Japan Wins First World Baseball Classic

Japan fought back in the series to win over Korea and Cuba. Team Japan tossed their coach in the air and then shook hands with the Cuban team. ESPN link here.

Baseball (and other interesting) notes
Most known for: Disciplined ballplayers with uncanny abilities (see Ichiro Suzuki); civil engineering marvel, Shinkansen bullet trains that whip under the ocean between Japan's islands; Mount Fuji; subways so packed officers actually push crowds in like sardines during peak hours; of course, awesome sunrises.
Quotable: "This country [Japan] has got its national flag all wrong. Instead of a rising sun in the center, there should be a baseball." -- British tourist
Famous national anthem verse: "May the reign of the Emperor continue for a thousand, nay, eight thousand generations and for the eternity that it takes for small pebbles to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss."
Baseball's Japanese debut: 1872. The game was introduced by Horace Wilson, an American professor of English at Tokyo University (then named Kaisei Gakko).
Japan's baseball hotbeds: All of Japan is a baseball hot spot, but particularly in and around the big cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama and Nagoya, among others.
Number of Japanese-born currently signed to MLB organizations: 20.
First Japanese-born player in MLB: Masanori Murakami, born in Otsuki, pitched for the San Francisco Giants in 1964.