From Asian Armageddon, 1944–45, by Peter Harmsen (War in the Far East, Book 2; Casemate, 2020), Kindle pp. 39-41:
Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the architect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had made only limited promises before committing to the offensive against US and Western possessions in the Asia Pacific in late 1941 and early 1942. He would be able to deliver one victory after the other during the first months of the war while the enemy was still reeling from the initial shock of being attacked, he said, but once that early advantage had been exhausted, the going would become much harder. Now, two years into the war, Yamamoto was dead, shot down by American pilots over the South Pacific, and the US counteroffensive had picked up, pushing back at the fringes of Hirohito’s vast empire.
At the dawn of the new year 1944, therefore, many of the emperor’s subjects were concerned about the future, and some put their bewildered thoughts on paper. “An important year has come. The days are coming that will decide history,” wrote liberal journalist Kiyosawa Kiyoshi in his diary on January 1. There was a pervasive sense that things might not stay the same. In every home in Japan when breakfast was served, he noted, people asked the same question: “Will we really be able to eat in this way next year also?” Yabe Teiji, a political science professor at the Tokyo Imperial University, was more straightforward in his diary entry: “The coming year will be Japan’s year of disaster.”
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police was keenly interested in the public mood and remarked in a secret report that although some clung on to a vague sense of optimism about the war, a note of caution was clearly discernible. “There are some who are frankly amazed at the quick and mighty strategy of the enemy and fear the threat of invasion of the mainland, some who desire the announcement of the truth, and some who fear for the safety of our fleet,” the anonymous author of the report wrote, adding that people who held these views were not few in number. There were other categories of opinion, all reflecting the fact that any early enthusiasm put on display at the start of the war was long gone: “Those who go to the extreme criticize military strategy, exaggerate the announcement of our losses, and consider the war to have already been decided. Also, those who are totally unconcerned with the war situation and show a trend toward defeat and war-weariness, just longing for speedy end of war, have been seen here and there.”
By early 1944, even the most optimistic among the 73 million Japanese could no longer fool themselves into believing that life went on as before. In February, the government issued “Outline of Decisive War Emergency Measures,” closing high-end entertainment and causing life in the big cities to take on an even drabber appearance overnight. The new rules were expanded to the entire empire with immediate effect, as Admiral Ugaki Matome found out when he stayed over in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and was entertained one evening by Japan’s governor general. “Banquets, restaurants, and geishas have been banned, as in Japan proper, but the governor general still seemed as full of life as before,” Ugaki wrote in his diary. The kimono, the colorful traditional Japanese dress, was also largely gone from the streets of Japan. As one observer noted, “to be a woman, basically, is not patriotic.”
As the war economy gradually caused an increasing share of available resources to be allocated to the military, getting enough to eat was suddenly a daily struggle for average Japanese families. There were lines of usually about a hundred people outside Tokyo food shops, and on any given day thousands of residents would leave the capital to buy supplies directly from farmers. The hard times were felt particularly keenly by the Westerners who had been caught inside the borders of the Japanese Empire when war broke out. In January, Red Cross delegate H. C. Angst visited a camp for civilian internees set up inside a Catholic monastery near Yokohama and subsequently described the poor conditions that the inmates lived under: “Space is insufficient and overcrowded. Some sleeping on tables. Light sufficient. No heating.” The anti-foreign mood showed up in other ways as well. Baseball, a favorite sport for the Japanese in the prewar years, was allowed to continue but was being cleansed of English-sounding vocabulary. Sutoraiki, an attempt to reproduce the word “strike” in Japanese, was replaced with the much more indigenous-sounding honkyū.
Actually, sutoraiki is a labor term; sutoraiku is the baseball term. I haven’t been able to find confirmation for honkyū, but it was probably 本球 ‘true/real/original ball’. Umpires had to call strikes with よし yoshi ‘good’ and balls with ダメ dame ‘not good’. Strikes were counted 一本, 二本 ippon, nihon, with the counter for long straight things, while balls were counted 一つ, 二つ hitotsu, futatsu, with generic numbers.
Two more nativized terms for balls and strikes, according to Japanese Wikipedia, were 悪球 akkyū ‘bad ball’ and 正球 seikyū ‘correct ball’, and the phrase 悪球打ち akkyū uchi ‘bad ball hitting’ is still used to describe batters who rarely walk because they swing at balls out of the strike zone. Anglicized terms for the same type of batter are バッドボール・ヒッター baddobōru hittā and フリー・スウィンガー furī suingā.
Far Outliers 