Across the Pacific and Into the Major Leagues

Major League Baseball teams are salivating over the prospect of 23-year-old Japanese superstar Shohei Otani playing in America. He's not the first Japanese player to stir this degree of interest. Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Yu Darvish, to name a few, were all accomplished Nippon Professional Baseball players who aroused intense media scrutiny before and after they moved from the NPB to the MLB. For all of these players, the media circus in both North America and Japan surrounding their transition not only has deep sociocultural meaning but also reflects the political and historical realities of Japanese-U.S. migration. ...