WARMING UP TO WALLY : Yonamine, First American to Play in Japan, Was Not an Instant Hit

He’s been called the Jackie Robinson of Japanese baseball, and if that might be stretching things a bit, there is truth in what the designation implies.

Wally Yonamine sat in the small Tokyo pearl shop he runs with his wife, Jane, in Tokyo’s trendy, nightclub-dominated Roppongi district. From beneath their second-story shop, the moaning sounds of congested street traffic--there is no other kind in Tokyo--wafted up the stairwell.

“You can call me the Jackie Robinson of Japanese baseball only in the sense that I was a pioneer, the first American, but not really in the sense of the kind of discrimination (Robinson) put up with,” he said.

“I mean, at first the fans over here threw stuff at me and yelled at me, but I never had to deal with anything like Robinson did.”

For Robinson, who in 1947 became the first black in major league baseball, it was, “Nigger go home!”

For Yonamine--pronounced: Yo-na-meena--who in 1950 became the first post-war American to play baseball in Japan, it was, “Yankee go home!”

Since Yonamine made the leap from Class B baseball at Salt Lake City to the Yomiyuri Giants in Tokyo, about 350 Americans have played in Japan’s major leagues since World War II.

But for the first one, it wasn’t easy.

He grew up in what was then a tiny Maui village, Lahaina, the son of a father who had left Okinawa for Hawaii in 1907, at 17, as a contract sugar cane field laborer. His father died last year, at 98. Yonamine’s mother, 89, who was born on Maui, lives in Honolulu.

“I was a good athlete my first two years in high school on Maui, but the school was very small and my father wanted me to go to a big Honolulu school to play football,” Yonamine said.

In the last two years of World War II, Yonamine was a standout running back at Honolulu’s Farrington High. He had a bow-legged, jump-start, slashing running style that caused almost as much excitement at Honolulu prep games as had the running of ‘Squirmin’ Herman Wedemeyer, two years older than Yonamine, who had gone from Hawaii high school stardom to St. Mary’s College in California.

Longtime Honolulu newspaperman Bill Wong remembers Yonamine.

“He had a slashing kind of running style that made him very hard to tackle,” Wong said.

“You could call him a prep superstar in the post-war period over here. A lot of old-time Hawaii people remember him very well.”

In a sports trivia encyclopedia, Yonamine could be named in three categories:

--First American to play post-World War II baseball in Japan.

--He’s possibly the only Japanese-American ever to play major league pro football in the United States.

--He’s on the short list of those who have played NFL-level football with no college background, as did Cookie Gilchrist and Otis Sistrunk.

In 1945, his dream was to play football at Ohio State, which had awarded him a football scholarship. But the world was still at war, and for a young, athletic Japanese-American, Ohio State was a goal out of reach.

The day after he graduated from Farrington High in Honolulu, in June, 1945, he was drafted by the U.S. Army.

“I figured going in I was going to get shipped out to Italy (to the 442nd Regimental Combat Battalion, the heavily decorated all-Japanese-American unit that served in France and Italy),” he said.

“But then the war in Europe ended and then Japan surrendered. So I spent two years at Schofield Barracks on Oahu, peeling potatoes and playing football and baseball.”

Yonamine must have caught the eye of at least one pro scout, because immediately upon his discharge, in 1947, he joined the San Francisco 49ers of the All America Football Conference as a reserve halfback. The 49ers joined the National Football League in 1950.

In the club’s 1947 team photo, which hangs on his pearl shop wall, Yonamine is in the back row, second from left. His salary that season was $7,000.

“I had a lot to learn, so I sat on the bench for most of that ’47 season,” he said.

“I was playing more in ’48 until I broke my wrist. But by then I was playing a lot of off-season baseball, and thinking about pro baseball.”

Yonamine had been a headliner as a prep football player in Hawaii, but he had been equally adept at baseball. And in his Army stint, he played against the best competition in the world--touring U.S. major leaguers.

“I played against Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial--I learned a lot of baseball in two years,” he said.

He also met a San Franciscan named Lefty O’Doul, who as an 11-season National Leaguer hit a career .354. Later, he managed the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals.

“I had met Lefty O’Doul in Hawaii when he brought some major league all-stars over there during the war,” Yonamine said. “He liked the way I played.

