Last year at this time, it seemed as if Japanese baseball was teetering on the edge of a precipice, doomed to collapse in a heap of splendid splinters. Reaching the tipping point would have resulted in a plunge in popularity and prestige, relegating the sport to irrelevance as its best players fled to the United States, taking fan interest with them. Instead, a mass movement by the fans and a player strike enthusiastically supported by the same fans saved Japanese baseball from itself and even put it in a position where it can thrive in the future.

In fact, last year’s course of events transcended the game of baseball and could be seen as a milestone in the continuing evolution of Japanese society. The crisis pitted hidebound, conservative owners—and no Japanese are more hidebound and conservative than the owners of baseball teams—against the public and the players/employees. For what may have been the first time in Japanese history, the public and the players/employees won.

Before describing the events, some background information is in order. Since 1950, there have been 12 teams in the Japanese big leagues divided between the Central League and the Pacific League. Unlike the United States, where the majority of owners are wealthy individuals or families, all Japanese baseball teams are owned by companies. From their standpoint, the teams are just corporate appendages for advertising purposes.

Many owners were private-sector railroad companies, mass merchandisers, or both. For example, the first time I went to Osaka, I stood outside Osaka station and saw the Hanshin Department Store just across the street. The department store is also the terminal station for the Hanshin train line, and one of its stops was the stadium for the Hanshin Tigers of the Central League. Across the street to the left was the Hankyu Department Store, which was the terminal station for the Hankyu train line, and one of its stops was the stadium for the Hankyu Braves of the Pacific League.

The big kahuna of Japanese baseball is the Central League’s Yomiuri Tokyo Giants, owned by the Yomiuri media conglomerate that includes the daily national newspaper with the largest circulation and a national television network. Imagine the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers rolled into one and three times as obnoxious. The Giants fashioned themselves into Japan’s team, aided by the clout of their newspaper and television stations, which make no effort to be impartial. Led by home run champion Sadaharu Oh, the Giants won nine straight titles from 1965 to 1973.

It would be difficult for an American baseball fan to understand just how much weight the Giants throw around. The league commissioner is a mere mouthpiece for their interests. The team buys the players it wants, drafts the players it wants using advance agreements, and bends the rules whenever it deems necessary. Umpires have a different strike zone for the Giants. One umpire crew chief stated in public that he preferred the Giants to score first in the games he worked; it made things easier. In the U.S., he would have been out of a job, but in Japan he only lost his crew chief position.

All the other media outlets in Tokyo, even those unaffiliated with Yomiuri, went along with the facts of life. This meant that discussions of Japanese baseball in Japan in the media began and ended with the Giants, even during those years when they fielded uncompetitive teams. At times, Japanese baseball resembled the Harlem Globetrotters and 11 regional versions of the Washington Colonels, except these people weren’t goofing around.

The other five Central League teams gladly went along with this arrangement. The Giants had successfully marketed themselves as Japan’s team, and the rest of the CL benefited financially from their success through gate receipts. The other teams in the league consisted (and still do) of the Hanshin Tigers, loveable losers who are the most popular team in greater Osaka, and teams with no other local competition in Hiroshima, Nagoya, and Yokohama.

The Pacific League, however, was left out in the cold. Though their caliber of baseball was just as good as that in the CL—and the Seibu Lions were the best team in Japanese baseball in the 80s—attendance was miserable. At one time three other teams in the greater Osaka area competed against the Hanshin Tigers for fans, and none of them drew well. Some played in stadiums so empty it was embarrassing.

Also, the conditions under which Japanese baseball operates are significantly different from those in the U.S. Here are some of what doesn’t exist in Japanese baseball: revenue sharing, a salary cap, a luxury tax, a fair draft (rich teams can buy players with hidden payments) a national TV contract with shared revenues, and coordinated licensing and marketing programs.

There conditions stood until the 90s, when a variety of factors converged to cause trouble. First, the Japanese economy tanked in the early 90s, and it has yet to fully recover. Second, a new professional soccer league was formed in Japan that became instantly successful and drew fan and media interest away from baseball. Third, Japan’s best players were no longer content with being big fish in a little pond, and starting with Hideo Nomo, began competing and succeeding in the U.S.

The first team to crack was the Kintetsu Buffaloes in Osaka. The Buffaloes were a perennially underperforming franchise with the worst attendance of the four Osaka area teams. They were the only squad who failed to win the Japan Series after they entered the league in 1950. When Japan’s economic bubble burst, the team’s owners, the Kintetsu Railway Company, found itself neck deep in sour real estate investments made during the era of a-go-go financial engineering. The company’s biggest liability was the baseball team. They needed financial help—their losses were up to 4 billion yen a year—and couldn’t afford the team for advertising value any longer.

Between the 2003 and 2004 seasons, Kintetsu asked the league for permission to sell naming rights. They were turned down, perhaps because the old guard in Japan is congenitally incapable of trying something new. Unable to maintain their financial position, the company decided to pull the plug. On June 13 last year, the story broke that President Masanori Yamaguchi of the Kintetsu Corporation had reached an agreement in May to merge with the Kobe-based Orix Blue Wave, Ichiro Suzuki’s old team

The merger would have created another problem, however—the Pacific League would become a five-team league, which was considered an untenable arrangement. The media began predicting another Pacific League merger, in which four teams would be created that would combine with the Central League to create a single 10-team league.

One team mentioned as a merger candidate was the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks. While that team’s owners, the Daiei mass merchandising chain, was in financial quicksand just as deep as Kintetsu, the similarities ended. The only problem was ownership; the Hawks themselves were a successful franchise. They had broad local fan support and had won the Japan Series a couple of years before.

But the Hawks’ owners were desperate to curry favor with the Yomiuri Giants, even going so far as to trade their best player to the Giants for…nobody. The Hawks gave Hiroki Kokubo to the Giants without receiving a player in return. Though Hawks ownership tried to explain it away by saying they were doing Kokubo a favor because he wanted to play for the Giants anyway, everyone else saw the move as pure brown-nosing. Daiei thought they were buying the Giants’ support for their efforts to maintain the franchise. Were the fans upset? Yes, but Japanese baseball teams had never cared what their fans thought before, and old habits die hard.

The brown beak on the Hawks didn’t do them any good, however, as they also were to become obsolete despite fan popularity and on-field success. The Buffaloes and the Blue Wave were merging, and plans were nearly complete for the Hawks to merge with another team. None of this could have happened without the blessing of the Giants, and when the Giants spoke, the other teams listened.

The old Japan was a top-down enterprise run for the benefit of the large interlocking interests of industry and government, where decisions were made behind closed doors. The people were expected to bow, respectfully chirp hai, wakarimashita, and scurry off to do as they were told. In the old Japan, this would have been a done deal. Japanese baseball would have become a single ten-team league, and the people who didn’t like it could lump it.

But old guard didn’t realize that the old Japan doesn’t exist any more, and something happened that caught them and all of Japanese baseball by surprise. The fans and the players wouldn’t stand for it.

On deck for tomorrow: The serfs storm the Winter Palace.