It is amazing how some people look at Japan and see what is not there. For instance, one reviewer on this book said how most "Japanese players never had much real education, as high schools were more like minor leagues, so the player mostly read mangas (comic strips) on bus rides."

Mangas are much more than comic strips. They are books, written by adults largely for an adult audience. Business people with degrees read mangas.

In fact, the ignorance of Japanese culture reflects in many unfortunate incidences between Japanese citizens and American citizens. Mr. Cromartie's slugging of a pitcher more than illustates this point.

Baseball in Japan is brutal. They burn out their pitchers, for instance, rather than rotate them. In this book you'll see that Warren Cromartie started out his first season first as the hero that was going to save his team, then as the first half of the season wore on he was viewed by the press as a bum who wasn't worth the money they paid for him (Japanese players were, and maybe still are, paid very low salaries for the receipts they bring in for their owners). He then became a hero who batted very well on the second half of the season. Did Mr. Cromartie improve his batting? Perhaps. But more than likely by the second half the season the pitchers in Japan had worn out their arms, and could no longer throw as well.

Get this to learn Japanese culture, Japanese baseball, and one man's confusion and eventual acceptance of both.

Cromartie came back to the States and played his last season with the Royals as a pinch hitter/1B and finished the season with a .307 average as a part time player.

Get this book. It's worth it.

I grew up watching Warren Cromartie play for the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants during the late '80s. Cromartie was one of very few gaijin players who left a great impact, not only by the way he played the game, but also by his cocky attitude and behavior. For the Japanese media who love to stereotype American players as brashly self-arrogant, lazy, and powerful, Cromartie was such a perfect fit. Of course, they would not report on his side of story, this biography may be of a greater interest for those who viewed him as a gaijin those days. To me, the reader may miss the most interesting points if she just reads this book just as an account of "bizarre" experiences that an American went through in one of the most exotic places in the world.

With the presence of such colorful personalities as the manager Sadaharu Oh (whose career homerun record of 868 surpasses the American counterpart), his teammates, and old-fashioned traditionalists who would be labeled downright racists in many other civilized nations, the story never seems to bore the reader.

Unlike many other player biographies ghost written by mediocre sport writers, this is surprisingly an engaging book. Robert Whiting does a great job of incorporating his own views on cultural disparities between Japan and America into Cromartie's endeavor as a gaijin player. Many opinions expressed in the book overlap Whiting's other works on baseball, such as "You Gotta Have Wa" and "The Chrysanthemum and the Bad," but "Slugging It Out in Japan" is probably the most emotionally involved pieces of all.

The book goes through both a history of baseball in Japan, as well as challenges American's deal with over there. It covers the trials and tribulations of Americans like Bob Horner, who thrive on the diamond, but struggle off the field. It covers the adverserial relationship between Japanese coaches and their foreign (Gai-jin) charges. Any American going to work in Japan is well advised to pay attention!

How is Japan changing over time? Compare how the approval of "different" antics of foreigners changes over time. Learn how some Japanese players follow the model, but as the exception and not the rule. Is the Japanese culture changing, or a surface appearance of change part of the Japanese character? Read the book to find out. Again, it's only about baseball on the surface.

How does training differ? The American model suggests individuals can improve, but only to the limit of their ability. The Japanese model in both the field and the office is that there is no limit - strength and success is limited only by effort. This drive leads to a 10-11 month season counting training camp, as well as several hours of strenuous exercizes every day before practice. This is essential to developing the fighting spirit. Again, someone travelling to Japan for business is well advised to understand this.

The book is a must for baseball lovers as well as people interested in learning more about Japan. The book is a fascinating work that hides great learning behind Japan under the story of America's pastime.

It is an alternate, separate layer of reality, a shadowy universe of characters-gangsters, corrupt entrepreneurs, courtesans, seedy sports promoters, streetwise opportunists, intelligence agents, political fixers, and financial manipulators-who have perhaps done as much in their own right to influence U.S.-Japan affairs as their more refined and respected peers. Significantly, it has not always been easy to distinguish the latter from the former.