“So after I got hurt with the 49ers, I contacted him. In 1948, he was managing the Seals. He signed me to a minor league contract and I was sent to Salt Lake City, which then was Class B ball.

“He’d seen me play baseball. He knew I had some ability. By 1950 I was hitting .335 and playing center field pretty well. I was the No. 4 hitter in the league. But I wasn’t hitting home runs, and I knew that would keep me out of the majors.

“So Lefty suggested I take a crack at Japanese ball. I owe him a lot.

“I had a Honolulu friend named Sam Uehara who owned a cafe called the Smile Cafe, which was sort of a Honolulu athletes’ hangout. He knew a lot of people in Japan and he set up the contacts for me.

“But without O’Doul steering me in that direction in 1950, I have no idea where I’d be today.”

The day in 1951 that Yonamine arrived in Tokyo, after an 18-hour Pan American Clipper flight (with an hour’s stop on Wake Island), the Yomiuri Giants signed him to a two-year contract and gave him a $2,000 bonus.

“I started at $185 a month and thought I’d struck it rich,” he said. “In Salt Lake, I’d made $150 a month. And the Giants were paying my rent, too.

“In those days, day laborers in Japan made $20 a month.”

Yonamine joined the Giants that first year in mid-season, hiked his average to .354, drew lots of attention, and was approached by the team’s owner in the locker room one afternoon.

“He came up to me and through an interpreter said, ‘You look lonesome. I’m going to bring your wife over to join you.’ ”

The Japanese, who had become intrigued by baseball when an all-star team featuring Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmy Foxx toured the country in 1934, had never seen the game played the way Wally Yonamine played it.

“He was sort of a Maury Wills-Pete Rose type,” said Ike Ikuhara, who is the Dodgers’ liaison man with Japanese baseball.

“He stole a lot of bases and he ran the bases unlike anyone over there before him. He wasn’t real fast, but he could read pitchers very well and he knew a lot more about sliding than most Japanese players.

“My recollection is no one had seen a hook slide executed as well as Wally did it.

“You could say Wally brought Little Ball to Japan. He was a great bunter. So many times, a throw would beat him to second base, but he’d beat the tag because of his sliding skills.”

Eventually, Yonamine won the Japanese over. In 1957, he became the first foreigner to win the most-valuable-player award in Japan. His batting average, .311, is among the highest ever compiled in Japan.

In his 11 seasons, he won three 1950s Central League batting championships with averages of .361, .338 and .343.

As a manager, his 1974 Chunichi Dragons team won the Japan World Series--but the team’s owner fired him two years later.

In Japanese baseball, players, coaches and managers tend to remain with their teams for considerably longer periods than is the case with the U.S. major leagues.

But that’s not Wally. In other words, you can move a Japanese-American in Japan, but you can’t take the American out of him.

“Wally has been with a lot of different clubs (six)) as a manager-coach,” Ikuhara said.

“That’s very unusual for Japan. Japanese tend to stay put in their jobs. But when Wally sees an opportunity somewhere else, to make more money, he takes advantage of it.”

But after 38 years, at 63, he’s still an American in Tokyo.

He grinned, as he gestured toward his Hawaii-born wife, who waited on an American tourist at the pearl counter.

“When I got fired from my last managing job last year, I was ready to finally go back to Hawaii, to retire,” he said. “But Jane’s making so much money here with this store, we can’t leave.”

Yonamine’s two daughters, Wallis and Amy, run a branch Yonamine pearl-jewelry store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

On the busy little Tokyo street, across the street from the Ibis Hotel, the small blue sign above the sidewalk says, “Yonamine Pearls.”

If there’s an American celebrity in Japan, you might find him or her in Yonamine’s. Nearly every available space on the shop’s walls is occupied by autographed photos of sports and entertainment figures buying pearls.

Sports visitors have included Pete Rose, Florence Griffith Joyner, Lee Trevino, Gary Carter, Carl Yastrzemski, Cal Ripken Jr., Warren Spahn, Lefty Gomez, Sparky Anderson, Brooks Robinson and Willie Mays.

Among the non-sports celebrities have been Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Kissinger, Isaac Stern, Andre Kostelanetz, Yo-Yo Ma, Brooke Shields and Barbara Bush.

