Early Life and High School Career
Kawasaki was born in Aira, a town in central Kagoshima Prefecture in the south of Japan. He began playing baseball after his older brother got him into the sport. Though he was a pitcher throughout his early years, Kawasaki switched to shortstop after enrolling in Kagoshima Prefectural Technical High School.
Kawasaki remained largely an unknown on the national level during his high school career, partly due to his team's failing to make any national tournaments in those three years. Still, he made a name for himself locally, earning the nickname Satsurō, a portmanteau derived from Satsuma (the name given to a former province of Japan in present-day western Kagoshima) and former Seattle Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki's first name for the similarities in their playing styles. He was drafted in the fourth round of the 1999 NPB amateur draft by the then-Fukuoka Daiei Hawks.
Read more about this topic: Munenori Kawasaki
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life, high, school and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don’t put psychotics in high places and we’ve got the problem solved.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“The scope of modern government in what it can and ought to accomplish for its people has been widened far beyond the principles laid down by the old “laissez faire” school of political rights, and the widening has met popular approval.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)