Shohei Ohtani: The Ubiquitous Icon of Japanese Baseball

Shohei Ohtani: The Ubiquitous Icon of Japanese Baseball

TOKYO — Picture this: Shohei Ohtani, the baseball sensation, is everywhere you look in Tokyo. Whether it’s on a vending machine, a billboard, or a TV screen, Ohtani’s presence is inescapable. I’ve seen him in jeans and a white T-shirt, holding a bottle of Ito En iced tea, standing in a field of green tea leaves. This image has been etched into my mind, having seen it roughly 4 million times. It’s as if Ohtani is omnipresent, a constant reminder of his legendary status.

In the Tokyo Dome, Ohtani’s image is plastered on the walls, his eyes following you as you move. There are two Ohtanis, one holding a baseball bat like a right-handed hitter, the other without a bat, both wearing the same expression. It’s the look of a man dreaming of getting back into the batting cage. This expression is consistent across all his appearances, whether he’s promoting New Balance, DIP, or a men’s fragrance called Kosé.

At the famous Shibuya Crossing, the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world, Ohtani’s electronic billboard presence is undeniable. He’s 100 feet tall on the side of a building in Shinjuku, next to Seiko watches. It’s as if one stock image of Ohtani has been reconstituted to serve an endless number of purposes.

Even at convenience stores, Ohtani is there, draped on banners across nearly every FamilyMart store, promoting the MLB World Tour: Tokyo Series. He’s holding up onigiri, a Japanese rice ball, and probably wondering how long this is going to take.

On television, Ohtani is a versatile figure. I’ve seen him wearing an apron, preparing and eating a bowl of ramen, chopping his own onion. It’s a commercial selling something food-related, and it’s some of his best work. He’s also been seen on a beach, kicking a soccer ball for the green tea people, smiling as if he’s unaware he’s being filmed. In a spot for Fortnite, he morphs from Dodger Ohtani to samurai Ohtani, both equally imposing.

Television Ohtani is not to be confused with taxi TV Ohtani, who seems to run on an endless backseat loop. On the first day the teams worked out in Tokyo, a massive screen in front of the Tokyo Dome played a mashup of commercials starring Ohtani, interspersed with promotional spots for the series. A long line of people stood next to it, pointing their phones at the screen.

“Shohei’s impact in Japan is impossible to overstate,” says Dodgers president Andrew Friedman. “We thought we understood it, but until you see it and live it, you can’t fully grasp it.”

Ohtani carries himself with the awareness that every eye in every room is hyperfocused on him. In his home country, this truth exceeds the bounds of exaggeration. For seven years, he has existed here as nothing more than a figure on a screen, yet his presence is never more than a street corner away. Baseball fans plan their summer days around Dodgers games, most of which start in the late morning. It’s more fame than any one human seems capable of containing.

“Every time I go to Japan,” Friedman says, “I think, ‘Well, Shohei, I didn’t miss you at all. I see you everywhere.'”

Ohtani’s mother, Kayoko, handles his business dealings in Japan, and she is clearly excelling. The word is he is judicious with his choices for endorsement deals, but it’s hard to imagine he’s turning much down.

All of this emphasizes Ohtani’s value, not just to himself but to baseball in general and the Dodgers in particular. For six days, Tokyo was one massive ATM. MLB set up a 30,000-square-foot store at the Tokyo Dome to sell Dodgers and Cubs merchandise, everything from logo-printed cookies to Ohtani towels. It was 10 deep just to get close enough to check the size on an Ohtani jersey. (You could have parked your car in front of the Cubs gear.)

Topps put together a remarkably cool four-story baseball card exhibit in Shibuya, right around the corner from the three looming Ohtanis. It included two donations from Ohtani: the base he stole to complete his 50/50 season last year, and a bat he used during the World Series. His deal with Topps netted roughly $7 million for the company last season alone, a company source said, even though card collecting is relatively new in Japan. Stamp rallies, however, are tried-and-true crowd-pleasers, so Topps made sure to include one in the exhibit.