For sure, here’s a guy who has come a long way from sleeping on the floor, on newspapers, on Japanese trains. Today, when his thoughts drift back to 1951, he sees a lonely young American in Japan, with no knowledge of the Japanese language or culture, and with no friends. And he wasn’t crazy about Japanese food, either.

“I’d eaten Japanese food in Hawaii, but I never liked sashimi (raw fish),” he said.

“So the first couple years I lived here, I ate three huge bowls of rice every day, with a couple of raw eggs and Japanese pickles.

“When I got here in 1951, things were really tough in Japan,” he said.

“For one thing, this country has a great train system now, but then it was very primitive. And baseball teams traveled in third-class cars, and the trains were coal-burning steam locomotives.

“When it came time to sleep, we set out newspapers on the floor and lay down. In the summer, we had to open the windows for ventilation. So with soot blowing in you were black, head to toe, when you got to where you were going.

“In those days, the worst trip was Tokyo to Sapporo. It was 25 hours.”

It was particularly difficult for a young American in post-war Japan but Yonamine said he never complained.

It’s not the Japanese way.

Within a season or two, Wally Yonamine had introduced to Japan the American way of baseball. And at first, it went over like a lead balloon.

“In Japan, even today, young athletes have never played football or rugby, so they don’t know anything about contact sports,” he said.

“In Hawaii, I’d been taught as a kid that when you’re the lead baserunner on a double-play ball, you knock down that second baseman and break it up. Well, the first few times I did that over here, people were shocked. It was something that just wasn’t done. It was unsportsmanlike.

“So I started getting a lot of ‘Yankee Go Home!’ yells, and people threw things at me. I wasn’t a real Japanese, they knew, and that upset some people. It was partly that I was a gaijin (foreigner), and partly because of my aggressive style.

“But it was also because I was an American, and Japan was occupied by America then.

“Now, Japanese fans realize it’s just the way Americans play and they accept it. But it’s still difficult to teach young players how to take out an infielder or a catcher--they just don’t know anything about contact.

“When I managed here, I taught an aggressive style of baseball, but Japan-born managers and coaches still don’t.”

Yonamine put another made-in-the-USA stamp on Japanese baseball--the manner in which he handled pitchers. Or tried to.

Almost all U.S. observers of Japanese baseball agree that Japanese teams overwork their pitchers.

Matt Keough, who has pitched for the Hanshin Tigers for several years, said that Japanese pitchers are asked to throw every day.

“Batting averages in Japan sky-rocket late in the season, because all the Japanese pitchers are worn out by then,” he said.

Said Yonamine: “By August, a Japanese pitcher’s fastball starts looking like a grapefruit coming in. The day after they pitch here, a Japanese pitcher goes to the bullpen and throws maybe a hundred pitches.

“It’s the one thing about the way they play baseball over here I’ve never understood. When I managed, I told my pitchers not to throw for the two days after they pitched, so they’d find a catcher and go somewhere else and throw.”

Japanese players nowadays are much bigger than post-war players, Yonamine said, but not necessarily as athletic.

“The Japanese leagues have lately gotten into weight training and the players eat better than they used to, so they’re bigger,” he said.

“But I’ve noticed that the biggest players here don’t seem to have the reflexes of the smaller players--they have trouble getting around on fastballs.”

He doesn’t foresee a trend of good Japanese players playing U.S. major league ball.

“There are eight or 12 pitchers here who could pitch in the U.S., and maybe eight or 12 hitters,” he said.

“But unless there’s a dramatic change in the dollar-yen exchange, it won’t happen. See, in Japan, a big high school star is looking at a $400,000 or $500,000 bonus just coming out of high school.

“The top-line stars over here make much more than they would in the States.”

Yonamine’s managing career reached its apex in 1974, when his Chunichi Dragons won Japan’s World Series. On the wall, the photo shows Yonamine being carried off the field, literally on his back, by jubilant fans and players. He appears to be laughing at the skies.

In his boyhood, he laughed at the skies, too. And the memory is pulling him back, to Hawaii.

And now, after all this time, he wants to go home again.

Try to imagine Lahaina, Maui, in 1940. Wally Yonamine can remember.

“It was an extremely beautiful, quiet, small place when I was a kid,” he said. “No one came there then. In those days, you wouldn’t see a single face in Lahaina you didn’t know.”