Chapter 1

It had been snowing outside for most of the day, but this fact now completely grabbed my attention once I took my third step out from my hotel onto the sideway and began at once to slip and slide on the ice. My bad knee buckled a bit, and before I knew it I was face down on the icy pavement and had nearly brained my skull when I slid into a street sign pole. My knee hurt, but then again my knee always hurt, but this time it seemed that nothing had been hurt except my pride.

I started to pick myself up when I was offered a young ladies hand of assistance. I immediately accepted, and thanked her in English out of habit, but caught myself quickly and offered a sincere "Arigatou gozai-masu". She laughed and replied herself with a perfect "Your quite welcome — you looked as if you had needed the assistance."

Standing up again now, I had a much better view of my benefactor. She was tall for a Japanese female, maybe about 5'8", and of about my age in her mid-late twenties. Her hair was dark and gorgeously long, nearly reaching her butt, and something about her eyes and cheekbones suggested that there had been at least a drop of two of western blood in her recent family tree.

I complimented her superb skill with the English language, and she told me that she was an English teacher at one of the middle schools here in Niigata. That was very interesting, and we began to walk together and talk a bit about our lives. Her name was Shinju (Pearl), and I gave her mine, Scott Walker. Soon though, she asked me where I was heading to and if she could help at least to lead me in the right direction. I said that I wasn't quite sure where I was going yet, but I had just a general idea or two in my head. I wanted to get to the harbor, near where the new ballpark had been built, to take the ferry to Sato for the weekend.

"Sado-ga-shima?" She excitedly enquired. That was where her family lived and she was heading for the ferry to go there herself. They lived in a small fishing village on the wild and rocky western side of the island, but she could certainly help me find the right bus at the big port village of Ryotsu. I offered her my elbow, which she accepted with a smile and a slight toss of her hair, and walked together to the ferry dock. The fast hydrofoils were shut down for the winter, but the regular car ferry was running today despite the bad weather.

We found seats out of the wind upstairs, and I showed her the small pamphlet that I had found pushed under my hotel room door that morning. It was nominally in English, but probably "Japlish" was a better definition. It purported to be from a small rural hotel with a nearby hot springs lake next to an old rundown scenic temple. Sounded like just the place to be on a freezing cold, snowy day in northern Japan, especially since the water in my hotel bath never seemed to run much beyond lukewarm, let alone hot ... and right now my knee needed HOT.

It was a long two and a half hour ferry ride, and the sea seemed to get choppier and the wind and snow blowing harder with each minute. My knee throbbed constantly, and even Shinju appeared to be demurely pressing even closer against me to conserve a bit of extra body heat. The passage trip gave us all of the time I needed to explain to her how and why I was here in one of the least touristy places in all of Japan.

I had grown up a happy kid in the Midwest and had done alright in school never getting into much if any trouble and had a few quality friends, including a couple of girlfriends who thought they saw something worthwhile in me. My only true love though was Baseball. If I wasn't outside playing it or practicing some aspect of the game, I was watching VHS tapes of old games on my small bedroom B&W TV. I spent every dime of my allowance and yard mowing money at the local batting cage, and by high school there wasn't any pitcher that I could not hit. By graduation I knew there was only one thing that I wanted to do with my life — become a professional baseball player.

In the Major League Draft that summer I was selected early in the third round and received a decent amount of bonus signing money. I cruised easily through the low Minor Leagues and by my third season I was crushing AAA pitching and seemed a lock for a call up to the Majors. Baseball American had just ranked me as their ninth best Top Prospect in all of the Minor Leagues; I could hit for good average and a bit of power, I had a good eye and could work a count to either get the pitch I wanted or take the walk; on the base paths I showed good speed and smart base running instincts. My only perceived weakness being I was only an average fielder at third base, but would likely improve with experience.

That all ended in a early September game that was virtually meaningless to our Minor League division standings, but it was just a day or two before the expected ML Roster increase date when teams could start calling up their minor leaguers for the final pennant stretch. I had not been scheduled to play that day, as my 'call up' was a virtual guarantee already, but our visiting Assistant General Manager for Minor League Operations had wanted to at least see me and a couple of other folks 'in action' first anyway. So I came into the game as a pinch hitter in the bottom of the seventh, and on the second pitch doubled to the wall in right-center, allowing two runs to score. We were way up, 8-2 by the top of the eighth, when I assumed my defensive position at third base.

