the conclusion of D. T. Suzuki, who tells the story of a master swordsman whose training consisted of setting his student to doing household tasks while he at odd moments, as the young man was washing rice or sweeping the floor, would approach and strike him with a stick: “The secrets of perfect swordsmanship consist in creating a certain frame or structure of mentality which is made always ready to respond instantly, that is, immediately, to what comes from the outside” (14).

The sword itself becomes not just a beautifully crafted work of art in its own right, but also an object of reverence, a symbol of the swordsman's art. Thomas Hoover writes:

The sword in particular was identified with the noblest impulses of the individual.... A samurai's sword was believed to possess a spirit of its own, and when he experienced disappointment in battle he might go to a shrine to pray for the spirit's return. Not surprisingly, the swordsmith was an almost priestly figure, who, after ritual purification, went about his task clad in white robes. The ritual surrounding swordmaking had a practical as well as spiritual purpose; it enabled the early Japanese to preserve the highly complex formulas required to forge special steel. Their formulas were carefully guarded, and justifiably so: not until the past century did the West produce comparable steel (61-62).

For Oh to practice with a Japanese long sword—even though his was, as he admits, a cheap one—and to pose for photographers with one as he often did, was to consciously associate himself with the spiritual discipline and high purpose of the samurai warriors. From the time he first picked up the sword, Oh recalls, he “felt the demand it placed on me for a certain kind of approach” (154). What Oh calls “the correspondence of sword and bat” (154) is apparent also in his account of the handmade bat he began to use in 1964, a bat Oh claims, that marked “a real change” in his hitting career. The bat was made by a Mr. Ishii, an eighty-year-old craftsman who sought to match the “soul” of the wood—only the maleyachidama variety of tamo wood found in the remotest region of the north would do—to the soul of the hitter. Treated with steam and fire, the result became, like the samurai's sword, an extension of the man: “I came to trust Mr. Ishii's bat as I trusted my own hand” (181). Like Roy Hobbs's Wunderboy, itself, of course, reminiscent of Arthur's Excalibur and an emblem of chivalric values, Oh's bat becomes a unique symbol of another almost mythic tradition: the bat Mr. Ishii presented him in 1964, Oh writes, “was a sword I used until the day I retired sixteen years later” (183).

Oh finds inspiration also in the life and writing of Miyamoto Musashi, the master samurai swordsman of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Oh reads and rereads Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi, an epic novel—Professor Edwin O. Reishchauer in his forward to its English translation calls it the Japanese Gone with the Wind—which dramatizes the transformation of Takezo, the young Musashi, into the disciplined master warrior by means of his own study with a Zen monk and three-year period of solitude. “Hm, you know, you remind me of Takezo,” Arakawa tells Oh early in their training. “There may be hope for you after all” (118). Musashi serves as a reminder to Oh that mastery comes only to those who are pure in heart, that the Way of baseball, like the Way of the sword, requires absolute devotion. Musashi, writes his twentieth-century translator, “devoted himself with ferocious single-mindedness to the search for enlightenment by the Way of the Sword” and summarizes his inspiration as “humility and hard work” (Musashi 22).

Together Arakawa and Oh study Musashi's Gorin no sho, The Book of Five Rings, his classic treatise on swordsmanship. They find analogies to the five rings in the five checkpoints of Oh’s stance; they adapt his advice on approaching an opponent to facing a pitcher, and they aim constantly at what Musashi promises as the reward of genuine mastery: “When you have mastered the Way of strategy you can suddenly make your body like a rock, and ten thousand things cannot touch you. This is the body of a rock. You will not be moved” (82). To acquire the body of a rock and to develop Musashi’s “immovable self-discipline” becomes Oh's passionate goal.

Oh moves through the traditional stages of technique, skill, art, and does achieve at last the final stage, the Way itself. He reaches the point at which he understands what Yogi Berra or any student of Zen knows: you can't hit and think at the same time. For Oh, the swinging of a bat, like the swordsman’s stroke, becomes the most spontaneous and natural of acts. He comes full circle. For the student of Kendo, “The first elementary teaching become the highest knowledge and the master still continues to practice this simple training his everyday prayer” (Musashi 7). For Oh, hitting a baseball becomes not an act of a will, not a metaphor for anything else, not a means to fame or wealth, but the unselfconscious expression of the highest truth, his everyday prayer: “I woke to find that my heart was on fire. ... I had reached the point where I simply lived to hit. How can I say it without sounding foolish? I craved hitting a baseball the way a samurai craved following the Way of the Sword. It was my life” (175).

