A Robert Whiting book about the more recent wave of Japanese baseball players to the US. Gets at some of the cultural differences that underly the different interpretations of the same game and how it is played. His previous book, Gotta Have Wa, looked at American players going to Japan to play so this one gives us the other way of looking at it. As a hardcover, it was called the Meaning of Ichiro, which reminds me that the whole book is worth reading just for the first chapter about Ichiro's upbringing and his father, Nobuyuki. And I quote,
"A person does not live alone. Our lives are not out own. They are a gift from heaven. Just like our physical bodies. We are created and nurtured by our parents, by all mankind, by the wind and the rain, by the food we eat and countless other things that have supported our hearts, soul and spirit. So, in a sense, they are not really our bodies. We live because we are allowed to live. I taught this to my son Ichiro again and again."