Search Results for: Japan

Breaking Ball: A Father and Son’s Pitch for Baseball Glory

Longreads Pick

In Japan, where baseball is a cherished pastime and players practice relentlessly, a father and his talented son decide to take a different approach to training and pitching: playing in fewer games to avoid injury.

Published: Jul 15, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,566 words)

Curses: A Tribute to Losing Teams and Easy Scapegoats

Barry Grass | The Normal School | Spring 2014 | 18 minutes (4,537 words)

 

1st

Late in every February, Major League Baseball players report to Spring Training.

Every year in Kansas City this is heralded by a gigantic special section in The Kansas City Star crammed full of positive reporting and hopeful predictions about the coming season. Each year it is another variation on the same theme: “This is Our Year” or “Is This Our Year?” or “Can the Royals Win it All?” or “Our Time” or “How Good are these Royals?” or “How Good are these Royals” or or or. It gets tiresome after growing up hearing it year after year, because the answer has always been the same. The answer is no. It’s not our time. It’s not our year. No, the Royals aren’t going to win it all. These Royals are not very good. No. Read more…

Springtime in Tiananmen Square, 1989

Longreads Pick

While teaching English in Beijing, the author witnessed one of the most tumultuous protests in modern history.

We were young, and maybe a little naive, and we were angry at injustice. Whenever a group of us foreign teachers got together to share a meal or some beers, Chuck, the most cantankerous of our lot, would find an opportunity to say, “America is a toilet that flushes itself with five times more water than any other toilet in the world.” We were disenchanted with the me-first materialism of Reagan/Bush America. We wanted to live conscientiously. China in 1988 was a slumbering giant just beginning to awake. None of us expected our lives there to be easy, or profitable, or flashy like those of other young English teachers in trendier, booming Japan, but we were intrigued by the country’s recent reopening, and up for a challenge.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 29, 2014
Length: 22 minutes (5,657 words)

Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

Download as a .mobi ebook (Kindle)

Download as an .epub ebook (iBooks)

 

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The Path to Pearl Harbor

Longreads Pick

How Japan found itself on the brink of war in December 1941:

By the mid–1930s, much of northern China was essentially under Japanese influence. Then, on July 7, 1937, a small-scale clash between local Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge in Wanping, a small village outside Beijing, escalated. The Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoe, used the clash to make further territorial demands on China. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist government, decided that the moment had come to confront Japan rather than appease it, and full-scale war broke out between the two sides.

Published: May 19, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,543 words)

Reimagining the Student Publication: Our College Pick

This week’s College Longreads selection is as much for the publication as it is for the story. Richie Siegel’s article about a Japanese street food restaurant in Chicago called Yoshu is mostly a profile of the owners, with a little bit of a restaurant review on the side. Siegel, a sophomore at NYU, is an ambitious writer whose work will mature well. He published the article in a digital magazine he founded called Seersucker, which is produced by and for Millennials. The low barrier to publish is both the beauty and curse of today’s digital tools. But Siegel’s magazine looks and reads with more sophistication because he and his team took the time to think about how the site would work and how the articles should read. We can hope for no less from the next generation of writers and editors.

The Couple Feeding Chicago

Richie Siegel | Seersucker Magazine | March 2014 | 15 minutes (2,722 words)

NPR's Nina Totenberg On What It Was Like To Be The Only Woman In The Newsroom

How did sources treat you differently than your male colleagues?

The bad news was you weren’t one of the guys so you didn’t chum it up with them and go drinking. The good news was they assumed you were young and stupid. I was young. I wasn’t stupid. They would very often say the most incredible things to me because they weren’t concentrating on the fact that I was concentrating on them.

I probably scored a number of scoops that way. It’s just hilarious. One time I was doing a story about junkets on Capitol Hill. I think Northwest [Airlines] had inaugurated a new line to Japan and Korea. They had taken on their maiden voyage most of the members of the Senate Commerce Committee, which of course controlled regulation of the airline industry.

So I did a bunch of interviews with people who went, and then I asked the people who didn’t go why they didn’t. I remember [Montana Democrat] Mike Mansfield said something of great integrity. He just said, “Don’t do that kind of thing.” But there was a senator, [New Hampshire Republican] Norris Cotton, who said, “Oriental food gives me the trots.” And that was the subhead in the story! It was just too good.

Nina Totenberg, interviewed by Adrienne LaFrance. Nina Totenberg’s tenure at NPR began nearly forty years ago, and since then her voice has become one of the most familiar on public radio. As LaFrance put it, “her work is so well known that NPR even sells a “Nina Totin’ Bag,” which pays homage to the legal affairs correspondent and pokes fun at public broadcasting for its classic pledge-drive gift.” Read more about public radio in the Longreads archive.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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Are You In A Haruki Murakami Novel?

An elephant mysteriously vanishes. A giant frog is waiting in your apartment. Your cat mysteriously vanishes. Two moons hang in the sky. Your wife mysteriously vanishes. A strange man comes to you and asks you to find a sheep, or a woman calls and asks for ten minutes of your time. You might be the protagonist in a novel or short story by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Look around you. If any of these things sound familiar, you might want to get a new collar for your cat:

1. You drink your coffee black.

2. You have a deep and abiding love for old jazz records.

3. You find it easy to have emotionless sex with strangers. If you were to describe the sex to a friend you would use the most abstract language possible, but you never do because you have no friends.

4. You worship the 1960s and the simple comforts in life: black coffee, old jazz records, emotionless afternoon sex. If, however, you are actually living in the 1960s, you mostly just keep to yourself.

If some—or all—of these things apply, you might want to read the rest of the list at The Toast. And if the mere thought of Murakami leaves you hankering for a short story, you can find more fiction in the Longreads archive.

Photo: Smithsonian, Flickr

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How the Creators of ‘Street Fighter II’ Figured Out How to Make the Best Game for an Arcade

YOSHIKI OKAMOTO (HEAD OF ARCADE DEVELOPMENT, CAPCOM JAPAN): Back in the day, people at arcades weren’t happy. Space Invaders was popular and cost 100 yen ($1) to play. And we were thinking, if you’re playing a shooter and there’s a lot of bullets coming at you, that’s a lot of fun. But if it doesn’t last very long, then developers are happy and arcade operators are happy, but players aren’t happy. So we were thinking really hard about what would make everybody happy.

We thought about putting big machines in arcades, so you would need to spend 500 yen per game — developers would be happy because they would make more money, players would be happy because they would get a better experience, but arcade operators wouldn’t be happy because it would cost a lot to swap these big machines in and out.

So we thought about it more and came to the conclusion that if two people played at once … operators would get twice the money. Players would essentially split the cost so they could both play for longer. We kind of did that with Final Fight since players help each other out, but we realized some players still felt cheated because the game was too difficult … If we dictated the difficulty, players could always get frustrated. But if players were competing against each other, whether they won or lost would be up to them. So we were thinking that could take out the frustration.

In Polygon, 20 former Capcom employees and business partners look back on the arcade game that transformed the industry: Street Fighter II.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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