Through his years of devotion to the discipline of baseball under the guidance of Arakawa, Oh learns that the contest of baseball is not with his opponent but with himself. He understands at last what Eugen Herrigel, the author of the classic Zen in the Art of Archery, a book Arakawa and Oh study together, had written about the “Great Doctrine” of archery: “... archery ...is a contest of the archer with himself; and this kind of contest is not a paltry substitute but the foundation of all contests outwardly directed—for instance with a bodily opponent. In this contest of the archer with himself is revealed the secret essence of this art …”(15). Oh comes to think of his success in baseball as a triumph over self: “I have two in me. One is weaker, the other stronger. The weaker one always looks for a way out, wants fun and good times... the other is therefore forced to work overtime to catch up" (72). Many of Oh's childhood recollections prefigure this struggle—the time, for example, his brother chastised him for celebrating a high school victory by tossing his glove in the air, and Oh resolved never again to show emotion on the field. As a young member of the Giants, Oh admits that the weaker one within was in ascent: known to his teammates as Mr. Take It Easy, he fell prey to the temptations of Tokyo's Ginzu district, to the lure of women and alcohol and cigarettes, the clutter of his dormitory room reflecting his own inner disorder. When Oh despairs, he feels defeated not by major league pitching but by himself: he is afraid that he has lost “the struggle within.” And under the guidance of Arakawa, Oh achieves the most important victory—"Winning over yourself.”

The most fundamental lesson Oh learns is as familiar and as trite as a little leaguer's guide to hitting and as ancient and as mysterious as Zen itself—how to wait. Herrigel in his study of archery had reached a similar point. “What must I learn to do?” he asked his master. "You must learn to wait properly.” How? “By letting go of yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing is left of you but a purposeless tension” (47). Likewise when Arakawa himself seeks advice from his master Useshiba Sensei, the sensei—who is no fan of baseball—tells him impatiently: “Look... the ball comes flying whether you like it or not, doesn't it? Then all you can do is wait for it to come to you. To wait, that is the traditional Japanese style. Wait. Teach him to wait” (129). He learns from Musashi that the key to acquiring the Body of a Rock is to have the discipline to wait (167). Oh learns that it is indeed waiting that is the secret to “apply the Japanese psyche to an American game”; it becomes his Way:

My Way has led me to accomplishment and through it to mystery. I don't know what the second half of my life will bring or even if it will in any way match the first part. I learned from Arakawa-san, my greatest teacher, that the way is long and mastery of any sort is not easy to achieve. Above what I learned from my Sensei was how to wait. I believe I learned the “meaning” of waiting on one foot. If I understand anything in this life, it is how to wait. It is not answer. But for me it is everything (262).

And thus concludes the autobiography of the man whose heroes are Musashi, the legendary Japanese samurai, and Lou Gehrig, the legendary Yankee iron man, both admirable, in Oh’s eyes, not just for strength or technique but for spirit discipline. Gehrig's record, Oh says, was an event of the spirit, as much a product of his ki—spirit power—as of the iron of his body. As exotic or strange as Oh’s reinterpretation of Gehrig and his particular brand of heroism may sound, it may point to something very essential in the nature of baseball. Oh recognizes as well as George Will, for example, that part of baseball’s appeal is that it is not merely a contest of physical strength; he would agree with A. Bartlett Giamatti that baseball is a kind of art whose goal is self-transformation and transcendence; and he would certainly agree with that most profound of baseball philosophers, Earl Weaver, who was known to comment, “This ain’t football; we do this every day,”—that the game's unique challenge lies in its dailyness, its repetitions. It may be that these very characteristics which American enthusiasts of baseball celebrate make the game uniquely suited to what D. T. Suzuki calls “the everyday mind of Zen, to the childlikeness that may be restored only after years if training in the art of self-forgetfulness” (Herrigel 7).

Works Cited

Cromartie, Warren, with Robert Whiting. Slugging It Out in japan. New York: Kodansha, 1991.

Herrigel, Eugen. Zen in the Art of Archery. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Foreward by D.T. Suzuki. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953.

Hoover, Thomas. Zen Culture. New York: Random House, 1977.

Kapleau, Philip. "The Private Encounter with the Master." Zen: Tradition and Transition. Ed. Kenneth Kraft. New York: Grover Press, 1988. 44-69.

Musashi, Miyamoto. A Book of Five Rings. Trans. Victor Harris. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1982.

Oh, Sadaharu, and David Falkner. Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball. New York: Times Books, 1984.

Suzuki, Daisetz, T. Zen and Japanese Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1959.

Whiting, Robert. The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: Baseball Samurai Style. New York: Avon, 1977.

------------------- . You Gotta Have Wa. New York: Macmillan, 1989.

Yoshikawa, Eiij. Musashi. Trans. Charles S. Terry. Foreword by Edwin O. Reishauer. New York: Harper & Row/Kodansha International, 1981.

Notes