Major League Baseball is back! The first game of the year was played in the middle of the night Monday, local time. The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Chicago Cubs 4-1 in Tokyo, Japan.
A small piece of history was made during the game: For the first time ever, two Japanese pitchers faced each other on opening day for the U.S. Major Leagues.
It was 30 years ago this summer that Hideo Nomo started a trend that continues to this day: Japanese players moving their professional careers to the United States. After Nomo came Ichiro Suzuki, leading up to today's superstar Shohei Ohtani.
Before former Cubs outfielder Kosuke Fukudome threw out the first pitch at last night's game, HPR's Bill Dorman spoke with Robert Whiting, a Tokyo-based author who has written 10 books on Japanese culture and history — including several on baseball. Did you know professional baseball across the Pacific has a history that also involves Hawaiʻi?
Interview Highlights
On the significance of last night's baseball game in Tokyo
ROBERT WHITING: There are five Japanese players on the field. There's three on the Dodgers. Three pitchers in their starting rotation are Japanese, and then there's two Japanese on the Chicago Cubs, (Shota) Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki. People in Japan used to think years ago, when I first got here, that a Japanese player could never make it in the major leagues. It was just an impossible dream. Every other year, an American team would come to Japan and play a postseason series of goodwill contests, and they would always defeat the Japanese team handily. I can remember the manager of the Yomiuri Giants after one such series ended saying there's no difference between the ability of Japanese and Americans and playing baseball, the Americans are bigger and stronger. That's all. And then here you have Shohei Ohtani comes along. He's 6-foot-4. He weighs 230 pounds. He throws the ball 100 mph, and he hits 500-foot home runs. He's bigger and stronger than most Major League athletes, and he looks like an NFL wide receiver or linebacker, so you could say they reached their aspirations for defeating the Americans in baseball.
On differences between the business side of baseball in Japan and the U.S.
WHITING: There's a basic difference between the Japanese professional game and the Americans. The American game is based on profit. Teams have to turn a profit and they have to win in order to turn a profit. But in Japan, the teams are created as advertising vehicles for a parent company, like the (Hokkaido) Nippon-Ham Fighters are owned by the Nippon Ham pork manufacturing company. They use it for advertising, and it's a kind of tax write-off. And I've been told that it's cheaper to buy a baseball team and have your company's name, parent company's name, in the sports news every day on newspapers and TV than it is to buy advertising time in prime time in Japan. They don't have extensive farm systems. They don't invest in the growth of the team the way they should. So that's why these players, like Sasaki and Ohtani, go to the States because the rewards are far greater. Nobody in Japan was going to pay Ohtani, you know, give him a $700 million contract like the Dodgers gave him 10 years, or the 12-year $325 million contract they gave to Yamamoto. The highest-paid player in Japan makes around $6 million a year. That's it. It used to be considered an act of national betrayal to go to the States. That's why (Hideo) Nomo was considered a traitor. And Sadaharu (Oh), the great home run hitter for the Yomiuri Giants, had 868 home runs in his career. He wanted to go, but he said, 'I never could because the fans never would have forgiven me.' The goal at that time, just talking about the '60s and '70s was to beat the Americans in a real World Series.
On how Hawaiʻi has been part of Japan's baseball history
WHITING: When Japanese baseball fans think of Hawaiʻi, they think of Wally Yonamine. He was the first foreigner to play in Japan after the end of World War II. He was a three-sport athlete from Maui. He played for the San Francisco 49ers for a year. He was a running back. He went over there in 1950. In the beginning, Japanese authorities thought they'd made a horrible mistake because the Japanese people viewed Nisei, American Nisei, as traitors because they fought alongside the American soldiers during the war, and so there was a lot of animosity towards him. And also he introduced the slide, rough slide into second base to take out the second baseman and break up a double play, which was something Japanese didn't do. It was impolite. But he helped the Giants win several Central League Pennants in Japan, serious victories. He won some batting titles and MVP awards, and he was accepted. Before Yonamine came, if a Japanese batter hit a ground ball to the infield, second or short, they wouldn't run it out. They just figured it was an automatic out. But Yonamine ran it. Even the most routine ground ball to the infield, he ran as fast as he could, and sometimes there was an error and he got on base. So he changed the way they play, and he went on to become a manager, and he introduced some of the American concepts of training. The Japanese had turned baseball into a martial art, and with the basic theme is practice until you die. They had this drill called the 1,000 fungo drill, in which a player was fielded ground balls hit to his left and right, back and forth, back and forth until he dropped from exhaustion. There was a famous manager at Waseda University who crafted the philosophy of the martial arts onto baseball, the samurai ethic, and who famously said, 'It's only when the player is lying on the ground, flat on his back, froth coming as from his mouth and semi-conscious that you could say he has practiced hard enough.' And the idea if you wanted to be a good pitcher, you were expected to throw 100 pitches every day in practice. That's like throwing a complete, nine-inning game every day.
On Japan's evolving culture around baseball
WHITING: I think the average Japanese baseball fan prefers to watch Major League Baseball rather than the Japanese leagues. If there are Japanese on the team, they'll tune in. It's a matter of national pride to see a Japanese succeed in America. They're gratified by seeing that. I think in all, this migration of Japanese players has been good for international friendships because of the intense coverage of Japanese players in the States — Japanese got a closer look at American society than they would have normally. So there's a cultural awareness that's improved. It's a learning experience. So people I think feel closer to America and Americans than they did before. So when I first came to Japan in the 1960s, all anybody talked about was the Yomiuri Giants. Every game they played, the entire season was telecast nationwide. You are at any bar, restaurant, you walk in, the TV there, the game would be on, or get in a taxi, the cab driver would have the radio blaring the game. The Giants used to get 25 million viewers for every game they played during the season. And that's like a 20-plus on the Nielsen, Japanese Nielsen rating, but it's fallen down now. It's down to single digits, and you very seldom see a Giants game on network television. They have, they're on cable now, but the viewership is down to like 200,000 or 300,000. The Japanese still, they will go out of their way to watch the Japanese play in a Major League game — and Japanese corporations buy sponsorships and advertising and big league parks. Some telecasts you can see signs that aren't really in the park, beyond the backstop, behind the catcher, they'll have a sign "Mitsubishi Heavy Industries." It's not really there. It's just superimposed on the screen for I don't know how many millions of dollars they had to pay for that, but it's generated a lot of money all around.
This interview aired on The Conversation on March 18, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. HPR's Tori DeJournett adapted this story for the web.
