True Master of Home Runs
According to a letter to editorial of a newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun, this morning, they had a baseball game between elementary-school boys and U.S. soldiers stationed in Japan, on one fine day in 1950’s.
The sixth grade pupils’ team of a certain elementary school had never lost a game. The rumor seemed to have reached a U.S. base. So, one day, a head teacher of the school got a call from the base, and accepted an offer for a match to be held in the base.
The result of the game was even, astonishingly given difference in the physical size of members of the two teams.
However, they had a happy time, and even after the game, they chatted friendly using their own language another team could not understand.
An old ex-teacher sent this letter to editorial which has been made public this morning.
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In another letter to editorial of the newspaper this morning, a Japanese boy living in England wrote that he had got shocked, when he started to live there, to know that no one plays baseball in England. But, now, he can play the game in a school for Americans, while enjoying playing cricket on different occasions.
An elementary school boy living in England sent this letter to editorial which has been made public this morning.
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Most of Japanese love baseball. The bat reminds the people of a Japanese sword.
Mr. Sadaharu Oh, who is leading the Japanese team in World Baseball Classic now being held in California, made a batting practice by using a real sword when he was young. He tried to cut a long and thin paper, arranged from a newspaper sheet, by swinging a Japanese sword horizontally.
When he started this practice, other members of his team came to view it. Even senior players sat square, showing respect, watching the swing, and listening to the sound of air being cut amid tension between a sword and a slip floating in air vertically.
Mr. Sadaharu Oh produced 868 home runs in his playing days between 1959 and 1980. During his last season as a player, he could still smash 30 homers.
But, this all time home-run king, with the nationality of Taiwan, seems to be gradually losing memory on how to deliver a home-run.
Now, he seems to have become an excellent manager of a baseball team and an ardent director of a baseball company.
Only a true master of an art could completely forget how and what he had ever achieved in it, according to tradition in ancient China.
“GO, BUT DO NOT SIN AGAIN”