Despite being perhaps the first player in MLB history to miss significant time due to anal fissures and widespread dismissal as a terrible offseason signing by Astros’ GM Ed Wade–one major MLB site decried it the “worst signing of the offseason” and questioned the sanity of the Astros’ brass–Matsui Kazuo is again proving to be […]

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Mostly inspired by the success of Hideki Okajima this past offseason produced several interesting signings of Japanese short relievers in Masa Kobayashi, Yasuhiko Yabuta and Kazuo Fukumori. Making predictions on any of the three was a basically a crapshoot, and I heard or read cases for and against all three.
I’ve mentioned before a conversation I had […]

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Good stuff and someone to keep an eye on here. This is written for the Washington Post by Jake Adelstein, who used to be a crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper. According to the story he moved to Japan in 1988 at age 19, spent most of college living in a Zen […]

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An odd but captivating story sent in by reader Tix, about a Buddhist couple living in a yurt in the Arizona desert who have taken vows to never separate from each other for more than 15…feet.
If they cannot be seated near each other on a plane, they do not get on. When she uses an […]

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