From our other sites
The story
Tokyo Sports reports that comedian Akashiya Sanma looked pensive discussing the debate over revising high school baseball terminology on MBS Radio’s late-night broadcast on August 22. According to the report, the Miyagi Prefecture High School Baseball Federation is setting up a review committee aiming to change terms with aggressive connotations like “kill” (殺), “stab” (刺), “death” (死), and “steal” (盗). Reactions on 5ch were split: some pushed back, calling it nothing more than “word-policing,” while others argued that “moral standards change with the times” and the change should be accepted. Many posts also cited examples of terms that have already disappeared, like “sudden death,” or terms that stuck around despite being mistranslations, like “dead ball.”
August 30, 2026, 00:50
Comedian Akashiya Sanma appeared on MBS Radio’s “Young Town Saturday” during its late-night broadcast on the 22nd, and reacted to the emerging debate over revising baseball terminology.
According to the report, the Miyagi Prefecture High School Baseball Federation is establishing a review committee aiming to change baseball terms containing aggressive expressions such as “stab” (刺), “kill” (殺), “death” (死), and “steal” (盗).
Source: tokyo-sports.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
>"…the words. Difficult," (looking pensive).
It's a radio broadcast — how would you even know what his face looked like?
People who are good at radio work talk in a way that lets you picture their expression.
That nuance doesn't come through even when it's transcribed into text.
Tokyo Sports has psychic vision, apparently.
Pretty soon they'll probably say even "rough and violent" is a bit much.
To begin with, baseball — which has top and bottom halves of an inning — never actually had a "sudden death" rule.
Though people used to call the current tiebreaker system that.
It does technically exist in penalty shootouts, at least.
English doesn't even use that expression — it's "hit by pitch."
but "ball" wasn't allowed.
Just a little trivia for you.
And yet they still wanted to play a sport that was born in America — that's the real mystery.
"own goal" (literally "suicide point")
and "sudden death"
pretty early on.
First you'd have to start calling it "football."
They keep using dead words forever.
That's exactly why generation gaps happen.
"Dead word" (死語) evokes death too, so shouldn't that get reviewed as well?
If it clearly led to discrimination, fine, but if we start regulating things just because someone reacts like this,
it's going to be endless, absurd word-policing forever.
A world that caters to weak people who say "this makes me feel bad" just breeds more and more oversensitive, easily-hurt people.
A world full of Spelunker-types who "die" the moment someone scolds them a little is far less healthy.
Improving morals along with the times is what a civilized society does.
Praising the Showa era is fine, but compared to the Sengoku or Edo periods, people in the Showa era would look pretty sensitive too — did Japan collapse because of that?
Are you saying the world, and Japan, would've developed further if we still had witch trials or the right to cut down commoners on the spot?
If anything, I'd argue the Ice Age generation, forced to cling to whatever single job they could get, listened too much to their elders and stalled moral progress — and that stagnation itself became one cause of Japan's economic stagnation.
Funny thing is, women's sumo was totally normal back in the Edo period… so what even is "tradition"??
I still almost say "loss time" for soccer even now.
Loss time = the lost hourglass.
Soccer never gets reported on like this — they just suddenly announce "it's already decided."
People are way overreacting.
Sure, words changing is inevitable.
But us old guys are just saying, let us keep using the old terms.
If anything, aren't you the one reacting emotionally here?
Just change it without asking for anyone's opinion.
The out-of-touch old farts who can't keep up can just get left behind.
You're the one reacting emotionally here, lol.
I never said a single word about banning the old terms, lol.
How does "hit by pitch" turn into that, lol
It really seems like someone mixed it up with the other meaning of "dead ball" (a ball not in play).
I think this is a good chance to fix an embarrassing made-up word.
Japanese people who can't speak English would probably translate "hit" here as "base hit."
and the buzz cuts too —
my kid said the players just look like North Koreans and was creeped out by it.
Back then there was no sound system that could put out that much volume, so they just used a hand-crank siren anyone could operate.
At the prefectural tournament level, schools with buzz cuts are actually becoming the minority now.
This came up in Kuwata Masumi's thesis too — Japanese baseball itself is a sport that still carries strong traces of prewar military-style coaching.
If you don't like that, you can just stop watching Japanese baseball.
Rugby's the same way, actually — it was valued abroad partly for being good military training, so it's another sport with a strong war/military color.
That chant actually has a bad reputation even among Hanshin fans, but even the ones who badmouth it end up chanting along once they're at the stadium…
"Dementia praecox" → "split-mind disorder" → "integration dysregulation syndrome" (successive Japanese terms for what's now called schizophrenia)
So "tōshitsu" (5ch slang shorthand mocking schizophrenia, literally "sugar/carb") was originally treated like dementia.
Repeating the same thing over and over —
that's genuinely rough.
Might end up as "sexy actor" for men too.
Prostitution → "enjo kōsai" (compensated dating) → "papa katsu" (sugar-daddy dating)
Dial Q2 (phone chat lines) → dating sites → matching apps
It just keeps getting more casual and convenient.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Baseball terms like “kill” (殺), “stab” (刺), and “steal” (盗) aren’t direct translations from English — they’re Sino-Japanese expressions applied when the sport was imported during the Meiji era, and they don’t necessarily match the nuance of the original American English. “Dead ball,” for instance, is Japanese-made English (wasei-eigo); in actual English it’s simply called a “hit by pitch.” The review committee set up by the Miyagi Prefecture High School Baseball Federation that sparked this discussion is only the starting point for debate — no terminology change has been officially decided. Opinions split on the thread largely over whether to view this kind of review as “word-policing” or as “a reasonable update for the times,” with many commenters pointing to soccer’s past renaming of terms like “own goal” (literally “suicide point”) and “sudden death” as precedent. At the same time, the fact that similar shifts in terminology have played out repeatedly outside baseball too — in the names for mental illnesses or certain professions, for example — was only touched on piecemeal in the replies rather than laid out systematically, making it an easy point for readers to miss.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Entertainment] Sanma laments report on reviewing baseball terms like “kill” and “stab”: “Getting rid of these words now… I don’t feel bad about it at all” [Ailuropoda melanoleuca★]” on 5ch.
Leave a Reply