HOT ITEM : All of Japan Focuses on Prep Tournament

Ah, August in Japan. It’s hot, humid, washed by typhoons, a time of nostalgic hometown visits and a marathon of high school baseball that holds the country in a sweaty, emotional embrace for two weeks.

The schoolboys’ baseball tournament ended Tuesday in a national finale with Teikyo High School of Tokyo winning a 10-inning thriller 2-0 over Ikuei High of Sendai, a large city in northern Japan.

The two teams lined up at home plate, doffed their caps and bowed deeply to each other, tears streaming down the faces of both victors and losers.

The Teikyo team tearfully sang its school song, and it seemed that summer, as usual in this country sometimes wrongly thought to be full of stoics, was ending in a bath of teen-age ballplayers’ emotions.

“I was so happy I cried,” Teikyo captain Koichi Gamo said.

Fans of both teams cheered madly throughout the game, with continuous blasting by pep bands, rhythmic chants and clapping led by squads of cheerleaders.

It has been like this every day since Aug. 9, when 49 schools started the elimination tournament at 58,000-seat Koshien Stadium in Osaka, the country’s biggest baseball stadium. It’s Japan’s summer festival, a celebration in which every corner of the country sends a team up for a moment of glory or despair in the national spotlight.

The tournament coincides with another hometown fete, the mid-August Obon season, when many city-dwellers go home for family reunions and to pay respects at ancestors’ graves, and they have time to relax in front of the television to watch baseball.

The 49 teams that competed in this 71st summer tourney were the winners of local contests that started with a record 3,990 schools, from Okinawa in the south to Hokkaido in the north. Fresh-faced young athletes only 17 or 18 may leap to high-paying professional baseball with a great tournament, and they certainly can enjoy the swoons of teen-age girls who crush to the fences to photograph their idols.

It is not only a time for teen-agers. Adults, too, pay close attention to the long tournament.

“It goes back to the close-knit family,” said Corky Alexander, a longtime American resident of Japan who edits the weekly Tokyo Weekender. “People are so enamored of their kids here that they love to see these games.”

For two weeks, professional baseball is overshadowed by the youngsters’ games. Tuesday’s edition of the daily Nikkan Sports devoted its first four pages to the semifinals, and pro baseball was relegated to page five -- even the news that American player Warren Cromartie, batting .402 for the Yomiuri Giants, has enough at-bats to become Japan’s first .400 hitter if he sits out the rest of the season.

Baseball fever can virtually empty a town like Naruto, a farming town east of Tokyo that sent 6,000 of its 20,000 people to Osaka on Aug. 10 to cheer the local team. Naruto won, and a week later Naruto was deserted again as 6,000 people boarded 106 chartered buses and several special trains to travel 300 miles to Osaka, only to join in the agony of defeat for their boys.

“The secret of the tournament’s popularity is that it is conducted nationwide, on a prefectural (state) basis, so everyone has a local team to root for,” said Toru Aoyama, an editor with Number, a leading sports magazine. “Japan’s pro teams are all too tied up with their corporate owners, not the areas where they are based.”