The Answer - A Newspaper President Replaced a Manager Who Met the Target
On October 21, 1980, Yomiuri announced that manager Shigeo Nagashima was resigning and that Motoshi Fujita would succeed him. The next day, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported a "resignation" on its front page. Yet the decision to remove Nagashima was made not by Toru Shoriki, the club's owner, but by Mitsuo Mutai, president of the parent company, the Yomiuri Shimbun. He had decided before the season ended. In form it was a resignation; in substance it was a dismissal.
That year Yomiuri went 61-60-9 and finished third, in the A-class, the top half of the six-team league. The club had publicly said Nagashima would stay if the team reached the A-class, and when that promise was reversed, the move was denounced as a "conspiracy." Nagashima was made to answer for the club's first three straight seasons without a pennant since the two-league system began. The last time Yomiuri had gone three years without a title was in the single-league era, 1944 to 1948 (no season was played in 1945).
The person who decided the manager's fate was the head of a newspaper, not the club, and the condition the club itself had announced for keeping him counted for nothing against that decision.
The 1980 Season - Third Place at 61-60-9
Nagashima's sixth season as manager opened with three straight losses. Yomiuri was third at the end of April (2.5 games back), fell to fifth by the end of May (6.5 back), and was still fifth at the end of July, by then 16.0 games out. A seven-game winning streak in August lifted the club back to third by month's end, but it was fourth at the end of September (19.0 back). A 10-2 October brought a third-place finish, 14.0 games behind first-place Hiroshima.
| Club | Place | Record | Games behind |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hiroshima | 1st | 73-44-13 | - |
| Yakult | 2nd | 68-52-10 | 6.5 |
| Yomiuri | 3rd | 61-60-9 | 14.0 |
| Taiyo | 4th | 59-62-9 | 16.0 |
The pitching held up. Suguru Egawa led the league with 16 wins and 219 strikeouts, his first title in each, and the team ERA of 2.95 was the only one in the league under 3.00. The offense was the opposite: a team batting average of .243 was the only one in the league below .250. Sadaharu Oh, who turned 40 in May, hit 30 home runs but batted .236, last in the league among qualified hitters.
Third place was settled on October 19 and 20, when Yomiuri beat Hiroshima, then tuning up for the Japan Series, twice in a row to win the race with Taiyo. The announcement came the following day. Oh later told Nikkan Sports (December 21, 2024) that he had already decided to retire at the end of that season and had a venue booked for his own press conference, but his conference was abruptly called off and Nagashima's resignation press conference was held in that same venue. Oh announced his retirement on November 4, saying he had reached the limit of his strength and could no longer hit his own way, and the Fujita regime formally began on November 11.
Who Decided - Yomiuri Shimbun President Mitsuo Mutai
Mitsuo Mutai joined Yomiuri in 1929 and rose through the circulation side, earning the nickname "the demon of sales." After Matsutaro Shoriki died in October 1969, Mutai served as president from the early 1970s, became chairman in 1981 and honorary chairman in 1983. He kept his representative authority and remained the most powerful figure at Yomiuri until his death at 94 on April 30, 1991. From the 1970s to the early 1990s he was the club's de facto owner, in a position to decide who managed it.
A saying attributed to Mutai as his creed, recorded in Yoichi Suzuki's 1987 book on Yomiuri managerial decisions (Kodansha), holds that the club belongs not to Yomiuri but to the public. Two causes are cited for his deepening distrust of Toru Shoriki and Nagashima: the three straight seasons without a pennant late in Nagashima's tenure, and the 1978 "Blank Day," the Egawa affair, which Toru Shoriki set off while Mutai was away recovering from illness (see our article on the Egawa affair).
Mutai's decisions did not end in 1980. It was also Mutai who fired manager Sadaharu Oh during the 1988 season and brought Fujita back as his successor. While Mutai lived, Nagashima's return to Yomiuri was said to be taboo. Mutai's death in 1991 and Tsuneo Watanabe's appointment as president of the Yomiuri Shimbun opened the way for Nagashima to manage again.
The Road to Dismissal, 1975 to 1980 - Six Seasons and Interference from Club Alumni
Nagashima's first stint as manager began with a last-place finish in 1975, the first in club history. Yomiuri won the pennant in 1976 and 1977 but lost the Japan Series to Hankyu both years. It finished second in 1978 (3 games behind Yakult), fifth in 1979 (10.5 behind Hiroshima) and third in 1980. There was no Japan Series title in six years, and six straight seasons without one was the club's longest drought, single-league era included.
