By Mack Trapp
I had two other experiences in Tokyo that are worth retelling: baseball and movies.
One of my close friends in Tokyo was Mapo Matsuura. He introduced me to his father and the father found out about my interest in baseball and my “Babe Ruth Baseball”. Mr. Matsuura was a senior executive of Daiei Motion Picture Company, and that company owned a major league (of Japan) baseball team, appropriately named the “Daiei Stars”.
Thus Mr. Matsuura invited me to attend the 1957 Japan National Series game (see photo below). He noted that my heroes Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had visited (played in?) Japan in 1934, the year of my birth. Football style cheerleaders were prominent on both sidelines. The crowd applauded the entry of the umpires. An umpire call was never contested. And I, who had never walked on a U.S. MLB field, got to walk on the Tokyo field for the championship presentation. Lucky! My photo:
One evening Mr. Matsuura invited several of us (the Godo boys) to dinner at his residence, adding “Trapp-san, I have something to show you.” Mr. Matsuura brought out a wooden box, carefully tied with a beautiful sash. He opened the box to reveal a gold lion (statuette) and said, “I want you to see what we won in Venice.” Daiei had won the Leone d’oro first prize at the 1951 Venice Film Festival for the production of the film “Rashomon” (I had never heard of either the Gold Lion or Rashomon). I was in awe, and even more in awe of some of Daiei’s leading female movie stars.
Above from the left: Chicagoan Harvey Struthers, the great musician Makino, Mack, Hideo Godo (of the Karuizawa tennis event) and Mr. Matsuura’s son Mapo, at reunion in Tokyo 2008.
A final note. When I worked in Taipei in 1958, I was aware that art treasures of the Beijing Forbidden City (Imperial Palace) were reportedly packed in crates and hidden in the mountains at the edge of Taipei. I was never allowed to see or be near them. I have just been reading “Fragile Cargo: The World War II Race to Save the Treasures of China’s Forbidden City”, a brilliant new book by Adam Brookes. It’s an amazing story of the Palace art curators inventorying, cataloging and safeguarding those priceless objects. Chicago’s East Asian Art Group will feature author Adam Brookes at its December speaker’s meeting.
