Shohei Otani has been a superstar in Japan for more than a decade, but one day earlier this year, Tokyo resident Tatsuo Shinie noticed something was different.
Shinke, the CEO of major trading card retailer Mint, said Ohtani's soaring popularity has stimulated Japan's collectibles industry, sent Major League Baseball viewership on Japanese television soaring, and made baseball news a huge part of the country's We were already seeing it pushed to every corner of the media. ecosystem.
But as Ohtani made history in his first season with the Los Angeles Dodgers, becoming the first player in history to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a single season, Schinke added another data point: his mother, Emiko. observed.
Emiko, now 73, had no interest in baseball. However, Ohtani's Dodgers games are broadcast live in the morning in Japan, and Ohtani appears daily on the country's popular morning variety show (equivalent to “Good Morning America” and “Today”). To help, Emiko developed a new morning routine. She wakes up, eats breakfast, and then turns on Ohtani.
“Japan's elderly love Ohtani,” Shinke said. “My mom. And all of my mom's friends too. She's already retired, so there's plenty of time in the morning to watch all the games.”
In the United States, the World Series between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers is a matchup involving the country's two largest cities and most famous franchises. For the first time since 2016, the number of viewers per game could exceed 20 million.
In Japan, the scale may be even larger.
In seven seasons in the majors, including six with the Los Angeles Angels, Ohtani has showcased his talent in Major League Baseball in ways previously thought impossible. Despite his struggles, he won the Most Valuable Player Award twice while excelling as a batter and pitcher. If he wins his third title this November, as expected, he will become the first full-time designated hitter to win the award, a role he will have to fill after sustaining an elbow injury last season. There wasn't.
At World Series Media Day on Thursday, no player drew more attention than Ohtani. (Catherine Lotze/Getty Images)
In the United States, his performances earned him a $700 million contract, the largest in history, and stardom in a sport that lags behind its rivals in cultural capital. But in his native Japan, where baseball is the most popular sport, Ohtani's celebrity has reached stratospheric levels akin to Michael Jordan and David Beckham, who have transcended the field of play to become international incarnations of their home country. There is.
“I don't think there's anyone in Japan who doesn't know about Ohtani,” says Robert Whiting, an American writer based in Tokyo who has written about Japanese baseball since the 1970s.
The Dodgers defeated the Padres in Game 5 of the National League Division Series, a game that featured two Japanese starting pitchers and was watched by an estimated 12.9 million Japanese viewers at 9 a.m. Saturday. did. That's at least 5.4 million more viewers than he watched in Japan, the U.S. When Ohtani chased 50-50 in September, his accomplishments were often credited to the national nightly news and daytime “wide” shows. In other words, it took the lead in a space where sports are rarely mentioned. (The Nikkei Shimbun, a business newspaper, also published its front page story on its first page.) And when U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel spoke about Ohtani at a press conference in Tokyo earlier this season, he told reporters “I don't want to talk about things like Otani,'' he said. Although he's an ambassador, he watched Jordan dominate the 1990s and transcend basketball as a “kid from Chicago.”
“This is in the early stages of Mr. Ohtani's career,” Emanuel said. “But there's no question that he has it now.”
The sheer volume of coverage surprised even Mr. Whiting, who first moved to Tokyo in the 1960s and is the author of books on baseball and Japanese culture. This story of the obsession with conquering baseball heroes Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, and Hideki Matsui, who was named World Series MVP for the Yankees in 2009, has been experienced before in Japan, but perhaps in the 1990s. Whiting says it's probably not the first time since Nomo in the 1990s. Japanese athletes embodied and uplifted the national spirit.
When Nomo debuted with the Dodgers in 1995, in the midst of a nasty trade dispute between Japan and the United States, Whiting noted that the Asahi Shimbun, one of the nation's largest newspapers, published an editorial that said: I remembered. We have created a product that no one complains about. ''But while subsequent pitchers like Nomo, Suzuki, and Yu Darvish recognized the quality of Japanese baseball, Ohtani changed the equation. For the first time, Japanese fans can confidently claim that the most talented baseball player of all time is from Japan.
“Japan's value and power in the world market is weakening little by little every year,'' says Tomoki Negishi, a baseball marketing executive who used to work in Japan's Pacific League. “In other words, Mr. Otani's wonderful performance is a lighthouse.”
For some, Otani is “a symbol of Japan in the global marketplace.”
To someone else?
“He's just the craziest superhero you've ever seen,” Negishi says.
On the morning of October 12th, that symbol was displayed on a television in a living room in Ota Ward, Tokyo's special ward. Masanori Ninomiya, the owner of an English reading company, finished his traditional breakfast of white rice, miso soup, and fruit before challenging the Dodgers and Padres to a game.
Mr. Ninomiya, 59, grew up in Oita City and was obsessed with books about the history of Japanese baseball. In the 1990s, when Nomo was making his mark, he attended business school at UCLA. He's one of the people in Tokyo who works remotely, which allows him to watch Dodgers games in the background during work hours.
“We'll all have breakfast,” he said, “and Otani.”
In Japan, all Dodgers games are broadcast on NHK, a free public broadcaster. NHK's audience often skews older, especially in the mornings. Unlike the United States, where European soccer fans flock to bars and pubs early in the morning, public consumption in Ohtani is low, except for major events like the World Baseball Classic. According to Negishi, this is partly due to cultural norms and partly due to the large number of baseball games.
