What baseball star Shohei Ohtani’s success says about Japan
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Shohei Ohtani has been a standout success, but there are also many of Japan's athletes who are everywhere in sport and doing well in their own right.
PHOTO: AFP
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NEW YORK – As Japan prepared to face the United States in the 2023 World Baseball Classic (WBC) final, Shohei Ohtani famously warned his teammates to stop revering their American peers.
“If we idolise them, we can’t surpass them,” he said.
The advice worked and Japan went on to win, with Ohtani closing out the game in the ninth inning.
Now the tables have turned, and baseball world idolises Ohtani.
Win or lose with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the play-offs, the 30-year-old has already achieved not just what many are calling the greatest individual game in Major League Baseball (MLB) history, but also the greatest season.
Sports journalism is running low on superlatives for him – such is his domination he has been dubbed “the most talented player ever to step onto a baseball field” and a “lion playing with cubs”.
Ohtani became the first-ever player in MLB history to record 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in a single season.
He has done all of this while utilising just half his talent. Ohtani first made his name as a “dual-wielding” two-way star who could pitch as well as he hits, but has stayed off the mound this season following elbow surgery.
That has not prevented him from having an economic impact of nearly 117 billion yen (S$1.02 billion) this season alone, in ticket sales and other revenue, according to Kansai University Professor Emeritus Katsuhiro Miyamoto.
Ohtani’s 2024 already included getting married, and his friend and interpreter Ippei Mizuhara pleading guilty to stealing millions of dollars from him to cover gambling debts. The scandal momentarily threatened to overwhelm Ohtani but, in a testament to his unwavering self-confidence, it has seemingly only made him stronger.
His triumph is more than just the story of a prodigiously gifted man or once-in-a-lifetime aberration. It is also one of Japanese turnaround.
In 2003, the local media fretted over how Japan was losing dominance of its own national sport – sumo. Earlier that year, the last Japanese-born yokozuna grand champion had retired, and foreign-born wrestlers were beginning to take over. Mongolian greats Asashoryu and Hakuho would go on to dominate the sport for years.
Few back then would have predicted that the narrative would be flipped, such that a Japanese player would dominate the great American pastime. And Ohtani is just the most prominent of a generation of Japanese athletes who are outperforming expectations.
In 2024, the country enjoyed its best-ever medal haul at an Olympic Games on foreign soil. A total of 20 golds trailed only China and the US, in competitions ranging from gymnastics and fencing to newer events such as breaking and skateboarding. Haruka Kitaguchi’s javelin gold medal was Japan’s first in a women’s athletics field event.
From tennis and fashion star Naomi Osaka to golf’s Hideki Matsuyama, the country’s sporting icons are everywhere.
There are also a growing number of Japanese footballers in Europe’s top leagues. Japan’s national team, too, beat Germany and Spain at the last World Cup and recently humbled China in a 7-0 win.
For all this to happen despite the birth rate dropping, with the number of children declining every year for over four decades, is particularly befuddling.
There does not seem to be a simple explanation. It might be indicative of economic recovery; the country suffered “the Olympic equivalent of lost decades” prior to the 2000s, writes TS Lombard economist Rory Green.
He notes that as the country recovered, the national sports budget has grown by nearly 200 per cent over the past 20 years, vastly above gross domestic product.
But economics alone may not explain the Olympic medal haul, says Jun Saito of the Japan Centre for Economic Research. Some argue that technology is helping – despite Japan’s relative lack of English proficiency, YouTube and other online resources now help spread new ideas and training techniques among young people.
Weight training is one area amateur baseball players now concentrate on, with the youthful Ohtani known to have emphasised pumping iron to fill out his once-wiry frame.
It helps coaching too, with instructors increasingly adopting modern strategies in the place of bruising old-fashioned practices designed to build spirit, such as bans on drinking water during sessions.
Additional emphasis is being placed on mental health and image training – Ohtani’s high-school coach had his students fill out a chart of goals and steps to achieve them. It was noticeable during the Olympics that many athletes looked far more relaxed and free of pressure than in the past.
Increasing internationalisation is no doubt a factor, with coaches coming from abroad with best-in-class techniques, such as those that have propelled the men’s rugby team to the upper echelons. It is likely no coincidence that Osaka, along with the likes of Rui Hachimura of the Los Angeles Lakers, have non-Japanese parentage.
Combined, these factors might make an Ohtani more likely. But maybe nothing can adequately explain him.
Japanese TV a few years ago showed the list of goals he wrote out as a high-schooler – moving to the Majors, winning the WBC and so on. He has not met all of them – the list called for winning the World Series by age 26 – but he is getting close. Perhaps it is simply fate. BLOOMBERG
