We can learn a lot from the success of Japanese Little League baseball.
Japan has captured a whopping five Little League World Series (LLWS) titles since 2010, and shows no signs of letting up. Now there are many theories out there attempting to explain why the US regularly loses to Japan, including that:
- Our best players don’t compete in the LLWS, because they’re off playing in elite travel leagues
- The Japanese fudge residency requirements
Regardless, Japanese dominance at the LLWS is an enormous feat. Let’s look at how they do it, and what we can learn from them to make our kids better players.
Japanese Little League Programs Make Practice an All Day Event
We all kind of know this already, but the Japanese Little League teams really practice. They’re at it almost every day, including 10-hour practices on Saturdays and Sundays, according to one article.
“Repetition is important,” one team manager said. “You’ve got to repeat movements until you master them.”
When it rains, the Japanese don’t call off practice. Instead, the team waits until it stops raining, then the parents all come together to work on the fields to allow their kids to resume practice.
If a Japanese coach spots a player going at half-speed, the player is made to sit in uncomfortable “seiza position” for five minutes as punishment.
Before you dismiss the Japanese method out of hand as overzealous, think how nice it would be to have your kid on a team that:
- Regularly practiced
- Drilled the fundamentals
- Didn’t make you hire a private coach for hitting and pitching help
- Demanded 100% effort from every kid
Japanese Little League Succeeds Because Japan Places Their Top Coaches at the Youth Level
As one Canadian who relocated to Japan observed, “Japan has the highest level of [baseball] coaching at the lowest levels. Like Canada in Hockey.”
In America, it’s the total opposite, where coaching is generally lacking at the youth level. There are plenty of well-intentioned Little League coaches here, but I think it’s safe to say our “best” coaches are elsewhere.
Even at the club level, the coaching is mostly non-existent in terms of teaching the fundamentals. You can pay extra for private lessons to work on your kid’s mechanics, but finding a good instructor can be like trying to find a cheap apartment in Manhattan.
Japanese Little League Teams Win More Because They Play Less
Unlike some American travel teams, Japanese teams don’t play multiple tournament games each weekend. How could they? They’re practicing all the time (see above).
As Josh Cathcart, a hitting coach in the Houston area, persuasively argues in the below clip, playing multiple games a week actually hinders the growth of ballplayers. Kids are so exhausted that they develop bad habits. Coaches play for the win at the expense of development. There’s no time to study the previous game and learn from mistakes.
In a similar story, but from a different sport, Belgium recently rose to the top of world soccer, by completely transforming their youth soccer program and getting their youth coaches to stop focusing on winning games and instead work on individual player development.
Japanese Baseball Players Excel Because They Don’t Play Other Sports
If you’re a youth baseball player in Japan, you play only baseball. Nobody lectures you in Japan that you shouldn’t “specialize” in one sport, as playing another sport is generally not tolerated.
In America, we’re constantly hearing that playing sports other than baseball make kids better baseball players. They tell you you if you really care about baseball, you need to master the athletic movements from basketball and soccer. You hear it so much you almost start believing it.
Well, Japan teaches us that spending all your time practicing baseball actually makes you really good at baseball. The Dominican Republic adds to this argument, as you’ll be hard pressed to find a basketball hoop at one of their famed baseball academies.
Now admittedly this one sport approach may lead to more injuries, especially with pitchers (see Why I Don’t Let My Son Pitch in Little League). But one study reported that Japanese pitchers actually suffer fewer elbow injuries than their American counterparts.
Japanese Teams Dominate Because They Don’t Subscribe to American Notion That Baseball Only a Game
In America, there’s so much hand wringing over whether we’re taking baseball too seriously and putting too much pressure on our kids. Most of the time we treat baseball like it’s much more than a game (spending crazy amounts of money, traveling to god knows where, obsessing over it), but then we pull back at key moments telling ourselves it’s only baseball.
In Japan, they don’t suffer this conflict. As one article reported, when baseball was introduced to Japan, “it was seen less as a leisurely pastime and more as a tool to forge national strength and moral character.” Thus, the Japanese don’t hesitate about taking the extra step for baseball greatness, and even put the sport before school work in some instances.
That’s not to say that the Japanese kids don’t have fun playing baseball. They still have fun. See the below clip of a Japanese home run celebration.
For more about Little League, see When a Frisky Baseball Training Facility Comes to Town and Are Local Little Leagues Bad for Baseball?.
HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN JAPANESE SUCCESS AT THE LLWS? LET US KNOW IN THE COMMENTS.
For information about the emotional side of baseball, see:
- How to Manage Your Kid’s Baseball Tantrums and Meltdowns
- Anger Management and Youth Baseball: How to Calm Down
- How to Stop Being a Crazy Baseball Dad
- 5 Ways Youth Baseball Teams Cheat, and How to Respond
- How to Be a Good Baseball Dad in the Backyard
- 4 Ways to Respond to a Coach Playing Favorites
- How to Deal with Umpires in Youth Baseball
- Is It Now Fashionable to Hate On Baseball Dads?
