The Power of High School Sports

This touching story from the New York Times is another example of the power of high school sports.  

In Japan, High Schoolers Use Baseball to Help Forget

By KEN BELSON

OFUNATO, Japan — Entering this port city by car these days means confronting nature’s fury and its fickleness all at once. The tsunami that hit Japan’s northeastern coast four months ago tore through the modest downtown, gutting buildings, crushing cars like beer cans and sweeping shops out to sea.

Rebuilt Seasons

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 and the nuclear crisis that has followed, several high school baseball teams have found that preparing for their regional qualifying tournaments has been a steadying factor in lives that have been forever changed.

But in areas out of the wave’s grasp, homes stand unscathed, rice paddies are still productive, and parks are filled with squealing children.

The awkward contrast is being played out across northeastern Japan, including at schools here. Perched on a hill overlooking the destruction, Ofunato High School is much as it was before March 11, save for a few broken windows. In the lobby are several glass cases that include trophies won by the school’s baseball team.

Less than two miles away, Ofunato Higashi High School’s Kayanaka campus also escaped serious damage. But now the hallways are filled with many students from Takata High School in Rikuzentakata, which is 10 miles from Ofunato and was consumed by the tsunami. And because military jeeps and trucks are parked on Higashi’s baseball field, Takata’s team must train at another school in town.

Baseball, though, has been a way for players and coaches from damaged and undamaged schools to resume a predictable if arduous routine they followed before the waves arrived. Players are more focused because on Thursday, the regional tournament to determine who will represent Iwate Prefecture at the national high school championship in August will begin. That is helping some forget, at least for a few hours, that they lost an uncle, or that they are living in a refugee center.

“As you can see, when they are practicing on the field, everything is the same as before the disaster, and they seem to be getting excited as the tournament approaches,” said Akishi Sasaki, the manager of Takata’s baseball team. “But once they go home, some students may pass the rubble. They probably feel down. I worry about those whose emotions soar and sink each day.”

There are 55 players on Takata’s baseball team, and it is Masato Owada’s job to speak for them. The wiry team captain and a first baseman, he carries himself like a yakyu jin, someone who devotes himself to baseball, not unlike a devotee of the martial arts. Owada has played baseball nonstop since elementary school.

With a straight back, he is unfailingly polite and, despite his circumstances, remarkably composed. About one-third of his teammates lost their homes, so he is relatively lucky to still be living with his family in Rikuzentakata, which had 23,300 residents before the tsunami. But to get to Ofunato, a city he rarely visited before, he must now commute on winding coastal roads clogged with construction crews.

Perhaps because the disruption in his life has been so acute, Owada appears particularly devoted to baseball, if only to escape the reality that his hometown has been irreversibly altered. Like every high school player, he dreams of playing in Koshien Stadium near Osaka, where the national tournament is held. But now he has extra motivation.

“My goal is to go to Koshien to make the people who are supporting us happy and to encourage Rikuzentakata to recover,” Owada said. “As a result of this experience, we became independent and our teamwork became better. And when we play as well as we can, people who see us will be thrilled.”

His sentiments are echoed by ballplayers across Japan, though they are especially poignant when uttered in this corner of the country this year. Rikuzentakata’s waterfront took the tsunami’s full force. About 2,000 residents died or are missing. More than 3,300 homes were destroyed, and nearly every building in the city center was wiped out. The mayor survived the tsunami by clinging to a railing on the roof of the city hall as the waves crashed over him.

Owada and his teammates escaped by running to a second ball field on higher ground. But their three-story school, which faces the water, was ruined. Four months later, its classrooms still have mounds of mud and waterlogged textbooks on the floor. Every window was smashed, and curtains flap in the wind.

On a ball field in front of the school, unmatched sneakers sit next to sweatsuits, a handful of aluminum bats and strands of paper cranes, their colors faded by the seawater. Albums with pictures of students are near a collection of medals won by various clubs. Computer motherboards shine in the sun.

