Isao Harimoto, Hiroshima survivor and a baseball star in Japan, dies at 86

Isao Harimoto, who survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing as a child and went on to have more hits than anyone else in the history of Japanese baseball, died Wednesday in Tokyo. He was 86.

His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Meikyukai, or the Golden Players Club, one of Japan’s baseball halls of fame. No cause was given.

Mr. Harimoto earned the nickname Hit Machine for collecting a record 3,085 of them in a long career than stretched from the late 1950s to the early ’80s. He won seven league batting titles.

He was the only player to collect 3,000 hits in Japan. (Ichiro Suzuki had 4,367, but more than 3,000 came after he moved to the American major leagues.)

But Mr. Harimoto was far from a slap hitter; 504 of those hits were home runs, putting him seventh on the all-time list for Japan. He also stole 319 bases, won an MVP award, and was an 18-time All Star.

After his time as a player, he became an outspoken commentator on the game.

Isao Harimoto was born on June 19, 1940, in Hiroshima, Japan, to Korean parents who had emigrated the year before. His Korean name was Jang Hun. His mother, Pak Sun Bun, was a cook and his father, Jang Sang Jeong, sold scrap metal and various secondhand items from a cart.

Harimoto was 5 when the atomic bomb was dropped on the city, about a mile and a half from where he lived. “There was a flash and an enormous roar,” he told the Chugoku Shimbun newspaper in 2011. “The next thing I knew, my mother was shielding me and my sister, three years older, with her body, though her back was covered in blood due to flying shards of glass.”

The event was not frequently discussed in his home. “My mother wanted to forget; I think she wanted to completely erase her memories of that day,” he told the Mainichi, a Japanese English-language newspaper, in 2020. He lost a sister, Jang Jeom Ja, in the bombing, and his mother burned all photographs of her, he said. He himself did not discuss the cataclysm publicly until well after his baseball career.

He was proud of his Korean heritage despite being bullied for it as a child and facing prejudice during his career.

“A lot of ethnic Koreans in Japan assimilate into Japanese society,” said Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa (1989), the definitive book in English about Japanese baseball. “Harimoto did not. He talked about the fact that his mother never spoke Japanese in the house, and he was very proud of that fact.”

Mr. Harimoto was also critical of other athletes in Japan with Korean backgrounds who hid their ethnicity. Only late in life did he become a Japanese citizen.

He burned his right hand in an accident as a young child, an event that contributed to his becoming a left-handed hitter when he took up baseball in fifth grade. Despite his talent, he lost a few chances at places on top high school teams because of a reputation as a troublemaker, deserved or not.

In 1958, he visited South Korea for the first time with a team of Korean Japanese high school students. He met his grandparents and later said he truly connected with his Korean roots for the first time.

His rigorous, disciplined approach to batting, and an ability to consistently hit up the middle, soon brought him to the top leagues. In 1959, playing with the Tokyo-based Toei Flyers, he hit .275, good enough to be named rookie of the year. He got much better over the next two seasons, hitting .302, and then .336. He played left field, and fielding was not his strong suit, but as a hitter, he performed strongly and consistently for two decades.

Many of the teams he played on were not among the elite in the Japan leagues. He was part of a Japan Series-winning team only once, in 1962, when his Flyers beat the Hanshin Tigers in seven games. That was also the year he was named the Pacific League’s most valuable player. (The Flyers adopted their current name, the Nippon Ham Fighters, during his time with the team.)

Mr. Harimoto’s most spectacular season was 1970, when he hit .383 with 34 home runs and 100 RBI, all career highs.

He was a large player by the Japan leagues’ standards at the time, listed at 5 foot 11 and 187 pounds. And he was not afraid of players, American or Japanese, who were bigger still. “If there was a brawl on the field, he was always in the middle of it,” Whiting said. “He was a scary guy; no one wanted to fight him. He wasn’t afraid to show his temper and challenge people on the field.”

Despite Mr. Harimoto’s batting success, he never could shake a reputation in Japan for being a bit of a bad boy. He enjoyed a drink and was involved in a few fights.

He moved on to the Yomiuri Giants in 1976 and the Lotte Orions in 1980. He retired after the 1981 season at 41.

After his playing days were over, Harimoto became a commentator on the game with a reputation for saying what he thought. “He didn’t seem to have a filter,” Whiting said. “He was very protective of the Japanese game and critical of players who went to the States to play, thinking they should be loyal to the Japan leagues.”

Harimoto worked for the Korea Baseball Organization and helped establish that country’s national league in 1982, though he later split with the group over slights he believed he received.

Speaking out against nuclear weapons was also a big part of his later life. “Which is more important: protecting human lives or holding on to nuclear weapons?” he asked in the Chugoku Shimbun in 2011. “These two things are poles apart. It’s inhuman to permit the existence of weapons that can annihilate people in an instant, when they’re just trying their best to live.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.