Looking up from beneath a blue Dodgers helmet, Shohei Ohtani's strong arms and boyish face tower over the side of the Miyako Hotel, 15 stories above Los Angeles' Little Tokyo district.
The song, released last week, is one of many tributes to baseball's two-way supernova that have popped up across Los Angeles since signing with the Dodgers in December. The record-breaking deal propelled Ohtani into the next celebrity stratosphere, even among athletes and in a city full of the rich and famous.
Many baseball fans tend to argue that the players who are so good and in demand are those who have roots in his home country of Japan, where he was known as a “existence above the clouds.'' ” has been called. The Little Tokyo mural is larger than life, echoing Ohtani's monumental status among Japanese Americans in Los Angeles.
Baseball has been a bridge between Japan and the United States for more than a century and a half, since 1872, when an American educator from Maine introduced the sport to students at an academy in Tokyo. Baseball is also played in Los Angeles. Cheering for the Dodgers is a cherished tradition for those living in the nation's largest and oldest Japanese American enclave. And for a community facing a gentrifying historic center and an aging cultural standard-bearer, Ohtani's arrival was a galvanizing moment.
But now, as the Dodgers play their first home series of the season, the gambling scandal involving center fielder Ohtani has come to light, making it feel like a prayer for rain.
“His start with his new team is definitely not the start I was hoping for,” said Rick Izumi, 63, a Japanese-American Angeleno. His childhood memories include watching Don Drysdale of the Dodgers pitch in the 1960s and his father sleeping on the baseball field. I sit on the couch and listen to Dodgers games on the radio. “It's a family story.”
Earlier this month, during the Dodgers' regular-season opener in Seoul, the team suddenly asked Ohtani's longtime translator and close friend Ippei Mizuhara, following reports from ESPN and the Los Angeles Times that the team had made payments in Ohtani's name. announced that he has been fired from the club. The money was sent to an illegal bookmaker that is under federal investigation. Initially, Mizuhara said he was willing to make the payment to help Ohtani with at least $4.5 million worth of debts he incurred gambling. However, Otani's representative subsequently announced that Otani had been the victim of theft, and Mizuhara denied his previous statement.
On Monday, Otani released a statement saying he had never bet on sports and that Mizuhara had been “stealing money from my account and lying to me.” An investigation by Major League Baseball and the Internal Revenue Service is ongoing, but questions remain.
Naturally, the group chat among Dodgers fans turned to other topics, away from rookie Japanese pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto's disappointing first start.
Izumi said he compared theories with a lawyer friend and asked his mother, who lives nearby, how the story had been covered on NHK, a Japanese broadcasting network popular with second-generation and older Japanese Americans. Americans who are more likely to speak Japanese.
“I'm sure they're monitoring it all day long,” he said.
Ohtani has been in the spotlight since emerging as a high school baseball phenom in Hokkaido, Japan. In 2018, he made the jump from the Japanese Pro League to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, where he was named the American League Rookie of the Year and never looked back.
Ohtani became a free agent last November and, after weeks of excitement among the team and fans, signed a staggering $700 million, 10-year contract with the Dodgers. The Dodgers are an attractive franchise in an A-list city with a vast, passionate and diverse fan base. . (Although the Angels are at least nominally a Los Angeles team, they play in Orange County, a considerable distance from the city, and lack the storied history and larger fan base of the Dodgers.)
Ohtani became the 11th Japanese player to wear a Dodgers uniform, and Yamamoto the 12th. For Japanese American fans and baseball historians, Ohtani's career marks the culmination of a long history. After baseball was introduced to Japan in 1872, its popularity in Japan exploded as it adopted a culture that valued discipline and technique over raw strength and speed.
So by the time thousands of Japanese Americans were imprisoned in remote concentration camps during World War II, baseball had already become an integral part of many of their lives. In the camps, the sport was both literal entertainment and a way to express American identity for a government that was suspicious of groups determined to prove its loyalty.
By 1964, parallel lines between Japanese baseball and Japanese American baseball had merged with the arrival of Masanori Murakami, a Japanese pitcher who briefly played for the San Francisco Giants. He had no interpreter and spoke little English at first. Kristen Hayashi, a curator at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo and a Dodgers fan, said Japanese American farmers in Fresno, Calif., where Murakami played for a minor league team, helped make ends meet. It is said that
That was the beginning of Japan's lineage of major league stars. Hideo Nomo was a pitcher for the Dodgers in the 1990s, and Ichiro Suzuki was a beloved member of the Seattle Mariners. Kenta Maeda and Yu Darvish are popular players right now. But Ohtani, who is highly regarded for both his hitting and pitching, is on another level.
“It's amazing that baseball was introduced to Japan 150 years ago, went through a segregated league, and now the face of baseball is Japanese players,” Hayashi said. “I can't wait to see what he does over the next 10 years.”
Multidisciplinary artist Dan Kwon, 69, has played for more than 50 years with the Little Tokyo Giants, part of a Japanese American baseball league with roots in concentration camps such as Manzanar, where his mother was imprisoned. I've done it.
He recalled seeing Nomo on the big screen at a Dodgers game in 1995 as a “mind-boggling experience.”
“It was my dream to be in this stadium and hear people cheering passionately for an Asian man in a Dodgers uniform,” he said. “I was really surprised.”
Kwon said he felt the same sense of pride and excitement as the “Showtime” (Ohtani's nickname) phenomenon swept Los Angeles.
Kwon is one of the Angelenos hoping Ohtani will do his bit to join a community that accepts him.
They want their star players to visit the Japanese American National Museum and learn what baseball means to Japanese Americans, who were unfairly forced from their homes and often stripped of property and businesses because of their ethnicity. I hope so. They hope to browse the gift shop, which has sold sturdy Japanese paper products and pottery for generations, or eat sushi at the restaurant, where the chef has forged decades-long relationships with fish vendors. There is.
Perhaps, they hope, Ohtani will make time to greet fans at the Nisei Week parade, the highlight of the annual summer festival celebrating Japanese culture that has been going on for more than 80 years. .
They say the community could benefit from high-profile boosters. Little Tokyo is ostensibly thriving with crowds flocking to the square on weekends, but in recent years many small, traditional businesses have closed, replaced by chain stores and white-owned establishments. There is. A business that sells Japanese-style accessories and sweets. Many store owners are retiring without having a replacement employee.
Nationally, the Japanese American population is growing at a much slower pace than other Asian Americans. The number of people who identify only as Japanese rather than as multiracial actually decreased by 3 percent between 2010 and 2020. This is the result of broader demographic trends and a decline in immigration from Japan.
Kristin Fukushima, 36, managing director of Little Tokyo Community, said, “I'd like to see him get involved in the community, but he's such a big superstar that I don't know if that's too much to expect.'' I don't know,” he said. Council. “Now that he's in the public eye, and when it comes to letting new people into his realm, I can understand that maybe some trust may be lost. Maybe it's not in the near term. I don’t know.”
Fukushima said that, like all Dodgers fans, he talked and thought about the gambling situation involving Ohtani's former interpreter nonstop. But she's optimistic that the ordeal is just an obstacle in the beginning of Ohtani's long career with the Dodgers.
“He's really warm and welcoming and will have open arms,” she said. “And please support me.”