Robert Whiting is best known as an expert on baseball. But he's much more than that. He's also an expert on mobsters in Japan and the sound a radar site makes when it is "spotted" by a U2 spy plane.

So far, he hasn't written anything about the "squschheee" sounds the U2s transmitted to his earphones when he worked for the National Security Agency in Tokyo, but if you ever read one book on Japan, it has to be "Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan."

And if you're going to read at least two books, then check out "The Chrysanthemum and the Bat" or "You Gotta Have Wa" (which has just been updated) or "The Samurai Way of Baseball: The Impact of Ichiro and the New Wave from Japan."