Breakfast with Ohtani: In Japan, watching this World Series may be the national pastime

Shohei Ohtani has been a superstar in Japan for more than a decade, but one day earlier this year, a Tokyo resident named Tatsuo Shinke noticed something different.

Shinke, the CEO of Mint, a leading trading card store, had already watched as Ohtani’s soaring popularity had fueled the Japanese collectibles industry, spiked Japanese television ratings for Major League Baseball, and pushed baseball news into every corner and crevice of the country’s vast media ecosystem.

Yet as Ohtani made history in his first season with the Los Angeles Dodgers, becoming the first player in history to record 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in one season, Shinke observed another data point: His mother, Emiko.

At 73 years old, Emiko had never followed baseball. But because Ohtani’s Dodgers games are aired live in the morning in Japan, and because he has become a daily fixture on the country’s popular morning variety shows — the equivalent of “Good Morning America” or “Today” — Emiko developed a new morning routine: She wakes up, eats breakfast, and then turns on Ohtani.

“Elderly people in Japan love Ohtani,” Shinke said. “It’s my mother. And all my mother’s friends. She’s retired already, so she has enough time to watch all the games in the morning.”

In the United States, the World Series between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers is a matchup featuring the country’s two biggest cities and most high-profile franchises. The audience could surpass 20 million viewers per game for the first time since 2016.

In Japan, it will likely be even bigger.

In seven seasons in the majors, including six for the Los Angeles Angels, Ohtani has lorded his talent over Major League Baseball in a manner previously thought impossible. For his trouble, he has captured two Most Valuable Player awards while dominating as a hitter and a pitcher. If he wins his third this November, as is expected, he will become the first full-time designated hitter to win the award, a role he was forced to play after injuring his elbow last season.

In America, his performance earned him a $700 million contract — the largest in history — and stardom in a sport that increasingly trails its rivals in cultural capital. But back home in Japan, where baseball is the most popular sport, Ohtani’s celebrity has reached stratospheric levels, akin to Michael Jordan or David Beckham, figures who transcended their field of play and whose fame turned them into international avatars for their home country.

“There isn’t a person in Japan who doesn’t know who Ohtani is, I don’t think,” said Robert Whiting, an American author in Tokyo who has written about Japanese baseball since the 1970s.

When the Dodgers defeated the Padres in Game 5 of the National League Division Series — a game that featured two Japanese starting pitchers — an estimated audience of 12.9 million Japanese viewers tuned in at 9 a.m. on a Saturday, at least 5.4 million more than watched in the U.S. When Ohtani chased 50-50 in September, his exploits often led the national nightly news and daytime “wide” shows, spaces that rarely mention sports. (The business newspaper Nikkei also ran a front-page story above the fold.) And when Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, spoke of Ohtani during a press conference in Tokyo earlier this season, he told reporters he wanted to speak not as an ambassador but “as a kid from Chicago” who watched Jordan rule the 1990s and transcend basketball.

“This is early on in Ohtani-san’s career,” Emanuel said, “but there’s no doubt that that’s what he has right now.”

The sheer volume of wall-to-wall coverage has even surprised Whiting, who first moved to Tokyo in the 1960s and has authored books on baseball and Japanese culture. Japan has seen this story before, the obsession over conquering baseball heroes in the form of Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui, who was World Series MVP for the Yankees in 2009. But perhaps not since Nomo in the 1990s, Whiting says, has a Japanese player embodied and lifted the national spirit.

When Nomo debuted for the Dodgers in 1995 — in the middle of a nasty trade dispute between the United States and Japan — Whiting recalled that Asahi Shimbun, one of the nation’s biggest newspapers, ran an editorial stating: “In Hideo Nomo, the Japanese have produced a product that no one is complaining about.” But whereas Nomo, Suzuki and later pitchers like Yu Darvish validated the quality of Japanese baseball, Ohtani has changed the equation: For the first time, Japanese fans can credibly argue that the most talented baseball player of all time is from Japan.

“In the global market, Japanese value and power is (becoming) a little bit weaker, year by year,” said Tomoki Negishi, a baseball marketing executive who worked for Japan’s Pacific League. “So Ohtani-san’s great performance is a beacon.”

To some, he says, Ohtani is “a symbol of Japan in the global market.”

To others?

“He is just a crazy superhero that I’ve never seen before,” Negishi says.

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On the morning of October 12, the symbol beamed through a television into a living room in Ōta, a special ward in Tokyo. Masanori Ninomiya, an owner of an English reading company, finished a traditional breakfast of white rice, miso soup and fruit and then turned on the Dodgers and Padres.

Ninomiya, 59, grew up in the city of Oita, obsessing over books about Japanese baseball history. He attended business school at UCLA in the ’90s, as Nomo was breaking through. He is among those in Tokyo who work remotely, which allows him to put the Dodgers on in the background during the work week.

“Everybody will have a breakfast,” he said “And then it’s Ohtani.”

In Japan, all Dodgers games appear on NHK, the country’s free, over-the-air public broadcaster. The audience for NHK often skews older, especially in the mornings. Unlike the United States, where European soccer fans huddle in bars and pubs in the morning, there is less public consumption of Ohtani, outside of major events like the World Baseball Classic. According to Negishi, this is partly due to cultural norms and partly because of the sheer volume of baseball games.

