Tetsuya "Nick" Sakagami has an interesting anecdote about first moving to America during the height of the Japanese bubble economy in the late 1980s, when Japan was booming and confidence was in high supply.
All through junior high school and high school in Tokyo, Sakagami was a basketball fanatic. When playing, Sakagami, close to six feet tall, was a key player his teammates fed the ball to, confident that it would end up in the net and get points on the board.
One of the major draws of America for Sakagami was the opportunity to play more basketball, not necessarily professionally, but at least on its home turf. So once stateside, he quickly set about getting in on a game, and possibly forming a fraternity.