Ogi: The Life of Ichiro Ogimura

Ogi: The Life of Ichiro Ogimura
            By Mitsuru Jojima (English translation: John Senior)

            Reviewed by Tim Boggan

            Michie always hoped her son, Ichiro (born in 1932), would grow up to be a diplomat—he was smart, of course, but as a youth uncompromising in his words and actions. Later in life (“I do not think it possible,” he said, “for modern sports to be completely disconnected from politics”), he was a diplomat—with the Chinese and the North and South Koreans in particular. Zhou En-lai personally asked him to help develop table tennis in China. And since he was in no way a parochial fellow—“Playing for one’s homeland is all well and good, but it implies a rejection of the other countries. Can human beings live together in harmony like that?”—he agreed, and urged Chou and China to come back into the table tennis family, which they did at the 1971 Nagoya World’s. Later, as ITTF President, he helped establish a joint North/South Korean Team at the 1991 Chiba, Japan World’s.
            However, important as diplomacy became to Ogi as he matured, what I found most fascinating in this book and what I want to center on in this review was how Ogimura—befriended by a motherly-minded Japanese woman, married but with no children, named Hisae Uehara whom he called “Ma’am”—became the World Table Tennis Champion. What I found in this book and hope to convey is: What made Ogi…Ogi.
            It’s 1948, Ogimura, in his first year at a Tokyo boys’ high school, sees a poster put up on a noticeboard, “We demand a table tennis club for Tenth High!” The principal thought table tennis was for girls, so the poster came down—only to be reposted, removed, reposted. Such persistency appealed to young Ichiro, so one day he checked out the t.t. play—and, like the English poet John Keats at 16 envisioning the possibilities of poetry, he was hooked. Now he was not only playing at the pathetically poor conditions at his school but going to clubs in various parts of Tokyo, paying the fees needed to play “vastly superior players” by selling old books and magazines he’d brought from home without his mother knowing.
            Soon a classmate was telling him, “Ogimura, the way you play table tennis…it’s not right for a student. You play as if it’s all that matters.”
            “That’s right,” replied Ogimura. And he couldn’t have been more serious. He wrote of self in his diary, “You’re going to be a [table tennis] genius among geniuses.” Hence the beginning of an “unshakable ego.”
            By 1949, we see, as Ichiro sits in class, often looking out the window at “people from all walks of life coming and going down Water-Pipe Road,” how different, how independent he is from the other boys who are feverishly copying down words the teacher has put on the blackboard. Yes, Ichiro’s a teenager, all the world is open to him, he’ll have choices to make—but again and again he thinks of table tennis. Now he writes too—in his own private exercise book (he’d have a lifelong habit of jotting things down as they came to him): “There is some vertical writing which appears to be Japanese, and some horizontal writing, which appears to be English, spread here and there across the blackboard. Apparently those of a certain profession will award us points tomorrow based on how well we have memorized the aforementioned writing.” Wow, how distant is this intelligent young man, expressing himself with such irony and disdain, from the others.
            Central to this unfolding drama is how in 1950 a 30-year-old housewife (going on 13 years Ogi’s senior), on little more than a whim (“Destiny” Ogimura would call it), convinced her husband to sell their home and rice field and, though each knew nothing about table tennis, build a two-story house with living quarters above and, what would become central to Ogimura’s early development, the Murashino Table Tennis Hall below.
            It was only a matter of time before the thin, gaunt-faced Ogimura found his Murashima Ma’am and she a youth whom she could be nurse and mother to. Of course Ogimura wasn’t eating meals; he was using most of his 40-yen dinner-money allowance to pay his table tennis fees. As he began playing at her hall, Ma’am saw him periodically pull a piece of a bread roll and a dab of margarine (15 yen) out of his pocket and “chew it as if it were a stick of gum” or, as I fancy, a communion wafer, for “when the bread in his mouth had melted into nothing, he repeated the routine.” There could be no doubt what Ogi’s spiritual sustenance was. His devotion to table tennis was flamed by a couple of tournament successes he’d had, though he’d “never risen above sixth in the Tokyo high school seedings.”
