Shadow Shoguns Sinking J-Ball

[Captain Japan]

Forget the Fans: It's Bean Ball in the Boardrooms

New York Times...registration required

The drama revolves around the future of the financially endangered Kintetsu Buffaloes here in western Japan's largest city. But it has also become a drama about many things at this particular point in Japan's history, including the clash between the old and new, collusive business practices, the role of sports in society and the neglected voices of the ordinary Japanese.

Love this part...

Masayuki Tamaki, a sports critic, said neither Mr. Watanabe nor the other owners had attempted any real reforms to revitalize baseball.

"The baseball teams' presidents are people who are dispatched to the teams from their parent companies for two, three years,'' Mr. Tamaki said. "What they do is spend their time getting autographs to present them as gifts to bar girls.''

Bu this is hopeless...

Suspicions arose immediately. Why would he step down over a minor violation? Was the resignation simply a ploy for Mr. Watanabe to bail out? After all, he will remain the chairman of the Yomiuri Media Group and a subordinate will become the owner of the baseball team.

Mr. Watanabe, it seemed to many, was stepping into a role that may be new to him but is old to Japan: that of shadow shogun.

[gkanai]

As is often the case, Japanese baseball mirrors Japanese society.

Forget the Fans: It's Bean Ball in the Boardrooms

The drama revolves around the future of the financially endangered Kintetsu Buffaloes here in western Japan's largest city. But it has also become a drama about many things at this particular point in Japan's history, including the clash between the old and new, collusive business practices, the role of sports in society and the neglected voices of the ordinary Japanese.

As expected, there is a good guy and a bad guy. Wanting to save the Buffaloes is a 31-year-old self-made multimillionaire who dropped out of Japan's top university to build his own Internet company, a complete outsider who wears T-shirts at news conferences and wheels around town in his silver-blue Ferrari.

Wanting to kill the Buffaloes is a 78-year-old insider, who over the decades navigated the shadowy corridors of politics and media to seize control of Japan's, and the world's, largest newspaper and, ultimately, Japanese baseball.

Emperor and emperor-slayer, the two share the very un-Japanese habit of tossing verbal grenades at each other, making no attempt to hide their mutual contempt.

...

Masaru Kaneko, a professor of economics at Keio University, said the baseball brouhaha symbolized a larger problem in Japan's business world: the older generation in charge, bankrupt of ideas and unwilling to accept them from the younger generation, engaging in mergers simply to project the image of reform.

"Mergers are happening everywhere: banks, trading companies, local governments, public highway corporations,'' he said. "While mergers are occurring in the name of reform, they are actually just cutting the number of participants and lack any substantive reforms.''

[Watcher]

Posted by Captain Japan over an hour ago... and he had nice pics too.

[gkanai]

Whoops- my bad. Thanks for moving my post.

g