This was when the trouble began. I had nothing left to prove that day, but a borderline bench player for the opposing team thought he did. I'll call him Jeff, but that's not quite his real name ... he feels bad enough as it is without me rubbing it in. Jeff had not been playing well, and felt he was in severe danger of not only not getting his 'cup of coffee in the Majors', but maybe even facing a demotion back to AA ball. He was as fast as the wind, and played a good center field, but he really couldn't hit his own weight. He did make an excellent pinch runner though.

When our pitcher walked the lead-off batter at the top of the eighth, Jeff came in to pinch run. On the next pitch, which was hit to left field for a routine single, anyone else other than Jeff would have held up at second base, but not him. Without even a glance at our fielder who was throwing the ball back to me or his own third base coach who was frantically waving at him to stop, he barreled around the bag and charged straight for third hell bent for leather. If the ball had been hit to right instead of left field his superb speed might have been enough, but the ball beat his foot to me by at least six steps.

His only prayer now was to somehow kick or knock the ball out of my glove or avoid the tag altogether — his mistake was instead of trying just one of those options he tried both, and missed. His spiked feet and later most of his body weight slammed against my left knee (he'd missed my glove entirely). Not a single person in the crowd, no matter where their seats were, could miss hearing the sound of my knee breaking and its ligaments and tendons ripping. They could probably hear my scream even on the nearby interstate highway.

In a moment, my career was done. I had gone from 'can't miss prospect' to badly damaged goods. My organization prayed for a miracle, but even three operations later it wasn't likely to be forthcoming. I could still hit and maybe now handle first base duties, but my running simply wasn't up to snuff. I looked like a tired broken-down forty year old catcher trying to shuffle and stumble my way down the base path. After a couple of years back in the low Minors I was released. Other teams would briefly pick me up and hope for a miracle of their own, but would soon realize it just wasn't going to happen.

By my twenty-fifth birthday I was considered 'done', and I was an assistant coach and playing irregularly for a small independent team in a semi-pro league that was sort of AA comparable. I mostly helped with batting instruction for some of the kids, and there were even a few veterans much older than me that also could not abandon their dreams yet and go back to the real world and put on a shirt and tie everyday and start selling insurance. I could pinch hit regularly and occasionally even played third sometimes just for the fun of it.

After one of these all too rare occasions when I had felt relatively pain-free and had played a good game, I was approached by a scout that I didn't recognize. It turns out that he represented a JPB team (Japanese Professional Baseball) and he had been scouting a different player whom he thought might provide some good 'veteran leadership', but my skills intrigued him. He would be watching our team all this week and he knew I didn't normally play everyday, but asked if I could arrange to do so.

I thought I could, and with the ok from our skipper I started the next two games and played my heart out, playing through the increasing pain and trying hard to never let it show. And wonder of wonders, it worked. I was given plane tickets and a bit of expense money to visit their senior American scout who was in Los Angeles, and I performed a day long workout for him. He didn't fall quite in love with me and he well understood that he was looking at damaged goods, but agreed that he thought I had 'something' as well, and made arrangements for me to go to Japan next February before Spring Training to get a physical exam and give another workout for the team management.

No promises, but it was at least an opportunity to play again.

My prospective team was to be the Niigata Golden Tanuki - a strange name if I had ever heard one! They were a very new team that had recently formed a few years ago when two smaller impoverished clubs folded and merged into a single team, leaving an opening for a brand new sixteenth JPB club. Our owner was fabulously rich (and infamously eccentric) and obsessed by baseball and desired the best possible winning team. This was a very different attitude than most other clubs, which were haphazardly run as publicity units for their major corporate owners, and winning championships was an incidental goal at best. I was certainly willing to give this my best possible effort, and all of my travel arrangements were swiftly made for me.

The next February 4^th, I was on a plane to a very uncertain future in Japan, with the smaller of my two bags packed with every book on Japan and Japanese Baseball I could lay my hands on. I knew I would be entering a strange and (to me) bizarre new culture, but that still didn't prepare me for the first site of my prospective ballclub's mascot — a Tanuki (a strange but real creature that appears to be half-raccoon and half-dog or badger), standing up wearing a traditional straw hat with a baseball bat over one shoulder and a large bottle of Saki in his hand.

