The popularity of Shohei Ohtani and the success of the Los Angeles Dodgers during the 2024 Major League Baseball season has dramatically popularized American baseball to Japanese audiences while also serving as an important vehicle for US-Japan cultural exchange.
On October 30th, the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in game five of the World Series, solidifying them as the 2024 Major League Baseball (MLB) champions. This was the two franchises’ 12th meeting at the World Series, but their first since 1981. The championship drew more than 30 million combined average viewers, a large portion of which were from Japan.
Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are two Dodgers players who have become national heroes in Japan due to their success in the MLB. Both players originally played in the Japanese league, the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), but later signed onto MLB teams and permanently moved to the United States.
Shohei Ohtani, the two-time MVP, has broken countless MLB records since his debut in 2018, one of which was becoming the first 50/50 player in September 2024—hitting 50 home runs and stealing 50 bases in one season. Ohtani’s 50th home run ball sold for a record $4.39 million in an auction a month later. Meanwhile, Yoshinobu Yamamoto is one of the highest paid pitchers in the MLB, just behind Ohtani, and, in the first game of the World Series, only allowed one hit during the first six innings—a feat only achieved ten other times in World Series history.
During the Dodgers’ 2024 National League Division Series against the San Diego Padres, Ohtani and Yamamoto played against another former NPB player, Yu Darvish. The final game of that series averaged 12.9 million viewers in Japan, which surpassed the 7.5 million viewers in the US.
After defeating the Padres and later the New York Mets, viewership only grew. In game two of the 2024 World Series against the Yankees, there was an average of nearly 16 million viewers in Japan watching at once—roughly 12% of the country’s population—making it the most-watched MLB game in Japanese history. The MLB also reports that its social media platforms have registered more than 345 million views, the greatest engagement in World Series history.
In 2024, the Dodgers and the Padres opened the season in Seoul, which recorded 17 million Japanese viewers, doubling the amount of the previous year. In 2025, the Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs are set to open the new season at the Tokyo Dome. The Cubs host two other famous Japanese MLB players, Seiya Suzuki and Shota Imanaga, and the combined roster facing off in Tokyo is posed to break Japanese viewership records.
Advertisers have greatly benefitted from the heightened Japanese viewership, especially as they target younger fans, whose views are up 93% since the start of the MLB championship. Nevertheless, advertising is not the only industry that has benefited from the Ohtani/Yamamoto craze.
At the start of the 2024 season, Dodgers Stadium announced they partnered with a Japan-based food group, Tsukiji Gindaco, to bring Takoyaki, the immensely popular battered and fried octopus, to its concessions. Since signing Ohtani, Dodgers Stadium has also started to provide sushi and chicken katsu to cater to its newer Japanese fanbase and introduce Japanese culture to American baseball fans.
Baseball serves as a powerful tool for contemporary cultural exchange between the United States and the Japanese public. However, Sho-time, the colloquial phrase describing Ohtani’s domination in the MLB, has built a new narrative for Asians and Asian Americans in baseball and beyond.
Shohei Ohtani, frequently referred to as the modern-day Babe Ruth, and the other former NPB players in the MLB have transformed baseball into a vehicle of cultural exchange that is breaking the divide between the Japanese and American public. These players have brought new perspectives and styles to the game, shaped the MLB to introduce Americans to Japanese food and businesses, and incorporated racial and cultural diversity into a favorite American pastime—a predominantly white sport today, but one that was also used to portray Americanness as exclusively white.
Stan Thangaraj, the director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Social Justice at Stonehill College, stated in an NBC News article, “The fact we’ve had someone become the face of MLB is an incredible move forward for the Asian and the Asian America[n] community.”
During the final meeting between the now-former Prime Minister of Japan, Fumio Kishida, and the US Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, the two held the signed jerseys of the Japanese players on their favorite respective teams: for Ambassador Emanuel, it was Seiya Suzuki from the Cubs, and for Prime Minister Kishida, it was Shohei Ohtani from the Dodgers.
Shohei Ohtani is already a two-time MVP, the first—and only—50-50 Player, and the highest-paid player in the MLB in the seventh season of his career. With at least nine more years in the league remaining, fans can look forward to Sho-time for a long time to come.
Jacob Erhart is a Fall 2024 Young Professional at the East-West Center in Washington. He is a fourth-year student at the American University School of International Service with a focus on foreign policy and East Asia.