The Beijing Olympics is history, but the debate continues over Japan's showing. Last week, Fuji TV's Sunday night newsmagazine, "Sakiyomi," held a discussion on whether or not the government should increase its budget for Olympic athletes. Three of the four celebrity guests in the studio thought that it should, and used the smaller-than-expected medal count to bolster their argument, but when the producers carried out a live survey they found that 75 percent of the viewers objected to any increase in government support. The guests were shocked. What happened to national pride?
What the survey results said to me is that the media commotion about the Olympics is mostly self-serving. People watched the games and reacted to the results in their own ways, but they didn't invest as much emotional capital in the Olympics as the media did. The return on that investment has been disappointment, and since the games ended, Senichi Hoshino, the manager of the ill-fated Japanese baseball team, has borne the brunt of it. The media were convinced that "Hoshino Japan" would bring home the gold medal — owing to the fact that Japan won the World Baseball Classic two years ago and that it would be the cream of the nation's professional players who would "wear the Rising Sun on their backs."
Hoshino is a convenient whipping boy. During his long career in baseball, he's developed a close relationship with the media while at the same time cultivating an image of being tough on his charges and himself. He is willing to take the blame because that's his job, and he seems to have a lot to answer for. According to an article in last week's Aera, among the skipper's failures in Beijing were an inability to instill in his team the proper "fighting spirit" and misreadings of the "data" he and his coaching staff had collected on their opponents. Mostly, he was criticized for lack of flexibility. His use of players, particularly pitchers, showed he didn't have alternatives to his original strategy, which prooved to be ineffective.