Bobby Valentine has nothing against the Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics opening Major League Baseball's 2008 season in Japan. It's just the timing of it he can't understand.

The former Texas Rangers and New York Mets manager will be on the bench as his Chiba Lotte Marines take on Sadaharu Oh's Softbank Hawks in Fukuoka just as the Red Sox and A's meet at Tokyo Dome next week in their MLB season opener.

Few people are better qualified to comment on the merits of Japanese and American baseball than Valentine, who believes Japan is selling itself short by hosting MLB games while launching its own season.

"I hope the Red Sox and A's have a great time here and I'm sure everyone will enjoy it but it's ludicrous that our games will be going on at the same time," Valentine said. "The timing is a mistake and I guess that's something that slipped through the cracks when they were planning the schedules."...more...

Captain Japan wrote:If anyone gets a keitai snap of someone like Pedroia puking outside Geronimo's PM me. Thank you.

Blah Pete wrote:How much will you give me for a shot of any Red Sox player with a tranny hooker (pre-op) in a compromising position?

Western All Stars wrote:Where did they hear 80,000?? The highest level of kanji kentei is only about 6,000.

Typhoon wrote:The most complete kanji dicitionary I've come across has about 72,000 entries.

ttjereth wrote:That would be a Chinese dictionary yes?

Typhoon wrote:No. Japanese.

The Dai Kan-Wa jiten (大漢和辞典, Dai Kan-Wa jiten? "Comprehensive Chinese-Japanese Dictionary") is a Japanese dictionary of kanji (Chinese characters) compiled by Morohashi Tetsuji. Remarkable for its comprehensiveness and size, Morohashi's dictionary contains over 50,000 character entries and 530,000 compound words. Haruo Shirane (2003:15) says: "This is the definitive dictionary of the Chinese language and one of the great dictionaries of the world."

..more recent mainland Chinese dictionaries contain 80,000 or more characters, many consisting of obscure variants..

Captain Japan wrote:If anyone gets a keitai snap of someone like Pedroia puking outside Geronimo's PM me. Thank you.

kamome wrote:Any idea which hotel they've taken over?

Captain Japan wrote:New Otani

kamome wrote:A Boston Globe reporter is traveling with the team and blogging about the Red Sox in Japan. I have a feeling there will be no pics of any player puking in front of Geronimo's, unfortunately.

Any idea which hotel they've taken over?

Captain Japan wrote:[floatr][/floatr]
Happy Valentine
Yahoo! Sports
SAPPORO, Japan –]more[/url]...

....

“Look at this one,” he says, pointing to a symbol for the butterfly. There are more than 80,000 of these characters, called kanji, and while Valentine isn’t endeavoring to learn them all, he wants to reach the 2,000 or so needed for high school equivalency. He has spoken Japanese for years. That wasn’t enough, which, as with Valentine, often tends to be the case.

He’s using a system espoused by an American theologist who taught himself how to read in Japanese. It’s all about imagining, and the kanji for butterfly combines three other symbols Valentine has already memorized: insect, tree and generation.

“So,” Valentine says, “in my mind, for this word, butterfly, I have the vision of a tree that has this cocoon that has been there for generations, and it has this little insect coming out the end of a cocoon. And with it, I go insect, tree, generation. And I’ve got the kanji.

“Isn’t it crazy?”

It’s a rhetorical question, and it applies rather well to Valentine’s existence in Japan, where he’s on one hand a surprising star, the individualistic American in a culture devoted to the whole, and on the other a made-for-Tokyo marvel, the kind of cult of personality onto whom the Japanese love to glom.

From the time he showed up in Texas as a 35-year-old managing a half-dozen players older than him to the days in New York leading the Mets to the World Series and wearing a mustache-and-glasses disguise after getting booted from a game, Valentine has distinguished himself a one-man genus, unique as a fingerprint, doing things no one else would dare try.

“Eighty-(expletive)-thousand,” Valentine says, “and I’m learning them.”

.....

"I have finished book one and I must say I am very excited. They are fantastic! Hopefully my next email will be in Nihongo!!"

Bobby Valentine

“Nihongo wa nakanaka muzukashii desu nee.”

As this means, Japanese is really difficult. I have been studying Japanese on and off now for a couple of years. Nowadays it is almost every day when I exercise. I try to learn vocabulary, diction, sentence structure through listening to CDs or reading from text.

I have found it quite exciting and I enjoy the experience immensely. I also enjoy being a guy in my middle age learning a new language. I get excited when I wake up in the morning, wanting to learn something new. Yet at times I get frustrated because the retention is not what it was when I was much younger.

Step-Up-Nihongo is a program that I was introduced to as I was leaving Japan after my first season managing here a couple of years ago. One of the front office members of ICI (International Communication Institute) gave me a book and a CD along with a note from the president and the founder of the company, Shige Yamauchi, who just said “Hey, you might enjoy reading this while you are on the airplane.” Since then, I started studying through the textbooks and CDs with his teaching method. I enjoyed better than the lessons that I had taken prior and I continue to enjoy it.

In June, I had an honor to speak to a group of people who are prospective users of Step-Up-Nihongo. I was invited as a guest of Yamauchi-sensei in Tokyo, I found it challenging to speak before this group, I spoke English mostly but I also tried to show that I have some feel for the language of Japanese. (From Left: Mr. Matsumoto, CEO of JR Tokai, me, and Yamauchi-Sensei. Mr. Matsumoto and Yamauchi-Sensei have known each other since they were in high school and are lifetime friends.)

It has also been a great relationship with Shige and knowing his family, who also work for his company and Step-Up-Nihongo. We all have become good friends.

The only things that I have received for all this have been books and a CD. Though some people may think that everything I do is some type of paid sponsorship or advertisement, the fact of the matter is that it simply is not true. This was done by Shige to me out of his heart and everything that I do for his is out of mine. And hopefully some of this will also go to my head and I can speak better Japanese.

Ganbaranakya!

Have fun and take care!

See you soon.



Bobby
Commit to your passions - Passionately pursue your commitments

Blah Pete wrote:How much will you give me for a shot of any Red Sox player with a tranny hooker (pre-op) in a compromising position?

Captain Japan wrote:Ok, but make sure he's with a hooker and not one of greiji's livestock. I don't need libel problems.

Greji wrote:Hey, I don't deal with anything but clean livestock, they all are inspected and have disease free certificates (natsukashii, reminds me of the old VD cards the J-hookers used to be required to carry).

Mulboyne wrote:That's the hotel that Shingo Furuya, general manager of Hanshin, was staying in when he committed suicide following the club's dispute with Randy Bass.

Behan wrote:My tidbit pales to yours, but didn't the Roy Keane-less Irish stay there during the World Cup, too? They were in Makuhari, I believe.