Drawing on police and press reports as well as personal interviews (Zappetti himself was interviewed extensively for this book between 1989 and his death in 1992 at age seventy-one), Robert Whiting, one of the few western journalists to live and write regularly in Japan, depicts an awesome cancer of corruption metastasizing behind the rigid veneer of Japanese society. From the smoldering ashes of postwar Japan (where things were so bad the Japanese had to fight for scraps with the Korean slaves they'd imported during the war), to the CIA's backing of yakuza gangs in the '50s and '60s as anti-Communist thugs, to the ruinous scandals of the '90s, where prominent Japanese executives and politicians were implicated in vast criminal rackets as the economy plunged into a tailspin, crooked and straight men mingled freely across previously impermeable caste lines in an ever-expanding criminal sphere which Whiting calls "Japan's first experiment in democracy". And where was Nicola Zappetti during these halcyon days? Hailing from Prohibition-era East Harlem, Zappetti had chosen crime as a career during adolescence, skipping school to learn instead from thugs and racketeers like his cousin Gaetano "Three Finger Brown" Luchese. Whiting contends that Zappetti actually joined the Marines to give his budding criminal instincts room to expand, and delighted in the hell of postwar Tokyo, where he quickly made a stake running contraband whiskey, cigarettes, and military scrip to-who else?-Allied soldiers and small-time Japanese gangsters, the only people in Japan with money or goods to trade. Zappetti shrewdly played the gangs off one another, recognizing their tribal hatreds and the burgeoning Japanese market for narcotics. He did so on his own initiative, using his own brains and brawn, not relying on the American Mafia (except to get back to Japan after being deported by the authorities in 1950). Zappetti also made a smart long-term investment early on, introducing the Japanese to pizza in the up-and-coming honky-tonk district of Roppongi. He made some erroneous investments as well, including a fur factory, several Japanese wives, and Japanese citizenship, for which he sacrificed his U.S. passport, thereby stranding himself in Japan. Crime and politics make for interesting bedfellows, and Zappetti's circle read like a Who's Who of both worlds. There was the famous Rikidozan, a psychotic sumo wrestler who met his end on the point of a yakuza thug's knife in a men's room. There was "Killer" Ikeda, a notoriously violent thug with whom Zappetti once went knife-to-gun, and won. There was Hiyasuki Machii, head of the Tosei-kai, Tokyo's most powerful Korean gang, which controlled the clubs and rackets of the booming Ginza strip (Machii also worked for the G-2 intelligence unit of the occupying American force, as a strikebreaker and anti-Communist thug). There was Yoshio Kodama, right-wing political fixer and yakuza money man (also a onetime G-2 operative, rooting out Communist groups in Japan). Much of the mingling between these men took place in Zappetti's Roppongi restaurant, Nicola's, or at the New Latin Quarter, a nightclub straight out of a James Bond movie: "It was a favorite hangout of the international intelligence community, agents from the KGB, CIA and MI6 often vying with each other for the same hostess." Zappetti died alone and penniless, unable to return home, broken by alcohol and diabetes, the victim of a new order of corporate criminals who used Japan's laws against him and his empire (known as keizai yakuza). Zappetti, who had survived knives, guns, and bombs, was mortally wounded by the sort of white-collar criminals who would carry the lessons of the street all the way up to the highest levels of the Japanese government, using corporate cutouts, money laundering, bogus investments, and the like. Zappetti had come up as the Mustache Petes in the American Mafia were going out; by the time of his death in 1992, Zappetti himself was the dinosaur. An exchange between Zappetti and one such new-wave crook showed the writing on the wall:

"What the hell is the point of being a yakuza," he asked one well-tailored mobster, "if you act like everyone else? You guys use electronic calculators instead of swords. You talk about derivatives. Your name cards say corporate vice president instead of captain or elder brother. You're trying too hard to be respectable." The mobster gave Nick a strange look and said, "What about you?" Then he asked for the wine list.

Whiting's book often veers away from Zappetti himself, panning out to focus on the big picture of Japanese crime during a given period. A far more concise summary of Zappetti's life and exploits appears in the book's acknowledgments, along with a thorough source list and bibliography. But the story tells itself, and it is a disturbing, thrilling account of U.S.-Japan relations and Japan after the Second World War.

This book will appeal particularly to people who live or have lived in Japan, but also to anyone who enjoys a lurid and seedy tale!