Robert Whiting (born October 24, 1942) is a best-selling author and journalist who has written several books on contemporary Japanese culture—which include topics such as baseball and American gangsters operating in Japan.
He was offered a job working for the NSA when his tour with the Air Force was about to end, but he chose instead to study at Tokyo's Sophia University, where he majored in Political Science.
[3] Whiting's research into the ties binding Japan's leading politicians to yakuza bosses gained him entrée into the Higashi Nakano wing of Tokyo's largest criminal gang, the Sumiyoshi-kai, where he became an “informal advisor."
He worked for Encyclopædia Britannica Japan as an editor until 1972, until in his words, he "got bored of being a gaijin" and moved to New York City, where he wrote his first book, The Chrysanthemum and the Bat.
[3] Whiting's works on baseball include The Chrysanthemum and the Bat: The Game Japanese Play (Dodd, Mead, N.Y. 1977), You Gotta Have Wa (1989 Macmillan, 1990, 2009 Vintage Departures), Slugging It Out In Japan: An American Major Leaguer in the Tokyo Outfield (1991), and The Meaning of Ichiro: The New Wave from Japan and the Transformation of Our National Pastime (2004), all of which have been published in English and Japanese.
A revised and updated edition of The Meaning of Ichiro, entitled The Samurai Way of Baseball, was published in trade-paperback form by Warner Books in April, 2005.
[22][23] In October 2011, he wrote a three-part series for The Japan Times on Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu, who had died in California two months earlier of an apparent suicide.
He is also a commentator on the influence of the yakuza on the Japanese power structure and the dark side of Japanese-American relations since the end of the Second World War.
[3][29] He was banned again, indefinitely, in 1990, after writing an investigative report for the magazine Shukan Asahi, which showed the Giants were falsifying attendance figures.
The Yomiuri front office had claimed that every Giants home game played in the Tokyo Dome drew a capacity crowd of 56,000.
Whiting returned to the Dome for the first time as a reporter in 2004 to cover an Opening Day match between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays.
[30][31][3] Whiting is married to Machiko Kondo, who is a retired officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).