Given the completeness of the destruction, it is hard to imagine how any school will be rebuilt there. Even if one is — and that could take years — it is unclear how many families with children will return to a city that has had its economy devastated. The only people who seem to be working in the city center are garbage haulers, a few gas station attendants and convenience-store clerks who sell their inventory from the backs of trucks.

We hear from Iwate prefectural officials that Takata High School will be rebuilt in Takata at some point in the future,” said Sasaki, the team’s manager. “That’s the only moral support for us now.”

Rebuilt Seasons

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11 and the nuclear crisis that has followed, several high school baseball teams have found that preparing for their regional qualifying tournaments has been a steadying factor in lives that have been forever changed.

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So, for the foreseeable future, Sasaki and his players will keep working, studying and playing in Ofunato, which had 40,700 residents before the storm. Like Rikuzentakata, the city is surrounded by steep mountains that are reminiscent of coastal Maine or Alaska. This topography created a funnel that accelerated the tsunami’s waves and gave things in its path little chance.

That includes Keita Niinuma’s grandmother, who died, and his house, which was destroyed. Like many players in Japan that afternoon, Niinuma, the pitcher on Ofunato High’s team, was at practice. When the earthquake hit, the field cracked. The waves that followed washed away most of his belongings at home.

For three days, Niinuma wore his practice uniform because the police would not allow residents to re-enter their neighborhood. When Niinuma went to see what was left of his home, he picked through the rubble and found his game uniform, which he washed. It was an upbeat moment in an otherwise trying time.

“The students are positive, but I think they are getting exhausted,” said Teruhiko Suzuki, the principal of Ofunato High School. “We can hardly see the town recovering its rhythms, and students cannot help but feel the hardships their families are feeling. I think they are having a tough time.”

One of the tsunami’s many cruelties is that in destroying cities, it ended up putting them on the map as well. Indeed, before March 11, few Japanese outside this part of the country would have found Ofunato and Rikuzentakata on a map. Now, their names make up a sad roll call.

But the tsunami also connected the Tohoku region to the rest of the country in other ways. For instance, Rikuzentakata’s team was invited to play practice games against a high school in Gunma Prefecture, more than 300 miles away. Ofunato’s team received 15 boxes of equipment from Mukawa High School in Hokkaido. Some students sent their worn-out practice caps. On the underside of the bills they wrote phrases like “Don’t give in to the disaster” and “Let’s meet at Koshien.”

In late May, Ofunato’s team also visited Kobe, through an old connection. In the summer of 1984, when Ofunato made it to the semifinals at Koshien, Ryuei Sato, the team’s manager at the time, befriended Mitsuhiro Kitahara, the manager of Shinko Gakuen in Kobe.

Two weeks after the tsunami, Kitahara contacted Sato and invited Ofunato’s team to visit. He wanted to give the boys from Ofunato a chance to take their minds off their troubles at home, but also to have his players — some of whom were not born when an earthquake leveled Kobe in 1995 — meet others now dealing with adversity.

“This is not something they can learn in classes,” Kitahara said. “They are lucky to be on the baseball team here to learn something they can hardly experience in other places.”

The local Rotary Club paid for a 15-hour bus trip from Ofunato to Kobe. Thrust together under the glare of television cameras, the boys were awkward around one another at first. But it rained the day of their exhibition game, which forced them to practice indoors together.

“I thought that they were down, and I wanted to encourage them,” said Takuma Hatokawa, the captain at Shinko Gakuen, who exchanges text messages with Noriyuki Ujiie, Ofunato’s captain. “But it was the opposite. I was the one being encouraged by them. They were so cheerful, and we became good friends.”

Of course, no two-day excursion will rebuild Ofunato. But Toru Yoshida, Ofunato’s manager and the captain of the 1984 squad that went to Koshien, said that the trip taught his players that cities could be rebuilt if the people in them persevered.

“Before the disaster, I told my players that we have to stick to baseball itself,” he said. “But things may be different this year. Facing a disaster of this scale, this is the year we have to be conscious of the people who are watching us and to encourage them.”