            Ogimura’s reputation as an eccentric was well deserved. “This silent, shadowy schoolboy had no qualms on tapping at the glass door after nine o’clock in the evening, when Hisae closed the hall for the night. It made no difference if there was no one to practice with, he would position his feet with almost obsessive precision and practice serve after serve to the empty side of the table.” He was so thin, had such a pallor—could he have eaten today? No—his father had died when he was two; his mother worked late, was always too tired to fix dinner. So Ma’am began regularly to feed him (one night steamed rice; another, dried mackerel; another, stewed.meat and potatoes). Sometimes he didn’t come to her until after midnight. “Hisae still left the door unlocked and waited for him.” Soon she was “washing his sodden shirt in her washtub and handing him the other, which she dried during the day.  She even mended the shirt’s ragged collars and darned the holes that frequently appeared in his thin socks. And she no longer collected playing fees from him.”
            What Ogi’s mother Michie or Hisae’s husband Kozo thought of this strange relationship, we don’t know, the writer doesn’t go there. But it appears that the 31-year-old Ma’am has as much of an obsession, a need for soul satisfaction, as the 18-year-old young man she’s caring for. When Ogi exhausts himself and collapses with pneumonia (“what matters,” he says, “isn’t extraordinary ability but extraordinary effort”) it’s Hisae who visits him in the hospital, not his mother.
            On coming out of the hospital he’s again immediately into torturous practice and looking for new ways to train—skipping rope, lifting iron dumbbells, playing billiards (examining the similarities between spinning a billiard bill and putting chop on a table tennis ball). “Winning,” he says, “comes from practicing more than your opponent.”
            Ogi, an avid reader, was also interested in painting and screen-writing. After he’d suffered a devastating loss that had sent him away sobbing, but not ready to quit table tennis and so call himself a failure, he said to Hisae, “Van Gogh went on painting the pictures he wanted to paint, despite suffering so much. It’s only natural that I should go on suffering.” After he saw the balletic-cinema masterpiece “The Red Shoes,” he wrote in his journal, “I want to elevate table tennis into the realm of art…. Someone has to take the lead in elevating table tennis.” No wonder he became not only a World Champion, but the President of the ITTF. From a young age he always thought big.
            And also single-minded selfishly. Said his friend Shotaro Kubo, “I have never known anyone who hated wasting time as much as Ogimura did….He had no time for relaxation. In his younger days he was in such a hurry to improve that he consciously avoided thinking of those around him. Stubbornly independent, he did not so much keep people at a distance as give off this menacing energy.” By staring intently at his clubmates he tried to determine “how their facial expressions changed during rallies,” and how these might give him a clue as to the coming trajectory of the ball. He even went so far as to occasionally close his own eyes in hitting a ball so as not to give away any eye-line direction to his opponent. A surprise to others, but no surprise to Ogimura that he won the All-Japan National Championship and was picked to represent Japan at the ’54 Wembley World Championships. As a practice partner said of him, “I admired how he set himself a goal so ambitious that he couldn’t hope to achieve it and then gave absolutely everything in pursuit of it.”    
            Which is the way he thought about the upcoming World Championship. To combat a multi-time World Champion like England’s Richard Bergmann, “Ogimura knew he would have to arm himself with a devastating sponge smash that could kill a rally in one fell swoop. This required lower-body agility, so, in addition to his 10-kilometer runs in Inokashira Park, he began to frog-jump four kilometers while carrying a 40-kilogram dumbbell on his shoulders. He also devised a swing that harnessed centrifugal force to generate extra punch. He saw this ‘circular swing’ action, which involved twisting his body so far that his opponent could see his back, as a means of compensating for his diminutive frame.” Speed, endurance, and smash, smash, smash (score 51 times out of a 100 and he was a winner), these were his weapons—along with the heroic intensity of one of his much admired masters (he had a number of them he wanted to be like and who gave him strength), the legendary swordsman Miyamoto Musashi.
            Of course he and his teammates had to get to the World’s—which seemed impossible, for each one on the Team had to raise 800,000 yen. It was Hisae who suggested that the club members all try to raise donations—and to her credit even those who didn’t like Ichiro, thought him arrogant and aloof, but respected him as a player, agreed to help. Miraculously, a Men’s Team of Ogimura, Yoshio Tomita, Kichiji Tamasu, and Kazuo Kawai made it to London—in a 55-hour propeller plane from Tokyo.
