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Whereas his predecessors were products of Japan’s player-development system, Kubo spent his formative years in Barcelona’s youth academy. Takefusa Kubo, 20, could be the most gifted of them all. Japan has specialized in exporting attacking midfielders over the last couple of decades, including several who played major roles on top clubs: Hidetoshi Nakata (Roma of Italy), Shunsuke Nakamura (Celtic of Scotland), Shinji Kagawa (Manchester United of England) and Keisuke Honda (AC Milan of Italy). (Incredibly, Miura is still playing for Yokohama FC at 54, making him the oldest active player in the world.) Miura scored only once in 21 matches, but his Italian experiment created an opening for a new wave of more technically adept players. (The 3-3 draw came to be known as “The Tragedy of Doha” and has become a cornerstone of Japanese soccer folklore.) Still wanting to compete against the world’s best, Miura departed the newly formed J-League and moved to Genoa of Italy’s Serie A on a loan deal in 1994, a year before Nomo signed with the Dodgers. While Japan was in the early stages of a soccer boom, Miura was the leading scorer of a national team denied a place in the 1994 World Cup by an extra-time goal in the final qualifying match against Iraq. But the player most responsible for popularizing the sport in Japan was Miura, a striker in the 1990s famous for his Samba-dance goal celebrations. Okudera played for Koln and Werder Bremen in Germany’s Bundesliga from the late-1970s to mid-1980s. The doors to the world, naturally, were opened by the world’s game.īefore there was Nomo, there were soccer players Yasuhiko Okudera and Kazuyoshi Miura.
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For example, the term “ pro yakyu,” which literally translates to professional baseball, is understood to refer to the Japanese league. Remnants of this inward-looking mindset remain in the Japanese language. In earlier times, the country’s sports culture was considerably more insular, with athletes striving to be “ Nihon ichi” - or No.
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Shohei Ohtani’s cartoon-like feats for the Angels have stunned the baseball world, but it’s very similar to the comic book world that influenced him. Hernández: How a comic book character influenced Shohei Ohtani’s two-way dominance
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“To want to try to play at the highest level possible,” Ohtani said in Japanese recently, “is normal, I think.” The Japanese men’s and women’s soccer teams fancy themselves as medals contenders at the Tokyo Games. Rui Hachimura was a first-round pick in the NBA draft and is a starter for the Washington Wizards. Two-time Olympic gold medalist Yuzuru Hanyu is considered the greatest figure skater of all time. 2 in Ring Magazine’s pound-for-pound rankings. Bantamweight boxing champion Naoya Inoue is No. Golfer Hideki Matsuyama won the most recent Masters tournament. Naomi Osaka is the most marketable female tennis player in the world, her profile as a four-time Grand Slam tournament winner further elevated by her social justice and mental health advocacy. Now, with Tokyo about to stage the Olympics, Japan is at the dawn of a golden age in sports. The Angels’ two-way star will headline the Home Run Derby on Monday and perform double duty for the American League as a designated hitter and pitcher in the game on Tuesday.Īs he envisioned, the world has become his stage.Īn entire generation of athletes from his homeland shared his ambition of global domination.
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This week, Ohtani will be the main attraction of Major League Baseball’s All-Star festivities, which will mark the unofficial halfway point of what could wind up being the greatest individual season of the last century, if not of all-time.
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He wanted to play in the United States and only in the United States, detailing his ambitions to sign with a major league organization at 18 and win multiple Cy Young Awards and World Series championships before retiring at 40. Ohtani never pictured himself playing in Japan. What was most striking about the document wasn’t the borderline-comical specificity of his plans outside of baseball, but how he wanted his career to play out. In the chart, Shohei Ohtani included a wedding, the birth of two sons and a daughter, and coaching a team to a Little League national championship. Nearly two decades after Hideo Nomo pitched in the major leagues for the first time, a high school senior in the northern part of Japan’s mainland wrote in colored markers his annual goals for the next 50-plus years.