Honor Award Politics

A lot of questions were cast on the People’s Honor Award to two baseball players, Shigeo Nagashima and Hideki Matsui. Nagashima, a popular hitter called Mister Pro Baseball, was the mentor of Matsui in Yomiuri Giants, and Matsui played both in Japan and US Major League. Why them and why now, anyway? Since it is presented by the Prime Minister, the award has been criticized as the political event. If it had been based on a political motivation, this must have been a strategy of getting more popularity by attracting baseball fans in the time before the election of the House of Councillors this summer.

The award was established by the Prime Minister Takeo Fukuda in 1977. Although there had been an award called the Prime Minister’s Honor Award, Fukuda created the People’s Honor Award for honoring Sadaharu Oh, who overtook Hank Aaron’s homerun record, because the previous award excluded pro-baseball players. Following him, twenty-one people and one team, including Yasuhiro Yamashita a judo player, Hibari Misora a singer, or Akira Kurosawa a movie director, were awarded. The rule of the award presentation simply says that the award is given to whom the Prime Minister think appropriate. That’s why the award is recognized as used for PM’s one of the political tools.

Many people wonder why those two were awarded. Although Nagashima was popular enough, there was no reason why he was awarded thirty-nine years later from his retirement as a player. Matsui, known as a slugger in Yomiuri and New York Yankees, was less significant in terms of hitting records than Ichiro Suzuki, who had been nominated to the award in 2001 and 2004 but declined. PM Shinzo Abe must have thought to raise the impact by presenting to both simultaneously.

For the supporters of both players, the awarding was quite proper. Nagashima and Oh were two distinguished figures of pro baseball in 1960s and 70s. Nagashima’s fans had been frustrated by not being awarded, while Oh was the first recipient. Matsui’s fans make more of his career as a homerun hitter than Ichiro as single hitter. Those are the tendency of Yomiuri fans.

One of the representatives of those fans is Tsuneo Watanbe, the president of Yomiuri Shimbun and a well-known political broker. He has maintained close relationship with Nagashima, and invited him to a special position of Giants, a life-time director of the team, and to a managing director of the Yomiuri Business Group. At the time of Matsui’s debut in Yankees, Yomiuri became a big sponsor for Yankee Stadium with expensive ads.

Yomiuri and the Liberal Democratic Party have long relationship. Abe had a closed meeting with Watanabe as soon as he inaugurated in PM, and both uphold constitutional amendment. It may be possible that Watanabe appealed the bid for the award at the meeting. In the ceremony of the award on Sunday, Abe put on a uniform numbered 96, that indicated the number of the Article in the Constitution of Japan Abe wants to amend. In the background of the award, one can see a close connection between political intention and business ambitions.