            When Japan, who would win the Men’s Team’s, played matches, the English booed them, were not sporting; the local media suggested the Japanese players must be using drugs because of the unusual spring in their legs; and the umpiring was atrociously unfair. “Tamasu was penalized for exclaiming ‘Yoshi!’ (‘Good!’) after hitting a winner. When he passed the ball to his opponent using his racket, the umpire called it a service fault.” When Bergmann was losing to Ogimura in the Singles, the chair umpire deliberately stepped on the ball to substitute a different, harder ball more favorable to the English player. But Ogimura came through it all a winner and “just five years and seven months after taking up table tennis as a sullen, skinny schoolboy…he’d become one of the national heroes of postwar Japan.” Amazing he could be so good in so little time.
            As World Champion, Ogimura went on a European tour and as usual over- extended himself and, exhausted, came down with hepatitis. He was always pushing the limits of his endurance—and always paying the price. Eventually he would die, in 1994, at age 62, of lung cancer.
            Meanwhile, he’d never tire of pushing the limits of others too—this while being criticized repeatedly for not having “the warmth to take an interest in and care about the feelings and lives of others.” Shortly after he’d won his first World Championship (but as we all know not his last) he fell in love with teenager Tokimi Morita, married her, and when he found out that Emil Zatopek, the Czech distance runner he admired, had a wife who was an Olympic javelin thrower, he told Ma’am that he wanted to play Mixed Doubles with Tomita at the World Championships. Consequently, until he finally gave up this fixation (perhaps because she was pregnant with their first child) he abused her with his intensity—made her pass under the table if she hit a ball out, and sent her into tears by forcing her to continue practice with a blistered playing hand. Ogi was Ogi, inflexibly demanding of self and others—and, as with most geniuses, you had to take the bad with the good.  
            Also once, while practicing at a training camp, he and Toshiaki Tanaka, who by this time had taken away the World Championship from Ogimura, got into a fiercely competitive hitting duel in which, after it had passed the 2,000-shot mark, Tanaka couldn’t go on, collapsed to the floor and lay there motionless. “Ogimura walked toward him. The other players, who had watched, breathless, as the extraordinary rally unfolded, assumed he would offer the exhausted Tanaka a hand. But the ex-champion took a towel in his right hand and flung it to the floor with all his might. Then, looking down at his prostrate, sweat-drenched team-mate, he declared: ‘Coward!’ When a member of the women’s team reproached him for what must have appeared a terribly callous reaction, he was unapologetic: ‘I wanted to test my own limits more. Pathetic…’”
            “People are always setting limits for themselves, Ma’am,” he’d said to Hisae. “The job of a coach is to set challenges just a little bit higher than those limits.” Maybe more than just a little bit higher?” For those Japanese who collapsed from exhaustion at an Ogimura-run training camp were “dismissed by Ogi with a cursory ‘You can leave now’ and were never invited to one of his camps again.”
            Of course Ogimura didn’t care about the Japanese who opposed his coaching in Sweden—he was a true internationalist. His survival-of-the-fittest demands there—the price of achieving excellence—were likewise so stringent that only the future European Champion Hans Alser stuck with him, as afterwards did future World Champion Stellan Bengtsson when he came to train with Ogimura in Japan. “I’d go anywhere in the world for Ogi,” said Swedish Coach Anders Thunstrom. “Swedish table tennis owes him everything.”
            My own favorite “hero” is the English poet John Keats who, like Ichiro’s father and grandfather, died at a young age of tuberculosis. I see parallels in Keats’s and Ogimura’s intensity that I much admire, so, in homage, I end this necessarily brief and personal review with lines from both I’ll always find inspiring:

            “…I feel assured I should write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the Beautiful even if my night’s labours should be burnt every morning, and no eye ever shine upon them.”
                                                                                                John Keats

            “…I would approach the tournament with the ambition and confidence to say, ‘Even if I am the only competitor, I will make this a worthwhile World Championships.’ I would practice so hard as to justify those words.”

                                                                                                Ichiro Ogimura