Back in 1972, a 30-year-old New Jersey native who had recently graduated from Tokyo's Sophia University was in New York City, trying to talk to anyone who would listen about politics and life in Japan. Nobody was interested.
"It was only when I started talking about baseball -- about how they'd start spring training in the middle of January in the freezing cold, and a guy named Sadaharu Oh who practiced his batting with a sword, and the phenomenon of the Yomiuri Giants" -- Robert Whiting relates, "that people started paying attention. It was then that I realized I'd found a way to explain Japan to people that was entertaining."
On a bet with a friend ("just to prove I could do it") in 1977 Whiting produced a best-selling book titled "The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: Baseball Samurai Style" -- a poke at cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict's 1948 classic on Japan, "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword."