From Oh to Ohtani: How Japan developed a generation of baseball superstars (again)

By Jamie Barton, CNN

(CNN) — In 1934, an American team featuring the best baseball players in the world – Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx and more – went on a barnstorming tour around Japan.

More than half a million Japanese fans came out in Tokyo to greet them, before the team went from city to city, playing against a team of Japanese All-Stars. Eighteen games were played – the American team won 18 times.

Now, more than 90 years later, two more American teams – the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs – are in Japan, for their season-opening Tokyo Series, which starts March 18.

The difference is that this time, in Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Seiya Suzuki and Shota Imanaga, many of the biggest stars on show are not going on vacation. They’re going home.

More than a game

Baseball was introduced to Japan in the mid- to late-1800s, but it wasn’t until 1896 – when the first formal game was played between Japanese and Americans – that the sport took off.

A group of students from Tokyo’s First Higher School, which was often known as Ichiko, took on a team from the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club, made up of American businessmen, traders and missionaries.

“Reporters from the national newspapers were there. This was significant because, for the first time, Japanese were allowed on the grounds of this foreigners’ club. They played the game, and the Japanese won 29-4,” laughed Japanese baseball expert Robert Whiting in an interview with CNN Sports.

“It was humiliating for Americans. They wanted a rematch and said, ‘We haven’t practiced hard enough.’ They lost again.”

The effect of the victory on the country was recalled later by Japanese diplomat and future Japanese ambassador to the US, Tsuneo Matsudaira.

“The game spread, like a fire in a dry field, in summer, all over the country, and some months afterwards, even in children in primary schools in the country far away from Tokyo were to be seen playing with bats and balls,” he said in 1907.

According to Whiting, the games’ importance cannot be separated from the period of Sakoku, or feudal isolation, which had ended less than 50 years prior.

“This was nationwide news in Japan, big news, and that’s what turned baseball into a national sport because the thinking was that Japan had really lapsed behind the other countries in the world because of this feudal isolation,” he told CNN. “And so the game took on this symbolic significance.”

Similarly, just as the historical context influenced the popularity of the game, it also influenced the ways in which its development differed from the American brand of baseball.

In the years following the end of the Edo period in 1868, rapid development had led many in Japan to fear that the nation was losing its identity. In turn, the philosophy of wakon yosai (Japanese spirit, Western learning) was developed, whereby ideas and concepts – like baseball – could be imported, but should be approached in a Japanese way.

“Sports came from the West,” an Ichiko player would go on to say. “In Ichiko baseball, we were playing sports, but we were also putting the spirit of Japan into it. … Yakyu (baseball) is a way to express the samurai spirit.”

Indeed, according to Whiting, the future of Japanese baseball would be defined, in part, by the attitudes of those at Ichiko.

“The majority of students in the school came from samurai families, so they adopted the martial arts ethic in their practice routine,” he said. “Whereas in the United States baseball was a spring and summer sport, in Japan it became a year-round sport. If you’re going to play it, then you had to dedicate yourself totally to it.”

This work ethic is still present in the modern game where, according to Detroit Tigers pitcher Kenta Maeda, players are expected to work harder in Japan.

“The difference of baseball here and there, in terms of spring training, is the hours are much longer in Japan. The drills are different,” he told CNN Sports via interpreter Daichi Sekizaki.

Japan’s first golden age

Fast forward to 1944, 10 years after the American All-Star team had toured Japan, and baseball was so embedded in the culture that when Japanese infantry charged at American forces during World War II, some would yell, “To hell with Babe Ruth!”

By then, the nation had its own professional league, the Japanese Baseball League. In 1950, that would become Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), and by the early 1960s, the Japanese game would have its first true superstars: Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima.

“Those two, they’re like the Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig of Japanese baseball,” said Whiting.

Oh was the headline name – his 868 home runs are the most ever hit in professional baseball, over 100 more than MLB record-holder Barry Bonds. But when Whiting moved to Japan in 1962, Nagashima was the name on everyone’s lips.

“When I first came here, you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing his picture somewhere, on a magazine cover or an advertisement in a bank window or something like that. Everybody knew Nagashima,” he recalled.

“The only professional game Emperor Hirohito ever attended, Nagashima hit two home runs, one of them in the bottom of the ninth. Many people say that is the greatest game ever played in Japan. And so that meant a big deal.”

Led by Oh and Nagashima, the Yomiuri Giants – the team which grew out of the Japanese All-Stars who had played Ruth and co. in 1934 – won nine consecutive Japan Series championships between 1965 and 1973.

For those in Japan, it was a golden age for baseball. For many Americans, smaller ballparks and a perceived lack of quality opposition dampened the achievements of NPB’s biggest stars. That would all change in 1995.

Across the Pacific

Hideo Nomo was not the first Japanese player to play in MLB. That honor belongs to Masanori Murakami, who played two seasons with the San Francisco Giants in 1964 and 1965 as part of a cultural exchange program.

But Nomo, who was the National League Rookie of the Year and an All-Star in 1995, played the most significant role in the explosion of Japanese talent in MLB over the last 30 years.

“I think Nomo definitely opened doors to a lot of Japanese players wanting to play over there,” Maeda said to CNN. “He raised awareness of MLB in Japan with his success and performance.

“There may not have been a whole bunch of Japanese players that followed Nomo right away, but certainly, there are players wanting to play in MLB as their ultimate destination or point in their career, and in that regard I think he definitely left a big impact for the Japanese baseball community.”

“Nomo challenged the system. He opened the door for Ichiro (Suzuki) and Hideki Matsui and all these other players,” agreed Whiting.

“It’s historically important. I can remember the Japanese TV announcer standing in front of (the former home of the Texas Rangers) during the 1995 All-Star Game in which Nomo was scheduled to start. And he just said, ‘Can you believe it? Can you believe it?’

“After that, one (Japanese) TV channel ran a 12-hour documentary!”

As mentioned by Whiting, Ichiro and Matsui – who arrived in 2001 and 2003, respectively – were the next Japanese stars to take MLB by storm. The former still holds the MLB record for most single-season hits with 262 in 2004, and the latter won the World Series and was named series MVP with the New York Yankees in 2009, the only Asian player to have received the award.

The likes of Daisuke Matsuzaka, Seiya Suzuki, Kodai Senga, Yamamoto and Maeda – who signed a deal with the Dodgers in 2016 worth up to $106 million and finished second in the AL Cy Young Award voting with the Minnesota Twins in 2020 – have all followed.

Maeda himself was inspired to come to America by two more of the most successful Japanese imports.

“Two main reasons (why I came to MLB). Reason one is being a part of Team Japan, the 2013 World Baseball Classic team, (I) witnessed first-hand the high level in America,” he explained.

“And the second one is two pitchers that played in MLB: Yu Darvish and Masahiro Tanaka. (I’m) very respectful towards them, and at the same time, (I want) to compete at the same level. So that kind of pushed (me) towards wanting to play in America.”

But, for all the excellent Japanese talent on show over the last 30 years, no one has rocked the league quite like three-time MVP, four-time All-Star and 2024 World Series champion Ohtani.

“If you wanted to be cynical about it, you could say Oh played in smaller parks against weaker pitching,” said Whiting. “Nomo was good, but he succeeded because he had this really bizarre wind-up and corkscrew delivery. Ichiro was essentially a ground ball hitter who would just beat out infield grounders.

“You could say that Matsui was OK, but he came to America advertised as ‘Godzilla the home run hitter,’ he hit 51 home runs in Japan but was never that spectacular in the States. So you could always find ways to criticize Japanese (players),” he continued.

“But you can’t say anything negative about Ohtani. The guy’s just spectacular. He hits 500-foot home runs and throws the ball a hundred miles an hour!”

In 2024, Ohtani, normally a two-way player, was prevented from pitching as he recovered from Tommy John surgery. Instead, the 30-year-old simply decided to have one of the greatest individual seasons in baseball history, becoming MLB’s inaugural 50-50 club member with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases in the regular season.

There are now serious conversations about whether he may be the greatest baseball player of all time. For NPB fans like Whiting, his success has been bittersweet.

“The obsession with professional baseball – NPB, they call it – has been replaced by an obsession with Japanese stars in America. So baseball is still an ongoing sport, but people don’t watch their own homegrown game like they used to,” he explained.

“Baseball has sort of disappeared from network television. You don’t see the Giants games on every night. They have their own cable channel, which has a limited audience,” he continued.

“But somebody like Ohtani comes along – and his Dodgers games are televised in Japan – everybody’s glued to the television set at nine o’clock in the morning to watch the game.”

Having the most dominant force in present-day baseball, it would appear, is a Catch-22 for fans in Japan.

“I’ve asked Japanese about that, and they say it’s a mixture of disappointment and pride that Japanese are over there beating up these Americans,” said Whiting. “It’s a big deal. It shows Japan as important. And so it’s a trade-off, I guess.”

With NPB clubs still functioning primarily as advertising vehicles for major corporations rather than successful businesses in their own right, the talent drain to America is set to continue for years to come.

Perhaps, it is not great for the global game that the season opener in Tokyo might be the only time that some fans get to see Japan’s greatest ever player in person.

But it does mean that you can pretty much guarantee a high decibel level when Ohtani faces off against Imanaga later.

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