There are a great many fables in Japanese folklore about Tanuki; they are credited with having magical powers, and are widely regarded as a symbol of good luck. They are also regarded as a symbol of fertility, and depicted, as our mascot symbol was, with enormous testicles. HUGE ones, which nearly brushed the ground. That looked very painful to me, especially as a symbol for 'prosperity'. I don't know if all of the 'Lucky Cat' statues that I saw everywhere else were disappointed by their own shortcomings or were immensely relieved in comparison.

My workout at their new stadium went quite well, I thought. The retractable roof was closed that day and it was only bitterly cold rather than utterly butt freezing inside. Their doctors MRI'd my knee and 'tut-tut'd' a bit over the results of that, but were obviously pleased with my batting skills. I knew I was a little rusty, but I think I demonstrated good contact to all fields. The running and fielding parts didn't go quite as smoothly, but I tried to exhibit my determination at every opportunity — body health and pain be damned! When something didn't quite go as well as I would have hoped, I would request to do it again and again, if necessary.

I resolved to myself that I would not stop for any rest or relief, no matter how much pain I felt, until every member of their coaching staff was satisfied and they instructed me to stop.

It became a grueling torture endurance event, the pain in my knee became nearly intolerable, but I grit my teeth and refused to quit. After about four straight hours of diving for ground balls that were always being hit 'just a bit' out of my range, I was biting my tongue so hard from the pain that it was bleeding. Somehow, I unsteadily got back onto my feet and beckoned for another ball to be hit to me when the Manager announced 'enough' and turned his back on me to consult with his coaching staff and the team's management.

I shuffled off to the shower room (it did have a real western style shower, plus the traditional large wooden bath tubs), but not before I heard what I was sure was the Manager saying to someone, "Wa". "Fighting Spirit". It was almost the only Japanese word I knew, but it was a very important word, especially for a potential "gaijin suketto" (foreign helper) whose loyalty to the team would be at best suspect.

I soaked in the hot water tub for as long as I dared to; just enough to get my knee loosened up enough again to at least be able to walk on it again, and I dressed. Someone eventually guided me back upstairs to the executive offices where I was directed to wait for a good long time. I got the impression that my fate was still to be decided. Indeed so, when at length I was admitted into a meeting room, it was clear that some of the men in the room did not especially look with favor at me (in fact I would learn later that nearly everyone except the Manager of the team thought they could do better with another gaijin).

Prepared for the inevitable letdown, I was quite surprised when my fate received a later postponement. I was to join the club for Spring Training on March 1 on Okinawa, under a provisional Minor League contract. The club would pay my hotel bill and offer me a small per-diem until that time. After receiving this news I was fairly curtly dismissed. At least I was to be given another chance, and my fate of selling insurance postponed awhile further.

I returned to my hotel room elated and despite its lack of proper hot water I was all set to wait out my three weeks until Spring Training locally seeing the sights, until I had found the hot springs hotel flyer under my door the next morning. All I could assume was that someone at the ball club knew I would be definitely be in need of a hot therapeutic soak, and if these springs did have a reputation for healing, so much the better. I packed a small bag and stumbled out into the ice and snow and thus met the lovely Shinju.

I learned much less about her. She came from a small village on the rougher western side of the island, and had to work hard 'not always doing what she would have preferred to have been doing', she said, in order to support the village, which mostly fished but also grazed a small herd of cows on nearby Osado mountain range. Most unmarried women of her clan, like her, worked in various jobs in the nearby bigger cities. I got the unstated impression, that she was of low status in her village, and she did not often return to visit her home and her visits home weren't especially joyous ones.

She was happy with her teaching job in Niigata and enjoyed it very much, and would like to continue to do it for the near future, but her 'Great Uncle' would prefer that she did 'other work instead'. She was naturally gifted at languages and spoke several other ones including Korean, Mandarin and French, all at least passably, and she knew smatterings of several more. She liked being 'independent'. She had no boyfriend at the moment, and admitted that dating men from 'off of the island' was against custom and... 'difficult'. She changed the topic right then and there and started to tell me more about the island.

