Kazuhisa Kawaguchi, a famous pitcher, is busy growing rice… “I’m busier than when I was in Tokyo!

It has been exactly one year since I moved to Tottori. I planted rice in May this year and harvested it for the first time in September. I was really happy when the little ears of rice came on. …… I took a picture of it and sent it to Tatsunori Hara, the manager who took care of me when I was a member of the Giants. I also ate the harvested rice, but I had no idea that rice, which used to just fill my stomach, could be so sweet.”

Kazuhisa Kawaguchi, 63, a left fielder for 18 years with the Hiroshima Giants and Hiroshima City, is the man with the sickle in his hand, his voice full of excitement. After retiring, Kawaguchi became a baseball commentator, and from 2011 he served as pitching coach for the Giants. For 26 years after moving to the Giants, he lived in Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture, and worked from his base in Tokyo, but last October he returned to his hometown of Tottori.

Two years ago in November, when my mother’s ashes were laid to rest in Tottori, she saw the rice field in front of the grave and said, ‘I want to grow rice here. Up until then, at every milestone in my life, my wife’s words have pushed me forward.’ When I obtained FA rights in 1994, my own intention was to stay in Hiroshima, but my wife’s father was suffering from cancer at the time, and I wanted to be close to him, so I decided to move to Hiroshima. In the later years of my career as a player, when I thought about retiring, she said to me, ‘You have worked so hard until now,’ and that was the deciding factor. This time, the rice fields she found in Tottori belonged to a relative of mine, and I thought it would be nice to get away from my life in Kanto, where I myself had become stuck in a rut.”

However, his wife, Junko (61), had no farming experience before moving to Tottori. Kawaguchi also helped his mother’s family, who were farmers, with rice planting and harvesting until he was 18 years old in Tottori. He may have won a total of 139 professional baseball games, but in the world of rice farming, he is a “newbie. With the advice of his older brother Hideaki Kimura, 66, who was groomed to be a farmer, he began growing rice while continuing his job as a baseball commentator.

He said, “Water management is important for growing rice. If you add too much water, the sun’s rays will warm the rice and cause the roots to wither. On his brother’s advice, he temporarily drained the water from the rice fields during the hot summer days, and when he re-filled the water a few days later, the rice grew surprisingly fast, and he repeated the process three or four times. When you put stress on the rice and give it a reward for overcoming the ordeal, it grows much faster. When I realized that the secret of raising rice and people is the same, I felt the depth of the experience. That’s why when I spend a lot of time in Tokyo for work, I get curious about rice paddies. ……