Late one night, and lost, drunk, in the dairy aisle of a Tokyo convenience store, I spent five minutes trying to work out whether the carton I’d just picked up had milk in or not. Google Translate’s camera app didn’t help. “Bulgaria!” the label read when I scanned it with my phone, ‘4 arrange the lance! Of bacteria in the hen! Tummy Keep Good.” You get used to it. There are awkward bits and pieces of English all around Japan. “Let’s watch the great power of live battle of men on the big screen!” is my favourite, from a poster advertising a rugby fanzone in Fuchu. The jacket-back slogan “vigorous throw-up – since 1973” is a close second.
It isn’t easy getting this stuff right. Just ask your friend in that Superdry hoodie, the one with “extreme speed try test” written across the front in kanji. There are plenty of Japanese words that even the experts struggle to translate exactly. Like doryoku, which comes up over and again when you’re reading or talking about Japanese sport. It means effort, yes, but ability, striving and endeavour, too. And all that still doesn’t quite capture its significance.
Fortunately there’s all sorts of lore about the men and women who personified doryoku. Like the champion baseball team at Ichiko school, who used to have a workout regimen called “bloody urine” because they practiced so hard they’d piss red at the end of the day. Or the “death training” philosophy of the famous Waseda baseball coach Suishu Tobita, who wrote “if the players don’t try so hard as to vomit blood in practice, then they cannot hope to win games”.
The history of Koshien, Japan’s high school baseball tournament, seems to be full of these stories. Like how the legendary Sadaharu Oh won the title for his school by pitching four games in four days even though he had blisters so bad the blood was dripping down his fingers onto the ball. When he grew up, Oh would to sign his autographs “doryoku”. These are all old and well-worn stories now, and overly-familiar to anyone who knows them, but new for the rest of us.
It was doryoku I saw at Yamanote high school, where the kids in the first XV were doing six hours training a day, six days a week. And doryoku I heard about in the words of three teenagers who had come over from New Zealand to play there, when they spoke with awe about how much training they were being made to do. “Back in New Zealand we were training twice a week, here we are training every day, so it’s way more intense,” one of them said, “and these guys are just monsters in gym, they spend too much time there, they all want to get big to climb over everyone they play.”
Those kids at Yamanote weren’t the first foreigners to struggle with the concept. The baseball writer Robert Whiting filled his brilliant book, You Gotta Have Wa, with stories about overseas pros who struggled to cope with the workload. Like the former Major League Baseball all-star Davey Johnson, who flopped at the Yomiuri Giants because the endless batting practice gave him a neuroma. And they still wouldn’t let him sit out training.
I was thinking about all this while I was talking to Toshiaki Hirose last week. Hirose spent two years playing as Japan’s captain under Eddie Jones. He quit in 2015, but four years later he still winces when you ask him what it was like. “Very hard,” he said, shaking his head, “very, very hard.” But Hirose had come up through Japan’s high school system, same as his teammates, and what I couldn’t work out was how Jones could have worked him any harder than he was already used to.
“Yes,” Hirose explained, “in Japan, we always do very long training, even from when we’re very young, but we don’t always do very good training, that’s the difference.” With Jones, he said, it was more about quantity than quality. “Eddie made us train for a short time but at a very high intensity.”
There’s a clear echo here of another of the characters in Whiting’s book, the coach Don Blasingame, who was one of the first foreigners to manage a top Japanese baseball team. Blasingame had spent 14 years in Japan as a player and coach when he took over at the Hanshin Tigers in 1979, but it still didn’t work. Blasingame reckoned one of the big problems was that his players were training so hard that they were getting tired in the back half of the season. Just like Jones he told his team it wasn’t how long they practiced that mattered, but how well. He cut down spring camp and practice sessions to half the amount the other teams were doing. The Japanese players hated it. Blasingame was fired after a season and a half.
That was 40 years ago though, and this Japan team have managed to fold together the traditional Japanese way of doing things with what Jones and his successor Jamie Joseph learned in Australia and New Zealand. The doryoku is still there. You can see it in their fitness levels, and their frantic speed of play. But their game is about more than hard work now. There are some powerful emotional currents pulling this Japanese team through this World Cup. Joseph wasn’t exaggerating when he said his team are being “driven and supported by the whole country”. More than 60 million people tuned in to watch them beat Scotland. They must appreciate the doryoku, but maybe they’re learning, too, that effort is never enough in itself. Whatever you call it.