Sato was Japan's fifth largest island off of the western coast of Honsu with a permanent population of about 60,000 people. It was pretty much associated in most people's minds with its former role as a place of permanent exile where prisoners were worked to death in the tunnels of its freezing cold gold mines. Even as late as World War II, hundreds, if not thousands of Allied POWs worked and died in its hostile and unforgiving mines. Its remote, storm-battered rocky coasts covered much of the island, and most of the population was squeezed into 10% of its land in a flat region across the middle of the island between the northern and southern mountain ranges. In summer the green hills and quaint fishing ports did receive some tourism, but things were considered 'very backwards' there, with many customs and most houses and temple shrines very little changed from the way 'things have always been' over several hundred years. There was a small airport that usually offered daily flights to Niigata, but in winter service was a much less regular. That would be good to know for the future.

It was to the island's provincial capital, Ryotsu, we were heading, but it was little more than a fishing and tourist village itself, but here is where the ferry (and in the summertime the speedier hydrofoil boats) docked, and with my hand holding hers, she found the correct bus for us to take. Her village lay a bit farther north than my intended destination, but they were relatively near each other, both being on the far west side of the island, and north of the town of Aikawa, home to the nearby infamous slave labor gold mines of the 17^th to 20^th century (they finally closed after WW-II). My stop would be first, she would then have another twenty to thirty minutes to go, depending upon weather conditions, which seemed to get worse by the minute.

My companion also seemed to get more fidgety the closer we seemed to get. I was sure the poor weather and icy road conditions bothered her, and she kept grasping my hand tighter and tighter, but I also got the impression she was not at all anxious to part from my company. By the time we reached the west coastal road at Sawata, she was resting her head on my shoulder and clutching my arm tightly as if she did not want to, or could not let me go. We didn't speak much to each other much on this part of the bus trip, but we would periodically look at each other and smile.

Once we neared Aikawa near dusk, conditions if at possible became even worse. The road was quickly becoming covered with ice and snow and the wind seemed to drive both nearly horizontally over the road, reducing the bus driver's view to mere feet. Most of the other passengers got off in Aikawa, to stay here for the duration of the storm. Shinju asked the driver if he thought he could reach my hotel, and giving the name of the small village nearby (not hers, but also close to it), the driver nodded his head saying "Hai" emphatically. Apparently an excellent Saki factory was very nearby (the island has at least seven famous ones, including the famous 'Alcohol Republic' town of Mano, further south) and he would love to put up his feet there for the storm. He would persevere!

Off we went again, and at times I was sure that we were no longer actually driving on the road in the snowy darkness, and certainly no one else was out on the road that evening. He continued to drive slowly and with a visibility of only a few feet, and somehow he kept us out of the ditches (and out of the Sea of Japan) until we finally made it to our destination at last!

Our most fortunate and skilled driver bid us farewell and drove back down the road to his awaiting (and well earned) liquid rewards, and Shinju went to get us rooms, and she returned a few minutes later saying that she got us one. I had asked her to check on rooms (plural) but either they were all taken (unlikely, as we seemed to be the only ones there) or else my kind young lady had other plans for the evening, because she returned bearing only that single room key.

The room was small and had traditional floor mat beds and a central charcoal heater (dangerous things in a snow storm that can quickly cover over window air vents). We cracked a window open the least amount we dared to, keeping fresh air in (and hopefully CO poisoning out) but we were going to be cold, even with the heater. Shinju went to ask for additional blankets and checked on the availability of dinner, both of which were soon bestowed upon us with abundance.

The dinner of fresh seafood was fabulous, the best I'd ever eaten, and we had several choices of cooked and raw sashimi fish and I was introduced to sushi for the first time and was soon eating it like a native. We also had a few warming drops of one of the local Saki's. It was good, but an acquired taste, and I determined to start acquiring it right away. Shinju would never let me pour my own cup and always insisted upon serving me at every available opportunity. I was becoming fonder of this very beautiful and seemingly very traditional woman with every moment, and it helped that few cups of the warming local brew was soon numbing the pained tightness in my knee down to a more tolerable throbbing dull roar.