- Share via
The smile got a little bigger, the emotions a little deeper, the meaning a little greater the more Dave Roberts looked around the room.
In the wake of last year’s World Series title, in which Roberts led the Dodgers to the second championship of his decorated tenure, the veteran manager spent weeks basking in the triumph. He sprayed champagne in the Bronx. He danced with Ice Cube the day of the parade. He rejoiced with friends and family who watched him endure a season he described as “the most trying” of his nine years with the Dodgers, but also “the most satisfying.”
Then, he got an invitation he never expected.
In early December, Roberts returned to the place of his birth, traveling to the Japanese city of Naha on the small Pacific island of Okinawa to receive an official recognition from the municipality’s local government.
As the Dodgers prepare to begin the season in Japan against the Chicago Cubs, here are five takeaways on how things went during spring training.
In a ceremony at Naha’s City Hall, Roberts was presented with a Special Honor Award — given to people who contribute to Naha’s standing in Japan — before the city’s mayor, 40 assembly members and thousands of local residents.
And as he addressed the crowd that day, Roberts felt a connection that had been missing for much of his life.
“Winning the World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers, for the city of Los Angeles, was incredible,” a beaming and appreciative Roberts said during his address at the ceremony. “But the final piece for me was to come to Naha to be with my people and celebrate with you guys, together.”
“Everything I do with my job,” he later added, “I take the Okinawan people with me.”
Roberts didn’t always have such a sentimental perspective on his Japanese roots. Though he was born in Okinawa — where his African American father, Waymon, and Japanese mother, Eiko, were married while Waymon was stationed on the island as a Marine in 1972 — Roberts and his parents relocated to the U.S. when he was just a newborn.
For much of his youth — which was spent moving around from bases in North Carolina to Orange County to Hawaii and eventually San Diego — he subconsciously suppressed much of his Japanese heritage, simply trying to fit into his ever-changing surroundings.
“As a young kid, you’re not really thoughtful enough, or want to be curious about who you are,” he recalled. “I was more just trying to survive.”
Even in adulthood, as he blossomed into a standout baseball talent, a 10-year MLB veteran and the league’s first World Series-winning manager of Asian descent during the Dodgers’ 2020 title run, Roberts never totally embraced his Japanese background.
“Honestly,” he said in his office at Camelback Ranch this spring, “I feel I haven’t given my Japanese side its due.”
“And that,” he added in a moment of self-reflection, “that is a regret.”
In recent years, however, circumstances have changed.
The Dodgers’ acquisition of Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki has made Roberts a baseball celebrity in Japan. It has exposed him to a culture he once rarely encountered, only at home through his mom and on occasional trips to Okinawa while growing up.
It also has come at a point in life where the 52-year-old skipper feels “more secure with who I am,” he said, and “much more confident in doing a deeper dive into where I came from.”
The result has been a spiritual reconnection for Roberts; one that, entering the Dodgers’ highly anticipated trek to Tokyo to start the season, has given the half-Japanese manager a renewed sense of cultural pride.
“I’m not saying it’s my country; it’s not my country,” Roberts explained. “But I feel a little bit more invested in the people of Japan because of this job … It’s given me a platform, a way to connect with the people back there.”
A native of tiny Rayburn, Texas outside of Houston, Waymon Roberts was just 19 when he enlisted in the Marine Corps and spoke no Japanese when he arrived on Okinawa.
A native Okinawan who came from a working-class family of six, Eiko Ikehara hardly knew a word of English when the future couple met.
Nonetheless, after being introduced by mutual friends while Waymon was stationed on the island, he charmed Eiko with the help of an English-to-Japanese dictionary. By 1972 the young couple had married. And that summer they welcomed their first child, David Ray Roberts, into the world.
“I think the language of love,” Roberts once said in a television interview, “resonated with both of them.”
Military requirements meant that the new family didn’t stay in Japan long. When Roberts was just 6 months old, Waymon was transferred back to the U.S. Eiko packed up her life and went with him, leaving behind all her relatives and all she’d ever known.
The Dodgers reached the end of Cactus League play Tuesday, with Roki Sasaki posting four scoreless innings before the team headed to Japan to open the season next week.
Growing up, Roberts returned to see Eiko’s side of the family on a few occasions — trips in which he remembers playing with cousins, even though they also didn’t speak the same language, and accompanying his grandfather to his job as a recycling collector.
“He had his little Japanese Isuzu truck, and we’d go into bars early in the morning and pick up bottles,” Roberts recalled, before breaking into a nostalgic laugh. “I remember the smell of beer in bars, vividly.”
