World View:

Godzilla rules.

Hideki Matsui, the designated hitter for the New York Yankees, is nicknamed after the towering sea creature that mutated out of control through exposure to atomic radiation in Japanese B-flicks of old.

Matsui, the Yankees’ Japanese import, terrorized the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series. His performance earned him the series’ Most Valuable Player award, making it a true World Series.

He’s one of few foreigners playing in the Major Leagues who isn’t from a country in America’s back yard of the Caribbean and Latin America. This time I didn’t cringe when the sports announcers proclaimed the Bronx Bombers the 2009 World Champs.

Love them or hate them, the Yankees are the sporting soul of New York.

I happen to hate the Yankees — except for Matsui and their captain, Derek Jeter, whom I respect — but, having lived there for 22 years, I was happy for my former fellow New Yorkers that their team had finally won a 27th baseball championship and first since 9/11. And I was thrilled that a fellow Asian, Matsui, came away the MVP.

I never imagined that nearly 68 years after the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor — and the vicious war that ensued in the Pacific — a humble and stoical ballplayer from Japan would seal a championship for the most storied of American sports franchises. Yet relations between the U.S. and Japan are closer than ever. Nearer to home, the sister-city relationship between Newport Beach and Okazaki, Japan, just reached a milestone: Who knew that the two cities have now been sisters for 25 years?

Matsui’s crowning as the MVP was ironic too because, in the days immediately after the 19 hijackers flew those airliners into the Twin Towers, Americans were likening the terrorist strike to Dec. 7, 1941. In a blind way, many Americans also were quick then to compare 9/11 to a nuclear attack. Although my heart bled for the nearly 3,000 New Yorkers who died that day at the World Trade Center site, and the nightmares haunted me for months, it bothered me that the word “Ground Zero” had somehow and so quickly slipped into the post-9/11 vernacular.

According to the Webster’s New World College Dictionary on my desk, the primary definition of Ground Zero is “the land or water surface area directly below or above the point of detonation of a nuclear bomb.” So, for me, using this word so loosely to describe the site of the 9/11 attacks cheapened the memory of the more than 200,000 civilians who perished at, near and around the real ground zeros in the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Toppling parochialism

Last week, a reader of this column called to thank me for my efforts to give the Pilot’s readers an international perspective by trying to connect people, entities or institutions in Newport-Mesa to news, currents events, issues and developments overseas. I’m always scouring around for ideas, and would welcome any of your suggestions.

The caller was David Henley, a longtime Newport Beach resident who had been a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Examiner, a now-defunct paper that belonged to the Hearst chain. In the early 1960s, he was reporting for the Examiner in Berlin when the wall that would divide that city until November 1989 went up.

On Sunday, the eve of the 20th anniversary of the wall’s dismantling, we featured Henley’s story on the front page. Henley told me how important it was to keep Newport-Mesans plugged into what’s going on in other countries, because, he said, it’s too easy to fall into a parochial mind-set.

Yet, I would argue, you can even find that walled-in mentality in cosmopolitan New York.

As a transplant from New York, I can tell you that the denizens of that great city can be insular in their own way. After all, Manhattan, the city’s central borough, is an island.

Their swaggering arrogance gives New Yorkers their brand of parochialism.

For me, no one New Yorker personified this blind attitude more than the No. 1 Yankee fan, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

When I was still living in New York in the late 1990s, the mayor often used to boast to reporters — and unashamedly — that his city was “The Capital of The World.” But, if you ask me, governing the most influential city in the most influential nation carried with it the responsibility of being aware of the outside world.

I think Giuliani learned his lesson, all right, when those hijacked planes were used as weapons of mass destruction against his city. After that, he shut up, refrained from boasting in that way again, and diligently went about his job of leading his city out of the ruins.

City Editor IMRAN VITTACHI may be reached at imran.vittachi@latimes.com or at (714) 966-4633.