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.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Besuboru Guy—Strike!

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.
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One year ago on Round and Square (19 June 2012)—Fieldnotes From History: Provincial Elections (b)
Two years ago on Round and Square (19 June 2011)—Hurtin' Country: Meetin' Hank

[a] Individual and Society RF
可飛ばせ, 山本!
Let 'er rip, Yamamoto!  OR
Fly to base, Yamamoto!
—Common Japanese baseball chant
(Yamamoto is a common surname, like "Jenkins")

[b] Looking for a strike RF
And if Yamamoto wants to let 'er rip (and fly to base), he needs a good pitch down the middle of the plate. The pitcher needs to throw strikes, and the hitter should learn to hit those pitches. That's beseboro.

But this post is about the strike of 2004. Yes, Japanese baseball shut down in September 2004. And you know what? The fans sided with the players. The issues weren't salary or work conditions so much as how league play would be shaped (including the interleague play that we saw yesterday). The owners caved, everyone made up, and baseball got back on-track.

 


But still, there was a strike in Japan. That still makes me shake my Besuboro Guy head.

[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] One kind RF
[Originally posted on August 19, 2014]

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