“I'm sure I'm not the only one,” says Chen Liang, import director of Mint Cards & Collectibles. “But the majority of Japanese people are at work and just sitting in front of a computer looking at an Excel sheet or something like that and clicking on box scores.”
Ninomiya was in awe of Ohtani when he appeared as a two-way player for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. When he debuted with the Angels in 2018, I followed him as his morning ritual began. But he believes the national love is due to how Ohtani conducted himself on the MLB stage.
“For example, if there's trash on the ground, I'll try to pick it up,'' Ninomiya says. “We know he's a superstar and super rich, but he doesn't act like one.”
Ohtani and his agent have cultivated an image in Japan as a modest, polite baseball star who respects his teammates and respects his elders. Thanks to this reputation, Ohtani faced a wave of public scrutiny earlier this year when former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara was charged with stealing more than $16 million from Ohtani's bank accounts to cover gambling debts. I was able to get through it. (Mr. Mizuhara later pleaded guilty.) It also helped him gain massive support from businesses on both sides of the Pacific and make his private life a daily fodder on television. (His wife, Mamiko Tanaka, and his dog, translated into Japanese as Dekopin, are regular characters on the daytime show.)
Mamiko Tanaka and Otani's comings and goings are a staple of Japanese morning shows. (Stringer/Getty Images)
“I think these are traits that Japanese fans like to practice in foreign lands,” said Hiroshi Kitamura, an associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary who specializes in U.S.-East Asian relations. . “Japanese fans love to see MLB players like (Aaron) Judge, (Fernando) Tatis, and (Ronald) Acuña say nice things about Ohtani, the unicorn. I think they value the fact that he's Japanese. In that sense, I think Japanese fans see Ohtani as one of their own.”
The face of Major League Baseball greeted Foster Griffin each day upon his arrival in Tokyo. Signboards. Something like the cardboard boxes you find at convenience stores. Otani's voice also appears in subway advertisements.
Griffin, a former pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, learned the cultural advantage of nightly television news shortly after arriving in Japan as a pitcher for the Yomiuri Giants.
“And he has his own section It’s about the news,” Griffin said. “They highlight everything he does there every day. He's everywhere.”
From an American perspective, it's hard to imagine Otani's popularity in Japan. America does not respect foreign sports in which it is not supreme. Japan's media is vast, with five commercial television networks and five national newspapers, but it can be difficult to understand for non-Japanese speakers. And contrary to exaggeration, not all Japanese people are interested in baseball.
“Culturally, I feel like in recent years young children's interest has shifted towards new sports like soccer,” said Emma Ryan Yamazaki, a Japanese film director who grew up in Osaka.
But the sport still unites cultures and is a source of connection at the office and during the morning commute. And Ohtani has transcended demographics, creating a new generation of fans while appealing to retired grandmothers in Tokyo, Fukuoka and Sapporo.
In Japan, Ohtani is the face of countless advertising campaigns. (Tomohiro Osumi/Getty Images)
“School teachers nationwide understand balks and intentional walks,” said Bobby Valentine, a former Mets manager who spent two years in Japan as manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines. “It's like a port of passage. By playing baseball, you get accepted into that culture. It's just one of those things.”
Last year, when Ohtani led Japan to the World Baseball Classic championship, more than 42% of Japanese households watched Japan beat the United States at 8 a.m. Wednesday. Six of Japan's seven matches on the WBC drew more than 30 million viewers. Ohtani's presence, along with starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, could help bring Japan's World Series crowd closer to those heights. This number is already so significant that MLB continues to target the Japanese market, and a year after the Dodgers opened the season in South Korea against the San Diego Padres, the Dodgers will face the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo. The 2025 season will begin with this. Commissioner Rob Manfred said. The Athletic This week: “If we were to open (the season) in Tokyo, we had no choice but to play against the Dodgers again. And the reason that was the only option was because the viewership that those games provide is so high. That's what drives the real broadcasting business for us in Japan.”
The first pitch of the World Series will be broadcast on NHK and Fuji Television from 9:08 a.m. Saturday. Interest was so high that the creators of the wildly popular manga show One Piece postponed the season premiere to avoid competing with Ohtani.
“It's a smart move on their part to run the show,” Yamazaki said. “I think so too.”
As Ninomaya notes, the only person in Japan who could possibly surpass Otani in name recognition is the prime minister, and the current prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, only took office earlier this month.
“Some young people may not know the prime minister,” he said. “But everyone knows about Ohtani, even the kids, middle school and high school students.”
Yes, every generation of Japan is ready to have breakfast with Ohtani. Even if there is someone who looks the most attractive.
Earlier this year, Mr. Whiting, 82, was talking with his wife, Machiko Kondo, who worked for many years as a resettlement worker at the United Nations. For decades, Kondo showed no interest in baseball, even though Whiting wrote best-selling books about Japanese baseball history and the meaning of Ichiro, and followed games on both sides of the Pacific.
But then Ohtani arrived.
“I've written baseball books that have gotten national attention, but that means nothing to her,” Whiting said. “But now when she thinks about Ohtani, she's asking, 'Did Ohtani hit a home run?'
The AthleticAndy McCullough and Sam Blum of contributed to this article
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic;Photo: Jayne Kamin Onsia/Getty Photos)
