YANKEE, YOU'RE OUT

By FRANK GIBNEY JR./TOKYO

Japanese besuboru is not exactly the same as American baseball. And that fact hit Mike Di Muro with all the force of a beanball. Di Muro, a 29-year-old pro umpire from New York, was invited this spring to step onto Japan's diamonds and teach the American meaning of a strike. But Di Muro soon learned that it's less hazardous to face Roberto Alomar's spit than the wrath of Japanese players and fans who don't like the call.

The low point came during a June 5 game in the central city of Gifu, when the burly Di Muro called two strikes on popular Chunichi Dragons slugger Yasuaki Taiho. Taiho didn't appreciate it much, and let Di Muro know it. Since American umpires take less guff than their Japanese counterparts, Di Muro tossed Taiho out of the game. That touched off a melee. The crowd jeered at the American, and coaches and players charged him. Taiho repeatedly shoved Di Muro in the chest. The end result: U.S. baseball officials called Di Muro home last week, while Taiho played ball as usual.

Of all the U.S.-Japan disputes over the years, concerning everything from auto shipments to whaling, this latest dustup may be the hardest to comprehend. Baseball is, after all, an American game. If the Japanese didn't want to learn from an American umpire, then why did they ask him to get behind home plate?

The answer may lie in Japan's typically ambivalent attitude toward opening up to the rest of the world. While Japan limits the number of foreign baseball players it imports, the country still wants to reach U.S. standards, so that a Japanese team could someday meet the American champs in a real World Series. That goal finally seems plausible, now that Japan's Hideo Nomo has become an All-Star in the U.S., and New York Yankee farmhand Hideki Irabu is mowing down American batters with 99 m.p.h. fast balls.

But the convergence of baseball and besuboru apparently hasn't gone far enough to let an American umpire in Japan. Those who thought that possible underestimated how difficult it would be to penetrate the Japanese game, which is run by a cabal of players and managers as protectively as the Finance and Trade ministries are captained for the good of the economy. Di Muro's insistence on standing by his strike and ball calls upset the system's harmony--what the Japanese call wa, as besuboru expert Robert Whiting wrote in his 1989 book You Gotta Have Wa.

The Di Muro affair is a reminder that the harmony between the U.S. and Japan is still fragile. U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky certainly won't bother pushing Japan to take in American umpires the way Washington once demanded the country import more Louisville Slugger bats. But Japan's trade surplus with the U.S. is once again rising at an alarming rate. At this weekend's Denver summit of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations, the U.S. will push Japan to open its economy further. "Japan's bureaucrats talk all the time about how they have an open market and believe in internationalization," says Robert M. Orr, a baseball enthusiast and vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan. "But then when it breaks up the harmony of the system, Japan's knee-jerk reaction is to claim special rules."

Still, Japan is fundamentally different from the protectionist fortress of the past. Fearing its insularity and mercantilist trade policies have left the country ill prepared for global competition, its bureaucrats and politicians have launched a sweeping campaign to deregulate the economy. "A sense of crisis has created the kind of circumstances that demand change," says Eisuke Sakakibara, a top Finance Ministry strategist. "We have become too rigid in the past 10 or 20 years, and now we need to be flexible--to absorb what is good in the U.S. but at the same time believe in ourselves as Japanese." Traditionally, such rhetoric was a way of hinting that painful structural change would take place because foreign pressure, or gaiatsu, demanded it. But Sakakibara's point, echoed in Japanese living rooms and boardrooms, is that the real incentive for change comes from within the country.

So in leaving, does the young umpire join a long line of earnest American missionaries, diplomats and free marketers who have tried--and apparently failed--to open Japan? While there were a few gloating headlines at his departure, Di Muro, for the most part, left a much admired figure. Letters of support flooded in to the Central League office, one calling him "a pioneer who brought needed change to the sport." Central League president Hiromori Kawashima sent a letter of apology to his counterparts in the U.S. And several managers of Japanese teams made an unprecedented public call for an end to harassment of umpires. "I really hope something good comes out of this," said Di Muro the morning he left. "At least both sides understand each other a little better from the perspective of the umpire." That is critical if the Japanese ever want to be fully respected players in world trade or the World Series.

--With reporting by Hiroko Tashiro/Tokyo

With reporting by Hiroko Tashiro/Tokyo