For information on hitting, see:
- How to Get Out of a Hitting Slump
- 4 Best Baseball Batting Aids (No. 3 is Free)
- 4 Hitting Drills You Need to Do Before Every Game
- 4 Old School Baseball Drills You Need to Be Using
For information on pitching, see:
On your response on why Japanese dominate Little League Baseball?
Actually, your answer is wrong. They don’t!! You only saw what Tokyo Kitasuna & Musashi Fuchu Little League accomplished winning 6 out of 11 LLWS titles won by Japan. 9 out of 11 LLWS titles won by Japan are Tokyo teams (Tokyo Kitasuna, Musashi Fuchu, Chofu, Edogawa-Minami (no longer exist) & West Tokyo (divided into multiple teams). Then 2 were won by Kansai (Osaka area teams) Wakayama & Hirakata.
Our best players don’t compete in the LLWS, because they’re off playing in elite travel leagues?
Japan’s best players don’t compete in the LLWS either. 99% of Japanese kids play Nanshiki (Rubber ball) League. Because they’re cheaper, easier to access since the ball is made out of pure rubber. Kids can just ride their bikes to practice. Unlike Little League, there’s very limited access to find a baseball field since Japan is a small island unlike USA. You can get fined for playing catch with a real baseball, even at a Nanshiki field. The best Japanese players are usually playing on Club teams like the Giants Junior, Swallows Junior or any other NPB Junior teams. None of those kids want to play Little League. Japanese kids are preparing & hoping to get recruited by high school teams hoping that they can compete at the Koshien High School Baseball Tournament. No one in Japan cares about Little League World Series.
The Japanese fudge residency requirements
Less than 1% of Japanese kids play Little League of course the boundary is a little bigger. Just trying to scrounge kids to barely have more than 9-kids just to have a team is not a real easy feat. While USA has 6 or more teams to establish an All Star team per league. Japanese LL teams barely have enough players just to establish 1-team.
Japanese Little League Succeeds Because Japan Places Their Top Coaches at the Youth Level
Really?? Japanese LL coaches aren’t professional. They have normal jobs. They coach, because they love baseball, but work comes first. This is how they were taught when they were kids focusing on fundamentals. The only reason why Japanese LL teams play games on weekends or Public Holidays is because no Japanese companies would allow their employees to take a day of 2 off so they can coach in their Little League games. That leads to company termination. So they have no other choice but to play tournament games on weekends & Public Holidays. Plus, Japanese coaching staff don’t have to tolerate nagging parents unlike the US. They are volunteers coaches just like the US. The only reason why US coaches leaves after their son graduates from Little League, because they can’t deal with the nagging parents. In Japan, coaches are like god, if you defy god, you are welcome to leave and play elsewhere.
Japanese Baseball Players Excel Because They Don’t Play Other Sports
That’s not just baseball, but that’s whatever sports that they play. There is no dual-sports athlete in Japan. If you pick a sport, you play that sport all year long. That’s just the way it is in Japan.
Japanese Teams Dominate Because They Don’t Subscribe to American Notion That Baseball Only a Game.
Little League is a piece of cake to most Japanese kids. Yeah they get scolded by their coaches and the practices are very long, but compare this to high school practices, that’s when players start quitting, because they are complete burned out. Japanese MLB pitchers season are usually cut short because they end up having the Koshien Arm. At the Koshien it was common for Japanese pitchers throwing almost 700 pitches in a week. Then play 5-years at NPB (Japan Professional Baseball) then get drafted by MLB. By the time they play in the MLB, they’re lucky enough to last for at least 5-years, because their arm is gone from overuse. Out of the Japanese LL teams who won the LLWS, about 30% of the kids continues on playing baseball after high school. Mostly because kids starting to burn out after high school
From what I can glean from the internet, the allowable population base for Little League teams is currently 20,000. Japan has a population of 123 million, 14 million in Tokyo alone. That would indicate that they have 6,150 leagues. They have 160. That’s a population base of more than 750,000 per league. Those are just national numbers, of course, but clearly the population base of Japanese teams is nothing like American teams.
1% of Japanese kids playing Little League. The vast majority plays Nanshiki (Rubberball) because it’s cheaper & easier to access playing fields. To access a real baseball field, you got to get a government’s. It’s super strict, it has to be area where there’s no residential area & far away from any roads. If you play catch with a real baseball, you can get fined. You are allowed to play catch with a Nanshiki (Rubberball), but not with a real baseball. So that gives you very limited area to have a baseball field. If a kid wants to play baseball, they rather play Nanshiki not Little League. This years team Johoku LL has a real disadvantage. It’s amazing that they had 14 players. After the 2017 season when Tokyo Kitasuna LL won their 4th title, LL International decided to shave all Japanese LL boundary, but led to forfeiture because most teams didn’t have enough players to form a team. This year after COVID, teams were forced to merge due to player shortage issue. This is not America, nobody in a Japan cares about Little League. It’s not even televised here. Little League World Series is an American thing.
In other word, you data is meaningless. For a country where it’s shrinking population how many of these numbers are kids U12? Only 1% plays Little League because it’s inconvenient & expensive