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
6AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:24
Re: #1
>"…the words. Difficult," (looking pensive).
It's a radio broadcast — how would you even know what his face looked like?
19AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:29
Re: #6
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.
188AnonymousAug 30, 2026 13:10
Re: #6
Tokyo Sports has psychic vision, apparently.
8AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:25
Back then it was a rough, violent era where "kill," "stab," and "steal" didn't feel out of place.
92AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:37
Re: #8
Pretty soon they'll probably say even "rough and violent" is a bit much.
10AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:26
"Sudden death" — the rule itself is gone now anyway.
51AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:53
Re: #10
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.
67AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:11
Re: #10
It does technically exist in penalty shootouts, at least.
22AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:33
What about "dead ball"? Is that okay just because it's not written in kanji?
28AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:37
Re: #22
English doesn't even use that expression — it's "hit by pitch."
35AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:40
During the war, "strike" was fine
but "ball" wasn't allowed.
Just a little trivia for you.
55AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:56
Re: #35
And yet they still wanted to play a sport that was born in America — that's the real mystery.
41AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:47
Soccer got rid of terms like
"own goal" (literally "suicide point")
and "sudden death"
pretty early on.
46AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:50
Re: #41
First you'd have to start calling it "football."
45AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:50
Old guys can't keep up with how language changes.
They keep using dead words forever.
That's exactly why generation gaps happen.
109AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:54
Re: #45
"Dead word" (死語) evokes death too, so shouldn't that get reviewed as well?
53AnonymousAug 30, 2026 08:55
This is so pointless.
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.
145AnonymousAug 30, 2026 11:16
Re: #53
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.
61AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:02
Before baseball, shouldn't they get rid of sumo's ban on women entering the ring first?
62AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:07
Re: #61
Funny thing is, women's sumo was totally normal back in the Edo period… so what even is "tradition"??
64AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:08
I wish they'd stop changing terminology.
I still almost say "loss time" for soccer even now.
65AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:10
Re: #64
Loss time = the lost hourglass.
70AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:14
Even in stuff like this, baseball can't keep up with soccer.
74AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:19
Re: #70
Soccer never gets reported on like this — they just suddenly announce "it's already decided."
73AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:19
This isn't really "word-policing" — it's just about renaming things to something more fitting.
People are way overreacting.
79AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:22
Re: #73
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?
84AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:26
Re: #79
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.
126AnonymousAug 30, 2026 10:24
Re: #79
You're the one reacting emotionally here, lol.
I never said a single word about banning the old terms, lol.
85AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:28
"Dead ball" is just too dumb.
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.
104AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:51
Re: #85
Japanese people who can't speak English would probably translate "hit" here as "base hit."
111AnonymousAug 30, 2026 09:54
Before that, they should get rid of the siren at Koshien
and the buzz cuts too —
my kid said the players just look like North Koreans and was creeped out by it.
137AnonymousAug 30, 2026 11:09
Re: #111
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.
183AnonymousAug 30, 2026 12:45
Re: #111
At the prefectural tournament level, schools with buzz cuts are actually becoming the minority now.
185AnonymousAug 30, 2026 12:52
Re: #111
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.
122AnonymousAug 30, 2026 10:10
If they've got time to come up with pointless rewordings like this, they should make Hanshin fans drop their "one more out, one more pitch" chant instead.
136AnonymousAug 30, 2026 11:08
Re: #122
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…
170AnonymousAug 30, 2026 12:25
Porn actress → adult video (AV) actress → "sexy actress" →
"Dementia praecox" → "split-mind disorder" → "integration dysregulation syndrome" (successive Japanese terms for what's now called schizophrenia)
173AnonymousAug 30, 2026 12:28
Re: #170
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.
177AnonymousAug 30, 2026 12:31
Re: #170
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.