“I’m sure I’m not the only one,” said Chen Liang, director of imports at Mint cards and collectibles. “But there’s a huge percentage of Japanese people who are at work, and they’re in front of their computer, and they’re just clicking on the box score while they look at Excel sheets and things like that.”

Ninomiya was awed by Ohtani when he emerged as a two-way player for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. He followed him when he debuted with the Angels in 2018, when the morning ritual began. But he ascribes the national love affair to the way Ohtani has conducted himself on the MLB stage.

“For example, if there’s garbage on the ground, he tries to pick it up,” Ninomiya said. “We know he’s a superstar — and super rich — but he doesn’t behave like that.”

Ohtani and his representatives have cultivated an image in Japan of a modest, polite baseball star who is deferential to teammates and respectful to elders. The reputation helped Ohtani weather a wave of public scrutiny earlier this year, when his former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, was charged with stealing more than $16 million from an Ohtani bank account to cover gambling debts. (Mizuhara later pleaded guilty.) It’s also helped him land a raft of endorsements from companies on both sides of the Pacific and turn his personal life into daily fodder on television. (His wife, Mamiko Tanaka, and his dog, translated to Dekopin in Japanese, are regular characters on the daytime shows.)

“Those are traits that I think Japanese fans love to see in practice on a foreign land,” said Hiroshi Kitamura, an associate professor of history at William & Mary who specializes in U.S.-East Asian relations. “Japanese fans love to see MLB players like (Aaron) Judge, (Fernando) Tatis, (Ronald) Acuna say great things about Ohtani as being the unicorn. But I think they also appreciate seeing Ohtani kind of being Japanese. In that sense, I think Japanese fans see Ohtani as part of them.”

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The face of Major League Baseball greeted Foster Griffin each day when he arrived in Tokyo. The billboards. The cardboard likenesses in convenience stores. Ohtani’s voice even features in advertisements on the subway.

Soon after Griffin, a former Kansas City Royals pitcher, moved to Japan to pitch for the Yomiuri Giants, he learned the cultural primacy of televised nightly news.

“And he has his own section of the news,” Griffin said. “They highlight everything he does every day over there. He’s everywhere.”

From an American perspective, it’s hard to conceive of the popularity of Ohtani in Japan. America does not revere any foreign sports in which they are not supreme. The Japanese media, a sprawling apparatus with five commercial television networks and five national daily newspapers, can be impenetrable for non-Japanese speakers. And contrary to hyperbole, not everyone in Japan cares about baseball.

“Culturally, I felt like in recent years, the interest of young kids seemed headed to new sports like soccer,” said Ema Ryan Yamazaki, a Japanese filmmaker raised in Osaka.

The sport, however, remains a cultural unifier, a source of connection at the office or during the morning commute. And Ohtani has transcended demographics, spawning new generations of fans while appealing to retired grandmothers in Tokyo, Fukuoka and Sapporo.

“The school teacher understands a balk and an intentional walk, throughout the entire country,” said Bobby Valentine, the former Mets manager who had two stints in Japan as manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines. “It’s like a port of passage. Baseball allows you to be acceptable in the culture. It’s just one of those things.”

When Ohtani led the country to a World Baseball Classic championship last year, more than 42 percent of Japanese households watched Japan defeat the United States at 8 a.m on a Wednesday. Six of Japan’s seven WBC games drew more than 30 million viewers. Ohtani’s presence — along with starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto — could help the Japanese World Series audience approach those heights. The numbers are already so striking that MLB continues to target the Japanese market, and will open the 2025 season with the Dodgers facing the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo, a year after the Dodgers opened the season in South Korea against the San Diego Padres. Commissioner Rob Manfred told The Athletic this week that “If you’re going to open (the season) in Tokyo, the only choice was to take the Dodgers again. And the reason it’s the only choice is the audiences that those games deliver are so big that it drives what’s a real broadcast business for us in Japan.”

The first pitch of the World Series will come at 9:08 a.m. on Saturday, airing on both NHK and commercial network Fuji TV. Interest is so high that creators of the wildly popular manga show “One Piece” pushed back a season premiere, to not compete with Ohtani.

“Smart move to move the show on their part,” Yamazaki said. “I would, too.”

As Ninomaya puts it, the only figure in Japan who could conceivably surpass Ohtani in name recognition is the prime minister, and the current one, Shigeru Ishiba, just took office earlier this month.

“Some young people may not know our prime minister,” he said. “But even kids — junior high school students, senior high school students — everybody knows Ohtani.”

Yes, every generation in Japan is ready for breakfast with Ohtani. Even if there is one that appears most charmed.

Earlier this year, Whiting, 82, was talking to his wife, Machiko Kondo, who worked for years as a resettlement officer at the United Nations. For decades, Kondo never expressed any interest in baseball, even as Whiting wrote best-selling books about Japanese baseball history and the meaning of Ichiro, even as he followed games on both sides of the Pacific.

But then came Ohtani.

“I’ve written all these baseball books that have gotten national attention, and it doesn’t mean anything to her,” Whiting said. “But now with Ohtani, she’s started asking: ‘Did Ohtani have any home runs?’”

The Athletic‘s Andy McCullough and Sam Blum contributed to this story

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Getty Photos)