The Egawa affair broke in the 1978 offseason, and Shigeru Kobayashi went to Hanshin in exchange for Egawa. In 1979 Egawa went 9-10, Yomiuri lost eight straight to Kobayashi starting with the second game of the season, and the club fell to fifth on September 5. Isao Harimoto, who left the team that offseason, told reporters that "the team is heading in the wrong direction." That autumn Nagashima drilled 18 young players at the grueling Ito camp, acquired Roy White, and brought in Noboru Aota as head coach. But Aota was suspended for three months over remarks in a January 10, 1980 interview with Sunday Mainichi and left the club on January 18.
Pressure also came from club alumni and the media. Among baseball media and fans who took a Japan Series title for granted, calls grew for the return of Tetsuharu Kawakami. Alumni known as the Kawakami faction meddled in Nagashima's team building, and between 1975 and 1979 the front office dismissed 11 coaches (according to a 1993 Nagashima encyclopedia published by PHP). Yukinobu Kuroe, who left the staff in 1978, recalled Nagashima telling him: "You did well as my right hand, but this is the club's decision. I'm sorry, but I have to ask you to step down" (Nikkan Gendai, February 11, 2015).
In August 1980 the weekly Shukan Bunshun held a roundtable. Kawakami gathered Noboru Aota, Shigeru Makino, Motoshi Fujita and Akira Kunimatsu and discussed Nagashima's successor with the magazine's reporter on the condition that it stay off the record. The article ran a few days later, and according to Aota's posthumous autobiography, "the wave to oust Nagashima became unstoppable." The successor's name reached a weekly magazine from club alumni before the club announced anything. Public opinion was shaped before the personnel decision was made.
Nagashima saw his dismissal as the result of years of maneuvering by Kawakami and his faction, and his ill feeling toward Kawakami became decisive (according to a 2001 Nagashima encyclopedia from Shincho OH! Bunko). He declined Toru Shoriki's offer of a front-office post, saying the front office did not suit him, submitted his resignation from the club, and set up a personal office, Office N. After Kawakami became head of the alumni association, Nagashima kept skipping its meetings until 1990, when he was warned he would be removed if he did not attend that year; he attended and "reconciled" with Kawakami.
The Fujita Era and Twelve Years Away
His successor, Motoshi Fujita, became the club's 10th manager on October 21, 1980. Because Fujita had taken part in the roundtable and Kawakami had named him as the successor, he was attacked by the pro-Nagashima press. The staff was a "troika" of Fujita, head coach Shigeru Makino and assistant manager Oh. Fujita spoke of his debt to Mutai for the rest of his life.
In 1981 Yomiuri went 73-48-9 (.603), won the pennant and beat Nippon-Ham in the Japan Series for its first title since 1973. Tatsunori Hara, the 1980 first-round pick contested by four clubs, was Rookie of the Year. The attacks on Fujita still continued, and much of the coverage praised Nagashima instead, saying that "the players who are performing are all players Nagashima forged at Ito."
In January 1982 Nagashima became a guest commentator for the Hochi Shimbun and worked as an analyst on Nippon TV broadcasts. He turned down every managerial offer from other clubs: Taiyo (after the 1981 and 1984 seasons), Seibu (after 1981), Nippon-Ham (after 1983), Chunichi (1983), Yakult (after 1989) and Orix (after 1990). To Taiyo he said he wanted "to study a little longer." He returned on October 12, 1992, at a press conference as the club's 13th manager, a move that also served as a response to the J.League, which launched the following year.
How to Read This and Its Limits
The sources this article relies on contain no words from Mutai or Nagashima about the dismissal. It is sometimes said that Yomiuri Shimbun circulation fell because of the dismissal, but there are no figures to back that up.
Even the label varies. Yomiuri's announcement and the newspaper's front page said "resignation," while some later accounts call it a "dismissal." If Mutai made the decision, as the record says, the event is best read as a dismissal.
The 1980 case can be read as an early example of a structure in which Yomiuri's managerial appointments move on the judgment of the parent company's top executive rather than the club's. What came after is covered in our articles on the Tsuneo Watanabe era and the 2011 Kiyotake revolt.