Japan’s batters are hitting for recycle
Every year, thousands of splintered bats find new life as chopsticks
The bats the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers break during the World Series are likely to be sold at team stores or by memorabilia companies, donated to charity, given away or even repurposed as wooden handles for bottle openers.
In the Japan Series (Japan’s version of the World Series), which begins Saturday in a country meticulous about recycling, cracked and splintered bats may find another use as objects indispensable to life here: chopsticks.
Each season, thousands of damaged bats are reprocessed into reusable “kattobashi,” a mash-up of the Japanese word for chopsticks and a baseball chant that translates as “get a big hit.”
The recycling is part of a conservation effort, designed to be decades long and to help preserve and replenish a species of ash tree known as aodamo, native to Japan and a region of eastern Russia. Aodamo wood — durable, light, flexible and resistant to splintering — was once used to make most of the professional bats here. But baseball officials, sporting goods companies and conservationists say aodamo is no longer considered economically feasible to log on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, considered the sweet spot for bat production.
At one time, Japanese stars like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui used aodamo bats. So did some Americans like Mike Piazza. But forestry officials did not systematically replant the trees as they were felled.
Now the vast majority of bats are made from maple and white ash, mostly imported. Mizuno and Zett, two leading Japanese sporting goods manufacturers, say they no longer make bats from aodamo ash. The hope is that if the reforestation project is successful over the next half century or so, aodamo will again become feasible for baseball.
Articles in The Nikkei financial newspaper and other Japanese publications first sounded alarms about the decreased availability of aodamo wood in 2000. The Nikkei article was read by officials at the Hyozaemon chopsticks company, founded in 1921, with an office in Tokyo and a factory in Obama City, Japan. (Yes, the company said it made souvenir chopsticks for a certain American president and first family.)
Hyozaemon’s chief executive, Hyogoo Uratani, 73, had played baseball in high school and was intrigued. He contacted a friend, Takeo Minatoya, 81, who had been a professional pitcher for the Taiyo Whales of Japan’s Central League and, later, a general manager and consultant for the team, now called the Yokohama BayStars.
At the time, broken bats were mostly given away or burned in barrels to keep players warm during spring training, Minatoya said. The bats-into-chopsticks idea, he said through an interpreter, allowed Japanese baseball “to start having a conscience about recycling.”
He helped persuade the 12 teams in Japan’s Central and Pacific Leagues to participate. Hyozaemon pays a licensing fee to put team logos on its chopsticks. In turn, Nippon Professional Baseball, Japan’s equivalent of Major League Baseball, makes an annual contribution of 3.5 million yen, or about $40,000, to the non-profit Aodamo Preservation Society.
The money is used to plant aodamo seedlings on Hokkaido. Other baseball entities contribute 2.5 million yen, about $22,000, to the aodamo nonprofit, while Hyozaemon con- tributes an additional 100,000 yen, about $900, said Masayuki Naito, the nonprofit’s secretary general. More than 10,000 trees have been planted so far, he said.
Hyozaemon said it collects an average of 10,000 broken bats each season. They are gathered by a courier service, whose records indicate it collected approximately 2,180 bats in July, August and September from professional and industrial leagues and from collegiate teams.
The barrel is sawed from the handle, sliced vertically into thin blocks then sanded by craftsmen into the shape of chopsticks. Team logos are imprinted, and layers of lacquer are applied.
The barrel of one bat can yield five or six pairs of chopsticks, Hyozaemon officials said.