http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqtgJ5TJi8M

This is just a fantastic story.  I’m really not a fan of Japanese (or Korean or Taiwanese) pop music, but I really enjoy enka quite a bit.  Enka is a postwar form of Japanese music in ballad style that has a very traditional and soulful feel to it, and is at times associated with Japanese [...]

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This comes from the Biz of Baseball. I’m not going to get all fired up about this, and I don’t know how the TV will work in Asia, but it bothers me that ESPN and ESPN2 can only be bothered to broadcast 23 of the 39WBC  games. That leaves 16 games in the cold, and [...]

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I randomly came across a single by Onra, a half-Vietnamese Paris-based producer/DJ type, called 7×7. While clicking around through some info on him I found he released an album earlier in the year called Chinoiseries, that was made mostly with records he’d picked up on a trip through Vietnam the year before.
I downloaded that and [...]

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No, Don Wakamatsu doesn’t speak Japanese and he mostly grew up in Hayward, California. I’m not sure the Mariners deserve to be called mavericks for hiring him, but, as steps go, this is a pretty nice one. Wakamatsu is expected to be named manager of the Seattle Mariners tomorrow.
Wakamatsu was most recently the A’s bench coach. [...]

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Yeah, I had no idea either.
Yankees outfielder Johnny Damon is best known to New Yorkers as the player who parted ways with the team’s dreaded rival the Boston Red Sox to sign with the Bronx Bombers in 2005. While his Japanese and Taiwanese teammates Hideki Matsui and Chien Ming Wang garner all the attention from [...]

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I had no idea Terrmel Sledge  was half-Korean. Here I am, debating whether Sledge’s recent signing with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters was worth a write up for not. Suddenly, it absolutely is.
I’ve always like Sledge, mostly because of his potential. Well, really, there’s never been much else and as you’ll read here, it’s led him [...]

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It wasn’t long ago that the very idea for this?blog was hatched in the bleachers of?Giants/Marlins game in San Francisco. Two men, talking about their lives in Asia, enjoying a beer after missing Barry Bonds’s 754th HR by seconds.
A video came up on the stadium screen concerning outfielder Dave Roberts, talking about his Japanese mother.?Neither [...]

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