From Round to Square (and back)

For The Emperor's Teacher, scroll down (↓) to "Topics." It's the management book that will rock the world (and break the vase, as you will see). Click or paste the following link for a recent profile of the project: http://magazine.beloit.edu/?story_id=240813&issue_id=240610

A new post appears every day at 12:05* (CDT). There's more, though. Take a look at the right-hand side of the page for over four years of material (2,000 posts and growing) from Seinfeld and country music to every single day of the Chinese lunar calendar...translated. Look here ↓ and explore a little. It will take you all the way down the page...from round to square (and back again).
*Occasionally I will leave a long post up for thirty-six hours, and post a shorter entry at noon the next day.

Friday, August 1, 2014

Besuboru Guy—Baseball: Remade in Japan

Click here for the "Celebrity Commentary" Resource Center—(all posts available)
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Celebrity Commentary" (coming soon)
This is a "small" (小) post—click here for an explanation of Round and Square post lengths.
***  *** 
One year ago on Round and Square (1 June 2012)—The Accidental Ethnographer: Ocean and Isle (b)
Two years ago on Round and Square (1 June 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: Newman's Mail

[a] Individual and Society RF
可飛ばせ, 田中!
Let 'er rip, Tanaka!  OR
Fly to base, Tanaka!
—Common Japanese baseball chant
(Tanaka is a common surname, like "Smith")
 
I'm leaping for joy, because I have a month to instruct my global friends about a terrific game that many people don't understand well. 

Think that you know baseball just because you played it in Little League, or because you enjoy watching the Boston Red Sox?
[b] Carp Sox RF

You don't have a clue (this is unusually direct language for a Japanese team player...すみません). 

What I mean to say, is that thinking you understand baseball in Japan just because you know (American) baseball is like saying you understand Japanese biological research laboratories just because you grasp the scientific method).

Not a clue だよ!

I will give you some of them in the next month of posts.

Sheer joy.

[If you don't read Japanese, but want to have some sense of the Japanese kana and kanji in these posts, just copy the phrases and paste them into translation software such as Babylon or Google Translate].
[c] October 様 RF
[Originally posted on August 1, 2014]

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