16
P/CLOUDY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
To say the Hanshin Tigers have been successful against the Yomiuri Giants is a somewhat of a misnomer. It’s probably more accurate to say the Tigers have owned the Giants in the early part of the season. Refer to the 2004 ALCS when Boston ...
There are so many written and unwritten rules around baseball that sometimes people in the sport tend to take things a little too seriously. That’s not a problem for new Yokohama BayStars outfielder Nyjer Morgan, who has the utmost respect for his craft, but ...
The last ‘homegrown’ foreign player to make any major impact for the Yomiuri Giants was volatile pitcher Balvino Galvez, whose reign of terror lasted from 1996-2000. Before him, there was Warren Cromartie, the 1989 Central League MVP who hit .321 with 171 home runs, ...
So why did the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters trade away arguably the best player on their team, if not in the entire Pacific League?
Last week, pitcher Mitsuo Yoshikawa became the first Pacific League MVP winner from the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters since 2009. The last Fighters player to earn the honor was former ace Yu Darvish, who won in both 2007 and 2009. Yoshikawa’s triumph also marks ...
Japan manager Koji Yamamoto said his World Baseball Classic team would mirror previous Japan squads and be built around pitching and defense. An admirable ideal, if not for the small issue of his best pitcher not wanting to play. What’s more, the second or ...
Stretching on the field hours before Thursday’s Game 5 of the Japan Series, Hokkaido Nippon Ham outfielder Daikan Yoh smilingly said that he hoped to go to South Korea. That meant that he wanted to advance to the Asia Series in Busan by winning ...
Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters youngster Kenshi Sugiya and his father, Mitsuru, are a unique father-son tandem. Both of them have been professional athletes. Mitsuru Sugiya was a Japan featherweight champion boxer, who also fought in a WBC world title match, in the mid-1980s. But ...
You could call it a coincidence, but going into Game 3 of the Japan Series on Tuesday there was a chance something uncanny could happen in baseball on both sides of the Pacific. Both the Giants of the United States and Japan had the ...
Despite a lopsided 8-1 loss to the Yomiuri Giants in Game 1 of the Japan Series, Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters manager Hideki Kuriyama came out in front of the media throng in a cheerful mode before Sunday’s Game 2 at Tokyo Dome. And the ...
Perhaps Shuichi Murata is the one who’s psyched up the most on the 21-time NPB champion Yomiuri Giants in the Japan Series. The 31-year-old slugger joined the club via free agency before this season after playing for nine years with the always-struggling Yokohama BayStars. ...
The Yomiuri Giants wrapped up the Central League pennant last week. Now the spotlight shifts to the Pacific League race, which is getting tighter by the day. Entering this week, there are three teams — the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, Seibu Lions and Fukuoka ...