Japan Airlines has an Ohtani-themed plane, his face in triplicate on both sides of the fuselage, and travel agencies throughout Japan operate tours for fans to travel to Los Angeles to watch Ohtani play. Concession stands and signage at Dodger Stadium look vastly different than they did two seasons ago. And Ohtani’s estimated $65 million in annual endorsement income in 2024 — the most of any baseball player, and about $58 million more than the second-place player, Bryce Harper — made it much more palatable for him to defer nearly all of his $700 million contract, which is partly responsible for Friedman’s ability to spend whatever he wants (more than $300 million this season) on whomever he wants.

Ohtani’s fame is such that it can be imprisoning. He has a running feud with Fuji TV in Japan after it flew a drone over the house he bought in Los Angeles and aired the footage. He refused an interview with the network after the Dodgers won the World Series. But rarely has his fame been so stark and unforgiving as it was when the Dodgers’ plane arrived at Haneda Airport on March 13. Roughly 1,000 Japanese fans crowded outside customs to get a glimpse of Ohtani, but the airport had installed white walls that served as a tunnel to separate the players from the public, leaving Ohtani’s fans to settle with breathing the same air.

“It’s too bad, but it’s a security issue,” says Atsushi Ihara, an executive and former director of Nippon Professional Baseball. “If Ohtani walked out of his hotel and down the street, it would end up a police matter.”

The scene in and around the Tokyo Dome for the four exhibition games and the two regular-season games is probably best described as controlled, civil mayhem. Four hours before the first pitch on Opening Day, the crowds were so thick in the shopping areas outside the ballpark that it was difficult to move, which was fine with most people since they were happy to stand in clumps and raise their phones to take videos of the latest Ohtani commercial playing on the massive screens all around them.

• Ohtani’s impact in Japan is immense.
• His presence is felt in every corner of Tokyo.
• Ohtani’s fame transcends baseball.
• His endorsement deals are highly lucrative.
• Ohtani’s fame can be overwhelming.

(Inside the Dodgers’ clubhouse, a space with all the charm of a middle school locker room, the most prominent feature was a smoking capsule that resembled a phone booth and included a bull’s-eye on the wall showing smokers where to aim for maximum ventilation. No Dodgers appeared to be interested in using it.)

Before every pitch to Ohtani, it felt as if the entire building held its breath before releasing it in one massive exhale. The result was immaterial — foul ball, swing and a miss, take — the response was the same. And when Ohtani hit a homer in his second plate appearance in Tokyo, sending the ball halfway up the bleachers in right against the Tokyo Giants, a group of moms with their tiny daughters, all wearing Ohtani jerseys, danced in the concourse behind the lower deck.

After the game, Giants manager Shinnosuke Abe was asked if he had a chance to speak with Ohtani. “Yes,” he said. “I saw him in the batting cage.” He paused for a moment, as if deciding whether to plow forward. “Some people might not like this,” he said, “but I asked if I could get a picture with him.”

There were five Japanese players in the Tokyo Series, but it was sometimes hard to tell. Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto turns up on the occasional train station advertisement for an energy drink that sources on the ground say was initially targeted toward Japan’s middle-aged salarymen and their rigorous schedules. Yamamoto’s task, along with sidekick Ichiro Suzuki, is apparently to recruit the younger Japanese consumer to experience the joys of concentrated caffeine.

But really, there is Ohtani, always Ohtani and seemingly only Ohtani. “It’s hard to imagine him being more famous than he is in America,” Dodgers rookie reliever Jack Dreyer says, “but that’s certainly the case.” In Ohtani’s home prefecture of Iwate, in the far northeastern section of Honshu, I passed a gas station with a row of tire racks covered by tarps emblazoned with Ohtani’s photo. A sign nearby declared, “More than 300,000 tires sold.” It was unclear whether the seller was Ohtani or the station.

“What he is achieving and what he’s already achieved is something out of a comic book,” Ihara says. “Like a comic book superhero, you would think that nobody could do such things in real life. He’s showing us that there’s no limits for us as human beings, and that’s the inspiration that he is continuously providing for us.”

Ohtani played four games in Tokyo, two that counted and two that didn’t, a distinction that didn’t seem to matter. He was here, in the flesh, playing baseball in Japan for the first time in eight seasons, and he provided enough memories — his booming homer in the fifth inning Wednesday is the first that comes to mind — to remind everyone why they came. And then he headed back to his new life, back to being an image on a screen or a vending machine or above a convenience store, back to being nowhere and everywhere, somehow both at once.