Three summers ago, I met a Japanese fellow by the name of Hiroaki. One of my best friends was visiting me in Japan, and another Japanese friend of mine invited Hiroaki along to make it a foursome.
We met at an English pub in Ikebukuro, one of the many fun parts of Tokyo, and the Americans introduced the Japanese to their first Irish Car Bombs. Twice. We said, “Let’s internationalization!” many times that night.
We couldn’t quit there, so we crammed ourselves into a karaoke box, followed the shaded words, and howled the night away. Sometime during the caterwauling and boozing, Hiroaki and I exchanged our cell phone addresses.
Fall fell quickly in Fukushima, and I took every opportunity to escape to the capital and watch pro baseball games. Hiroaki and I kept in contact, and he was happy to meet me in front of the various stadiums, provided that I had a backpack full of snacks and chilled beers.
We sat together in the outfield seats, right in the middle of the infamous cheer groups, and drank, sang, and shouted our heads off. He always had a last train to catch, and with the last bus to Fukushima leaving the city much too early, I always had a stairwell or park bench to find and curl up on or under, awaiting the morrow’s first return bus.
This happened three or four times, and would have happened again but for a Chiba Lotte Marines sweep of the Hanshin Tigers. Hiroaki had scored tickets to Game 6, but dumped them after the Marines won the first three games 10-1, 10-0, and 10-1.
We obviously had chemistry and something to talk about, and we texted and called each other frequently. Hiroaki was in his fourth year at a prestigious college in Tokyo, all set to become a ubiquitous salaryman at the Hitachi Company when springtime rolled around. I was finishing up my first year of adult life, and I was disappointed, discouraged, battered, and broke.
The baseball dream was fading as I kept running into brick walls in the States. I had written letters to MLB and all thirty teams once a week for a month and could count the number of meaningful responses on one hand. Almost half the teams hadn’t replied at all.
I was in a foreign country, in an area with no baseball team, with no contacts in the game and no prospects for work; I was farther from baseball than I had ever been. I decided to return to California and beat the pavement from there, hoping that I would be harder to ignore from the States.
I didn’t send anything to the Japanese clubs because I thought they wouldn’t have anything for me to do and because sending letters would be too much trouble. I didn’t think I had anything to offer that would put me over any Japanese job-seeker.
Then, out of the blue, Hiroaki emailed me, excited about getting some responses from Japanese baseball teams. He copied the letter he wrote and the letter the teams wrote back to him and sent them to me.
I thought he may have been having second thoughts about Hitachi and had done this for himself; I didn’t realize that he was writing this letter on my behalf until he explicitly said “my foreign friend” about halfway through.
It never even crossed my mind to have him do that for me, let alone ask him, but he did it. He sent out feeler emails to the twelve Japanese pro baseball companies and received two responses.
I was deeply touched that he would go through great lengths to do something like that. He believed in me when I wouldn’t believe in myself.
I was also surprised that he had actually gotten some feedback; surely those letters would find their way to the circular file with much more ease than would my own letters about me in my native language to organizations in my home country.
I couldn’t ignore the kind gesture or its implications, so I set to work writing a “self-appeal letter,” as they call it, and learning how to fill out a Japanese resume. It was as painful and tedious as I had feared it would be, but I had the inspiration that I had lacked before.
It took a week for me to copy all twelve letters and resumes. I suppose I could’ve printed them, but I wanted to show the companies my “fighting spirit” as well as demonstrate my gnarliness, so I decided to do it all by hand. I’ll remember that as long as I’m in my right mind.
The letters garnered responses from three teams and I got interviews with two of them, the Yokohama Bay Stars and the new Rakuten Golden Eagles! I didn’t get either position, although I now realize that I could have made things work with the Eagles if not for some bad information I got (and believed) about visa laws. I could have done a lot of things better with that short burst of energy toward a job in Japanese baseball, come to think of it.
Nonetheless, Hiroaki had saved my life in Japan with a dozen clicks of his mouse. He restored my confidence and encouraged me to continue the fight. He put rear-view mirrors on the plane to California and made the idea of returning to Japan a possibility in my mind.
He did it all with characteristic humility, and he still seems to have difficulty understanding just how seriously he affected my life. Hiroaki is the type of person who will give you something just fabulous and then stand back, look at you marveling over it, and wonder why you like it so much.
I see Hiroaki a couple times a year, and I attempt to return the favor, but nothing I do can reciprocate what he did for me. On top of that, he finds it difficult to accept help, consideration, gifts, love, encouragement, or anything else, for that matter.
He is the guy I turn to first when I’m having trouble in Japan, and I tell him to call on me in good times and bad, but he says he doesn’t want to bother me with his trifles. I think he means it sincerely. I have to work to get things about himself out of him, though it’s never tough to get him to come out and enjoy a few rounds of beers that I never let him buy.
Once, he told me why he wrote those letters. He thought it was a waste of talent for me not to have a job in Japanese baseball and simply decided to do something about it. I hope that I will be able to understand and feel that level of selflessness someday.
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