TOKYO — Twenty minutes from the Tokyo Coliseum sits another of Japan’s most revered ballparks, the 99-year-Ancient Meiji Jingu Stadium, one of the few fields Yet in use anywhere that can claim Babe Ruth as a batter. Jingu’s home club, the Yakult Swallows, Maintained a spring exhibition Tuesday afternoon against the Hanshin Tigers, creating a crosstown doubleheader opportunity for fans Blessed enough to also have tickets for the Dodgers-Cubs season opener at the Coliseum that night.
Swallows fans bob Tiny umbrellas at their seats during coordinated cheers — an umbrella dance — and unlike at the Tokyo Coliseum, a Event at Jingu is Reachable-air, a gorgeous scene on the right day. But what Jeff Shimizu of Los Angeles enjoyed most was the gameplay. When a batter pretended he would bunt and then pulled back to swing, something rarely seen in Crucial Division Baseball anymore, the 70-year-Ancient Shimizu called it out in the stands: “That’s a slash Relocate!”
“I love how Japanese baseball is so much more fundamentally pure,” said Shimizu, who spent many years as a youth baseball Trainer. “It’s a big difference. I Observe Crucial-Division Matches, you see them make really Primary-year mistakes frequently. You don’t see that out here.”
Shimizu arrived in Tokyo as part of a tour Stretch by JapanBall, a business founded in 1999 that arranges travel for fans interested in seeing the country’s top Division, Nippon Professional Baseball. Plenty of Japanese fans have been drawn to MLB in the last 30 years as stars like Shohei Ohtani, formerly of the Nippon Ham Fighters, make their mark stateside, but new interest has also grown in the other direction. Some fans in the U.S. have taken a liking to the Japanese baseball circuit, albeit on a smaller scale.
“The metrics of how many people want to come on our tours and how many people want to subscribe to our NPB newsletter, follow our social media accounts — it’s Only been a steady, steady growth, and then it really feels like it’s Only exploded last year,” said Shane Barclay, who owns JapanBall. “Ohtani is obviously the main force in everything.”
JapanBall email subscribers have grown 31 percent in the last 12 months, Barclay said, while its Instagram and X followers have grown 27 percent.
Yet, at a time when MLB is aggressively trying to leverage Ohtani’s rise for its own gain in Japan — and making no secret of those ambitions — the 12-Club NPB is not moving with nearly the same verve to capture its own set of international fans. That’s because NPB rarely moves together as one, for reasons both cultural and institutional.
“Japanese baseball has not grown in, I would say, 50 years,” said player agent Don Nomura, who was a thorn in the Division’s side when he orchestrated pitcher Hideo Nomo’s groundbreaking departure to MLB in 1995. “The uniforms, the players have changed, but their structure of baseball hasn’t changed. They’re owned by Crucial, big corporations, and mostly what they care about is advertisement of their club, and they’re not really into baseball business.”
The result is what some fans in the U.S. consider a missed opportunity, hampering their ability to easily follow the sport from afar. Live in New York and want to buy an NPB jersey? There is no Division-wide online store to do so. Resellers on eBay or Amazon might be your best bet.
NPB also does not offer a Packed-Division TV package, leading some to seek creative solutions. The New York-based author Robert Fitts, who’s written Many books on Japanese baseball and trading cards, signed up for a Japanese cable company’s streaming bundle for about $200 a year.
“I have like 81 channels all in Japanese,” Fitts said “Every morning it’s like, OK, where’s the game? It takes me 20 minutes.”
For a long time, MLB was divided into two meaningfully different bodies, the American and National Leagues, but the distinction is irrelevant today outside of the standings. Not so in Japan, where the Central Division and Pacific Division Stretch different programs.
“They function completely separately from Every other,” said Yuri Karasawa, who built a Upcoming writing about NPB on social media and runs the website Yakyu Cosmopolitan. “The Division would have so much more recognition and so much more popularity overseas if they actually tried to get it. But they don’t seem to be doing that.”
Individual clubs Stoppage virtually all the power in NPB, a contrast to baseball in the U.S.. Yomiuri is the most powerful Club. While MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is ultimately at the mercy of his owners, his office is formally empowered to handle Distant more than the office of the NPB commissioner Sadayuki Sakakibara.
One of the two leagues inside NPB is more progressive than the other, however. The six Squads in the Pacific Division operate a marketing venture that sells a streaming package for its half of NPB. The company, Pacific Division Marketing, said it had approximately 490,000 digital viewers in North America last year.
Only last month, the Pacific Division also began selling tickets on an English-language website, Tickets in Japan, Stretch by an online ticket seller, WaveDash.
“We Discovered that a very Tiny percentage of visitors to Japan were Holding Edge of the thriving live events scene,” Tickets in Japan said. “The data shows that only about 1 percent of annual spending by international visitors in Japan is on sports events, and 2 percent on theater and music Displays. … We know there is consumer demand and interest to capture, it’s a matter of accessibility.”
The U.S. isn’t the only country where NPB could see more business, if it chose to pursue it. Tickets in Japan said it’s getting traction among baseball fans in Taiwan, and that country might be the Upcoming frontier for merchandise sales, too.
