Editor's note: Jim Caple is in Japan and will be covering the Japanese reaction to Ichiro Suzuki's debut with the Seattle Mariners tonight.

Any self-respecting major-league owner would take one glance at Hiroshima Municipal Stadium and immediately threaten to move to a city with a more lavish, more state-of-the-art stadium. Like Minneapolis or Montreal. The home of the Central League's Hiroshima Carp, Municipal Stadium is 44 years old and looks it. Its paint is faded and peeling, rust eats away at the batting cage and the outfield grass appears pale and worn. Worst of all, there are no marble-floored luxury suites.

	“	How Ichiro (Suzuki) does is very, very important to Japan. I wonder whether he can do it; there's a big barrier in power between the U.S. and Japan. (Hideo) Nomo did very well, now I hope Ichiro can do it as well. ”
		— Kiyoshi Tahara, a Japanese baseball fan

Yesterday morning, the groundskeepers pushed a wheelbarrow across the outfield grass, patching up the thinnest areas for the team's home opener tonight. They didn't need to. This wonderful diamond sparkles as brilliantly as Camden Yards through its humble condition, for one simple reason. Its location. Municipal Stadium is located across the street from the Atomic Bomb Dome, the haunting skeleton of the only building that remains from that 1945 day when the atom bomb exploded almost directly overhead.

On one side of the street is this sobering symbol of man's inhumanity to man. On the other is a ballpark. Horror and joy, death and life, separated by little more than a Chuck Knoblauch errant throw. It is both sobering and refreshing.

An old man I met Sunday at an Osaka store selling major-league merchandise said that baseball played an important role in rebuilding Japan's morale following World War II. Ichiro Tanaka says he remembers playing with bamboo bats as a child before the war and with whatever equipment that was available immediately after the war. "There were very limited fields, they weren't good fields," he said through a translator. "We had gloves, but they were very bad ones. Even the professional players, they didn't have good equipment."

The game swiftly gained stature in the ensuing years and with the career of home run king Sadaharu Oh and the beloved Shigeo Nagashima, baseball grew into Japan's national pastime.

On Monday, a new era in Japanese baseball history opens, albeit an ocean away, when Ichiro Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Shinjo become Nippon's first position players in the major leagues. Should one or both succeed, Japanese players will cut a broader figure in the major leagues this season than Hideki Irabu after a winter of All-U-Can-Eat dinners. There are eight Japanese players in the majors, including two Boston pitchers, Hideo Nomo and Toma Ohka.

The focus is on Ichiro, the Pacific League's seven-time batting champion who will bat leadoff for the Mariners on Monday night. Ichiro, who like Madonna, Eminem and Yanni, goes by one name, is so popular and his move to the U.S. so important that Japanese network NHK will televise all Mariners home games and most of their road games. The irony is that because his old Orix Blue Wave team was not that popular, more Japanese fans may see him play with the Mariners than when he was in Japan.

	Ichiro Suzuki begins this season as the Mariners' leadoff hitter.

Ichiro's T-shirts are the best selling item at the Osaka MLB store, where his merchandise fills several shelves. You can't buy his replica jersey yet, but you can get his key chain, baseball card and Zippo lighter. My translator, Nobutaka Shimotsuma, even carries a credit card with Ichiro's picture on it, though the card expired last September along with his Japanese career.

(A brief aside. Shimotsuma is a great baseball fan, who rooted for the Dodgers when he attended USC's prestigious film school in the 1980s. He says he learned to speak English by repeatedly watching American movies, such as his all-time favorite, "Midnight Run," which he estimates he's seen more than 100 times. "Robert DeNiro was my English teacher." You could have worse instructors. Adam Sandler springs to mind.)

"How Ichiro does is very, very important to Japan," said Kiyoshi Tahara, a passionate 35-year-old fan who went directly from his Sunday sandlot league to Osaka's Mizuno store to buy equipment for his team -- he still was dressed in his uniform. "I wonder whether he can do it; there's a big barrier in power between the U.S. and Japan. Nomo did very well, now I hope Ichiro can do it as well."

Many Japanese fans are like Tahara, rooting for Ichiro to succeed, proud and confident he will. Others are disappointed he and Shinjo left their country behind. Many feel both emotions. An older fan named Kei Fukita summed up his feelings by telling me, "You take good care of them."

While Tahara roots for Ichiro, he worries what his success would mean for the Japanese game. If Ichiro performs well, will more players go to the U.S., lessening the game in Japan? Will soccer -- gasp! -- take over in popularity when Japan hosts the World Cup next year, a possibility more frightening than another Mothra movie?

"I'm apprehensive of baseball losing momentum," Tahara said. "Because of all the players going there, all the eyes are on the U.S., not Japan."

Although Tahara declared that he will never let his three children fall prey to soccer, his favorite sport's future seemed bright last night at Hanshein Stadium, located midway between Kobe and Osaka. This old ballpark serves as home to the Hanshin Tigers and the annual spring high school tournament, Japan's own version of March Madness.

This is important stuff. The championship teams from Japan's 48 prefectures meet in a tournament so popular that NHK broadcasts it nationwide. Ichiro pitched in it when he was a senior and turned pro soon after.

Thousands of fans filled the stadium for Sunday night's quarterfinal game between the Okinawa team and the Osaka team, including hundreds who traveled the long distance from Okinawa to line the right-field line. Along the left-field line, more than 700 Osaka fans in one section stood chanting and singing in perfect unison. They wore maize and blue coats, with the expertly organized fans in blue forming a perfect N against the yellow background. Michigan's engineering department couldn't do as well.

It was inspiring stuff. You really haven't lived until you hear 700 Japanese high school students singing "We Will Rock You." (Or see a life-sized Col. Sanders sporting a Hanshin Tigers uniform to welcome fans outside the nearby KFC.)

With the fans chanting and standing and banging horns and clapping throughout the game, Okinawa and Osaka both scored a run in the fourth inning and again in the eighth, before Okinawa finally won with two runs in the 11th to advance to Monday's semifinals.

Afterward, the Osaka team bowed to its opponent and its fans. Then they carefully scooped up handfuls of the stadium dirt around home plate to take home.

It was a fitting gesture. This is baseball after all, and whether it is played in a faded stadium next to a symbol of destruction or in a $500 million stadium with a retractable roof, whether it is played in Japan or across the ocean in America, whether the players grow up to be the next Ichiro or merely to play it on sandlots, this is the best game in the world.

And that soil is sacred, providing a common ground for us all.

Jim Caple is a Senior Writer for ESPN.com.