Why Major League Baseball keeps coming back to Japan
- Written by Jared Bahir Browsh, Assistant Teaching Professor of Critical Sports Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
When Shohei Ohtani stepped onto the field at the Tokyo Dome in March 2025, he wasn’t just playing a game – he was carrying forward more than 100 years of baseball ties between the U.S. and Japan.
That history was front and center when the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs opened their 2025 regular season facing off in the Tokyo...