As Roberts got older, his Japanese heritage became a more complicated dynamic. Already, as the son of a military man, his upbringing was nomadic. And in every new place his family moved, and every new group of friends he tried to make, he often was encountered with the same awkward question:
“What are you?” they would ask.
Along the way, he began to contemplate the question himself.
“That’s a bad feeling as an adolescent,” he recalled. “I felt a lot of my childhood and early teenage years that there was a little bit of an identity crisis. Being biracial — you have a dad that’s Black, a mom that’s Japanese — I was trying to figure out who I was, where I fit in.”
Sports helped provide a sense of self, with Roberts turning into a dynamic option quarterback in football (at one point committing to play at the Air Force Academy) and an eventual 28th-round draft pick in baseball after walking on at UCLA.
But still, as he tried to fit in, he kept his Japanese background at a distance. He never learned the language. He never went to traditional Japanese schooling. He never really identified himself with the country of his birth.
“I didn’t really appreciate it,” he said, “until it was too late.”
That didn’t mean he was untouched by Japanese influences. As Roberts described it, Eiko tried “to keep me tied to my roots in Japan,” cooking traditional Japanese meals and decorating their homes with accents of red and Japanese-style furniture.
She also instilled certain personality traits in her son — fostering the relentless positivity that has come to define his style as a baseball manager.
“My outlook on life and my personality, as far as always showing the good and suppressing the bad feelings or thoughts or emotions, is a byproduct and direct correlation with how I was raised,” Roberts said. “It’s a Japanese cultural thing.”
Roberts also began encountering Japanese players during his MLB career, becoming teammates with Hideo Nomo, manager of Kenta Maeda and Yu Darvish, and acquaintances of everyone from Hideki Matsui to Japanese icon Sadaharu Oh.
“There’s a respect, a kindness, a softness [in all of them],” Roberts said. “But as competitors, they’re just the fiercest competitors.”
Such personalities, he realized, he was able to relate to.
“A respect that you always kind of show overtly, but inside there’s a fire — that’s kind of who I am,” Roberts said. “That’s my mom too. She’s smiling and she’s sweet. But inside, she is tough.”
One of the first differences Roberts noticed last year was the candy.
As a kid, one of Roberts’ favorite features of trips back to Japan was finding exotic treats — think small, colorful bites of bean-paste mochi, fruit-infused gummies and matcha-flavored everything.
When Ohtani and Yamamoto signed ahead of last season, Roberts suddenly started seeing such candies again around the clubhouse. In casual conversations with the new Japanese stars, it became one of many small ways Roberts shared a personal connection.
“We talk a lot about some of the foods that I ate growing up, which they like, which they can relate to,” Roberts said.
With the arrivals of Ohtani and Yamamoto and the acquisition of Sasaki this offseason, almost every part of the Dodgers organization has been infused with a new Japanese dynamic.
Roberts’ pre- and postgame media scrums consist mostly of Japanese reporters. In the clubhouse, the Japanese players and their accompanying interpreters and support staff make conversations in their language part of the daily din in the room. New billboards dotted the outfield walls at Dodger Stadium. Specialized television advertising backdrops are used for every interview by Ohtani, Yamamoto and Sasaki.
It was all part of why Roberts’ job with the Dodgers helped him find a new perspective. He grew more comfortable opening up about his Japanese background, with the players and others around the team. It immersed him in the culture in a way he’d never experienced, making him “really appreciate where I came from even more.” It also opened his eyes to the Dodgers’ booming popularity in Japan, giving him another connection to the nation’s passionate baseball community.
“It’s just really mind-blowing to see the scope, the gravity of the impact that we have on people,” he said. “And I think what it really actually helped me do is understand why people are so open to sharing their opinions and voices about things.”
Yoshinobu Yamamoto made his fourth and final Cactus League appearance Monday, throwing 75 pitches over five innings, giving up a run on four hits and striking out seven.
Roberts then thought back to his offseason trip to Naha, and specifically having his mom — now a widow after Waymon’s death in 2017 — see him be embraced by the place where she grew up.
“She just felt really full inside when she saw her people celebrate her son in her home country. The country I was born in. The town I was born in,” he said. “That was a full-circle moment for me.”
This week might yield similar sentimentality. Roberts will get the chance to watch his Dodgers team experience a country and culture that he now feels much more a part of. And even before they’d left, he beamed with pride about a part of his background with which he once felt so out of touch.
“Japan for me — I am a little biased — is the best place in the world,” Roberts said. “So to bring our organization to the country, to the city of Tokyo, I’m excited to let them see it.”
Are you a true-blue fan?
Get our Dodgers Dugout newsletter for insights, news and much more.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
