Yo, did you know that “hancho” is a Japanese word? I didn’t until I got on the horn a few weeks ago with a man from one of the Nippon Pro Baseball teams.
He’s an older Japanese gentleman who spent some time working and studying on the East Coast, losing his job after a company named Federal Express bought out the smaller shipping company for which he worked.
Mr. Shipping returned to Japan and began working for a famous Japanese shipping and transportation company that happened to own a baseball team. Now he does more work for them on the baseball side of operations. His is an interesting but not uncommon route to becoming a Japanese baseball team’s manager of international affairs.
Unlike some other “international” guys, Mr. Shipping speaks English very well and is an extremely learned man to boot. I imagine that he would be an excellent JEOPARDY! contestant, as he never fails to sprinkle a few of the latest headlines and add a dash of old-fashioned wit to each of our conversations.
Once, I was asking him about a player in whom my club was interested, and found that his Port City . . . Longshoremen . . . held an option on his contract for 2009. The option gave the Longshoremen rights to the player within Japan, but he was free to sign with an American club in the event that there was interest.
I pressed on with more questions and found that the player’s wife had a lot of weight in the final decision, and my one-yen cell phone was burning up with all of the great information I was getting.
However, I asked one question too many, and Mr. Shipping responded in a delicate, smooth tone:
“Well, Mr. Mac, I do believe that what you’re asking me could be considered what you call ‘tampering,’ if I’m not mistaken.”
Though delivered in nearly accent-free English, he couched the comment in the typical Japanese layers of politeness and indirectness. The above phrase is very close to what spoken Japanese sounds like, especially when you’re accusing somebody of something.
I was as surprised to hear the word come out of his mouth as I was that I had crossed the line. So many times on this baseball journey, I have learned that I don’t know as much as I think I do about business and the way things work in the game.
We get words like “tampering” and “option clauses” on the television sports reports, but I would surmise that most people don’t know what they really mean. I know that I have thrown words around the concepts of which I was sure that I knew.
I was standing on a land mine in front of Mr. Shipping because I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing; I never thought that I would come close to committing an unethical business practice.
His tone was calm and he gently coaxed me out of the mess into which I had greedily stumbled. Our relative ages and experience left no doubt as to who held a higher position, but he assumed the upper hand so gracefully that he was easy to listen to and learn from.
I apologized tensely and took the lesson to heart, and he followed up with what could be described as a verbal muscle relaxer:
“So, I got it right, didn’t I? ‘Tampering?’”
Instant relief shot through my body and I almost dropped the phone. I chuckled and confirmed that he had indeed knocked that one right out of the park.
On another occasion, I called him to ask about an impending rule change for foreign scouts in Japan. An industrial league player named Junichi Tazawa is making huge waves right now by attempting to become the first scandal- and hardship-free Japanese player to play in the Major Leagues without first playing professionally in Japan.
There are plenty of young Japanese players ahead of him in the minor leagues who may get there more quickly, but Tazawa is a highly sought-after pitcher and officially asked not to be drafted in Japan for the second straight year. He is the banner case, the poster child, the final unwelcome wake-up call to those who want to protect Japanese baseball from evil, foreign predators.
NPB and the amateur leagues freaked out and slapped a multi-year penalty on any player, including Tazawa, who refuses to play in Japan first and goes abroad instead. Should they try to return, they will have to sit out two or three seasons, depending on the circumstances upon their departure.
Among other suggested measures was a registration system for MLB scouts, and I assumed that other, more stringent regulations would accompany such a system. In short, I was worried about my status in the country and with my club in the event of a rule change.
The day of the draft passed, Tazawa went untouched, and the penalty will be enforced for the first time. But there was no news on the MLB scouting registration. I wanted to know what was up, so I gave Mr. Shipping a ring.
He let me know the particulars from the NPB meetings and it sounded like there was nothing to worry about. My club does things on the up and up and we already have all of the pieces of proof and approval that we would need should the rule go through.
Mr. Shipping continued with the minutes of the meetings:
“You know, there were some problems a few years ago with some people posing as scouts or agents in order to get contact with our amateur players,” he explained.
“One man made false business cards and distributed them to high school coaches in order to gain access to the players and their families. Another disguised his voice on the telephone and tricked team officials into giving him free tickets.”
The whole while, I was giggling inside because Mr. Shipping is very meticulous with his pronunciation and his diction is a little stiff, but never incorrect as far as I’ve heard.
He uses so many official-sounding words, yet with his warm tone makes you feel like you’re sitting on the opposite side of a campfire from him, with a marshmallow on a stick in one hand and a mug of hot chocolate in the other.
“You know, I think that NPB simply wants to make sure that scouts are actually doing work at these games. So many of our [Japanese] scouts have been caught at the games with their friends, their families, their concubines - ”
I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I didn’t wake up that morning in Kochi, Japan expecting to hear the word “concubines.” Come to think of it, “mistress” is probably the only word (of the many we have for that . . . position . . .) he could have used there that wouldn’t have made me laugh.
All in all, I like calling Mr. Shipping because I get good baseball information from him, but he usually manages to enrich my day with some polite conversation or an eclectic bit of knowledge.
A few Japanese teams have shut down toward MLB guys thanks to the “Tazawa Problem,” and it’s refreshing to still have at least one official on your side. I’ve been hung up on, snarled at, ignored, and banished to the left field corner for scouting in the last two months. All of it makes me sad that my team isn’t interested in Tazawa, that might make some of the shoddy treatment worth it.
But Mr. Shipping and the other representatives of the Port City Longshoremen have been gentlemen since Day One.
Back to “hancho.” I think he made the comment in reference to that player’s wife, something along the lines of “she’s the head hancho in their home.”
He paused after he said it, and asked, “Do you know ‘hancho?’ It is an old Japanese word.”
He asked me to guess the origin and the characters used to write it, and I was searching through the Rolodex for matches to “honcho” because I had always seen it spelled that way in English. “Honcho” would have the long “o” sound in Japanese, and I came up with a pair of characters.
“Wrong,” he said gleefully. He then explained that a “han” is a squad or a patrol, and “cho” means “long” but is often used to refer to the head of a group or department (the words for “manager,” “department head,” and “principal” all contain the same “cho”). The word came from way back in ancient wartime Japan.
I instantly recognized “han” from the CSI episodes that make it over here. They’re called the “Chemistry Investigation Squad” in a literal translation, or “Kagaku So-sa Han” for those of you keeping score at home.
So there you have it. The origin of “hancho.” And the story of Mr. Shipping, the best ambassador of Japanese baseball and the head hancho of international relations in my book.