Not only has he been entrusted with restoring Japan’s image but he has become a romantic symbol countering the national

Not only has he been entrusted with restoring Japan’s image, but he has become a romantic symbol, countering the national Japanese stereotype for social conformism and compliance to the strictures of corporate Japanese life – a youth who threw away a safe career to pursue a dream.In the US the sport is in desperate need of a boost: a year-long dispute between players and major league owners paralysed the game, and viewing figures are down 25 per cent since last year.Nomo, with almost no English, is lionised as a celebrity player at home and was recently selected to play in the All-Star game, a mid-season championship of top players which has not invited a rookie pitcher to play in 15 years.”The most famous Japanese in America is neither the Prime Minister, Tomiichi Murayama, nor the Minister for International Trade. He’s become the Michael Jordan of our country.”Nomo is the first Japanese to play in American major league baseball in 30 years. His 6-1 win-loss record and fantastic run average, slaying every US baseball star with his baffling 90mph pitches, have made him the toast of the US and Japan.In Japan he has become the quintessential local boy made good. “Whenever he pitches, it’s like everybody in Japan stops what they’re doing.

In the last six months, Hideo “Tornado” Nomo, 26, has been entrusted not only with saving baseball the way Babe Ruth did in the Twenties, but also restoring Japan’s self-regard after a year of cult attacks, the Kobe earthquake, economic slump, trade disputes and rows over the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” says Don Nomura, Nomo’s agent. EVERY year one American sports figure captures the imagination of the public. This year is no exception – except that the new icon is a Japanese pitcher for the Dodgers baseball team in Los Angeles who speaks little English and is shy of celebrity. In old South Africa I would know I can go down this street and not down that one Here in Portugal I don’t know which streets are safe And the stones I don’t see are the ones that kill me.”. “I can easily get work doing an African dance like this.” He sketches a crude hip-jiggle, beer glass in hand “The Portuguese love it They think it’s exotic. But if you want to do something serious, forget it.”The racism here is not obvious, it is subtle, soft and dangerous. The worst is when you go into a bar and the barman just ignores you, serving all the other people.” Mr Aguiar works in the theatre as a dancer.

It offered an amnesty to illegal residents, giving them three months to get their papers in order But many were afraid and took no action. Now, technically, they face deportation.Mr Ka says mass deportations are unlikely because construction companies need the labour for such big projects as the new bridge over the Tagus – a British joint venture – the metro extension and Expo-98, but the authorities will not legalise the Africans either. “So they remain in a sort of limbo, neither deported nor legal, vulnerable to blackmail and exploitation.”Quintero Aguiar, 25, came from the island of Sao Tome nine years ago, and likes a drink in the Bairro Alto. “I’ve been turned down so many times for houses and jobs that now when I phone I say from the start that I’m black. Mamadu Djoco, in his thirties, arrived in Prior Velho from Guinea-Bissau in 1982 and works, when he can find employment, on building sites. “I am not very happy, because the whites don’t treat us as equals It is two worlds. Even if we live side by side they treat us differently.”In 1993, the government tightened up asylum and immigration laws to bring Portugal into line with other European countries in the Schengen group, which seeks to drop border controls.

It ended the previous open-door policy, alerting many Portuguese for the first time to the idea that Africans should be kept out. Those who remain, as they look across the motorway to the glass and steel towers of a European metropolis, live in fear of the bulldozers.Prior Velho’s community of Gypsies, Cape Verdeans, Guineans, and some poor Portuguese, co-exist without really mixing, but underlying tension has heightened in recent weeks. But they still fetch water from a standpipe and steal electricity by tapping into mains cables.A slow rehousing programme has been under way for years, but the new flats residents are sent to are often worse than the slums they leave behind. Prior Velho, a chaotic jumble of alleyways, is a well-established though illegal shantytown whose residents, over more than 10 years, have scaled up their tin shacks into plaster and concrete dwellings. Africans driven from the former colonies by poverty, drought or civil war were welcomed as cheap labour by the booming construction industry. Portugal, with a population of 10 million, has 170,000 registered foreign residents, and between 70,000 and 150,000 illegal immigrants.Most live in shanty settlements on the fringes of Lisbon with the dusty anarchy of Third Worldtownships. In the years after the “carnation revolution” of 1974, prompted by soldiers sick of fighting an unwinnable war in the African colonies, up to a million retornados, mostly white, were absorbed into Portugal.