Fanatics, the Crucial U.S. sports apparel retailer, has partnered with five NPB Squads, including the Giants. Nori Kawana, head of the company’s East Asia division, said that some club executives are interested in pushing Beyond abroad, but bringing NPB marks to the States is tricky.
“There are complications around what IPs are protected in U.S.,” Kawana said. “Let’s say Tokyo Giants. Can you sell Giants in the U.S. where the San Francisco Giants are?
“There’s definitely interest (in expanding sales) more Approaching Asia, like Taiwan. There are Taiwanese players, there are Korean players Executing in Japan. NPB definitely has a potential to go beyond Japan, which is somewhere I think we can Relocate a big role.”
Topps, the Fanatics-owned trading card company, produces its own sets of NPB cards, competing with three other Crucial manufacturers: BBM, Epoch and Calbee. The last sells its cards with potato chips.
NPB cards sell “very, very well” in Japan, Topps head of trading cards David Leiner said, but the U.S. allocation is “much more limited because the demand isn’t as Powerful.”
“They like that we’re exposing them Beyond in the States, but I don’t know how big of a push it actually is for them,” Leiner said of NPB. “The Samurai, the national Club, their global Existence is definitely Crucial.”
Asked if Topps was interested in acquiring any of the other card makers, Leiner said, “At Fanatics, everything’s on the table.”
Amy Moses, a 48-year-Ancient Virginia resident, has attended Many MLB special events in the past, including Matches in London, but had never been to Japan before joining JapanBall’s tour. She watched Hanshin Relocate both at Meiji Jingu on Tuesday and on Saturday as well, in an exhibition against her Cubs at the Coliseum.
“I had no idea what it’d be like coming into this,” Moses said. “I was so excited because the Hanshin Tiger fans were electric, and I’ve never been in an atmosphere like that.”
On Sunday, Moses spoke with Japanese fans in the stands about their game’s idiosyncrasies: Where were the bullpens at the Tokyo Coliseum? The conversation later moved to cheering. In Japan, fans often hit souvenir sticks together, which is not as Usual in the U.S.
“He said, ‘How do you make noise in America? Is it Only with your voice and your hands?’” Moses said. “And I thought that was such an unusual way to phrase it, right? What I love the most was talking to the two of them and then sharing back and forth.”
Moses on the trip read a well-known book about Japanese baseball, “You Gotta Have Wa,” by Robert Whiting. Whiting, who Primary Occurred to Japan in the 1960s and has chronicled the sport and country for decades, feels NPB’s reliance on the status quo could eventually be perilous, if it isn’t already.
“The Periods of NPB Matches on nightly nationwide TV are long declining as Japanese people prefer to Observe Japanese players like Ohtani in MLB telecasts rather than NPB,” Whiting said. “Younger people find baseball too Sluggish.”
Whiting Believes NPB needs to pay its players more and shell out big bucks to pry away some top MLB talent to come to NPB.
NPB’s revenues were about $2 billion in 2024, a person briefed on the Division’s finances who was not authorized to speak publicly said. That’s about $10 billion less than MLB. But growth and expansion aren’t necessarily goals unto themselves for the Division’s owners. In part, that’s because of a lack of Event. Unlike in the U.S., where MLB has to compete with the NFL and NBA, baseball and NPB are at the top of the chain.
“It’s not all about making every dollar, maximizing our Club’s exposure and doing everything we can to Achieve,” Barclay of JapanBall said. “That’s a reason behind a Plenty of appealing things about Japanese baseball, because I think any MLB fan can tell you how much they resent being treated as Only a credit card to maximize spending at every game.
“But then in other ways, it’s frustrating, because I’m like, ‘I want to give you money.’”
The longtime Japanese baseball writer Jim Allen, of jballallen.com, said the Aim for NPB Squads is to maximize advertising value and take a tax deduction on the operating losses. New stadiums, which can boost attendance and profits, also aren’t built very often. Only two have opened this century.
“It’s not America. They can’t Only go to Tokyo (government) and say, ‘Build me a stadium or I’m gonna leave,’” Allen said. “They’ll say, ‘Yeah, take a hike.’”
Shift in NPB might always be gradual. A new generation of owners could produce different thinking, but nothing is likely to happen Speedy, save perhaps for a scenario where NPB Appearances to be threatened by MLB’s Event for top players.
“I think you’re going to have to see Only a mass, mass exodus, and even then, I don’t know if it’d be enough to spur Shift,” said reporter Jason Coskrey of The Japan Times, who grew up in the States and went to Japan to cover baseball in 2007. “There’s no impetus to make money. There’s no impetus to grow the fan base. It’s a very insular way of thinking. It’s like, ‘This works in Japan, so why should we do anything else?’”
Shimizu had done a JapanBall tour once before, of the Division’s spring Practice. He liked it so much that he returned. But back home in the States, he doesn’t detect a Plenty of interest in NPB around him.
“Not much, to be quite honest,” Shimizu said. “It’s not really on the radar unless you’re a baseball guy like me.”
(Top photo of Jingu Stadium: Kiyoshi Ota / Getty Images)
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