These days, Don Nomura, the man who changed baseball forever, lives in Hawaii.
The isolated island chain in the middle of the Pacific is a fitting, poetic place for the 67-year-old, silver-haired player-agent to call home. Honolulu sits approximately halfway between Japan and the United States, the two nations whose sporting worlds Nomura bridged three decades ago.
These days, Japanese baseball and American baseball are inextricable, overlapping, intricately intertwined. Shohei Ohtani, the defending National League MVP, is the most famous player on Earth. His likeness graces billboards and TV commercials on both sides of the world’s largest ocean. Currently, Ohtani and the defending world champion Los Angeles Dodgers are in Tokyo for a season-opening, two-game set against the Chicago Cubs. The 45,600-seat Tokyo Dome is sold out for the series, which features a quintet of Japanese-born superstars.
The Dodgers — who, in addition to Ohtani, employ Japanese pitchers Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki — have quickly become the island nation’s most popular team. All across Tokyo, interlocking L.A. hats dot the bustling metropolis like deep blue flecks of paint on an asphalt canvas. A whopping 10,000 tickets — sales were capped at that number — were sold for the Dodgers’ Tokyo Dome practice on Friday. Games 1 and 2 of the 2024 World Series between the Dodgers and New York Yankees had higher viewership numbers in Japan (15.2 million average) than in the United States (14.5 million).
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But while baseball has been Japan’s unofficial national sport for more than a century, the immense popularity of Major League Baseball is a relatively recent phenomenon in the country. Although Japan established its own pro circuit, Nippon Professional Baseball, in the 1930s, until the mid-1990s, only one Japanese-born player had ever crossed the Pacific to appear in an MLB game.
It wasn’t a lack of talent but rather a traditional culture deeply rooted in obedience and respect that prevented Japanese players from making the leap. For decades, the idea of crossing the Pacific to play in Major League Baseball seemed nearly impossible due to the restrictive rules governing NPB. Meanwhile, cultural expectations stymied any player from challenging that status quo.
That all changed, forever and for the better, in 1994, when the agent Nomura, a wonderfully gifted pitcher named Hideo Nomo and an indomitably…