Let me be clear from the outset. This is not about the truth behind the Ippei Mizuhara illegal gambling scandal. Whether Ohtani was lying, what the facts actually were \u2014 none of that interests me here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What interests me is something the coverage and reactions around that scandal inadvertently revealed: a kind of symbolic operation Japanese society performs on “national stars who succeed abroad.” The subject of this critique is not Ohtani himself, but those who make use of him \u2014 the media, the audience, society itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am someone who has had almost no interest in watching baseball or soccer on television since childhood. I don’t watch high school baseball tournaments either (I don’t even own a television). It’s precisely from this outside vantage point \u2014 where the process by which Ohtani gets deified is invisible to those inside it, but plainly visible from outside \u2014 that I write this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When the Mizuhara scandal broke in March 2024, Japanese wire reports captured a striking difference in temperature between American and Japanese reactions. The American response was, on the whole, suspended judgment \u2014 a collective “we can’t say yet.” Fans interviewed at the ballpark showed little deep interest in the details of the case. Most believed it unlikely that Ohtani himself had been involved in illegal gambling, yet held onto a detached, unresolved skepticism: it’s strange that this much money moved without anyone noticing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The moves on Ohtani’s side told a different story. As ESPN’s reporting progressed, Mizuhara’s account flipped between two interviews conducted a day apart. The first explanation was that Ohtani had covered Mizuhara’s gambling debts; by the next day, this had been hastily consolidated into a single, clean narrative \u2014 theft committed by Mizuhara. A single story, ambiguity refused, established before the facts themselves had been sorted out. The speed of this pivot itself tells us something about the pressure the Japanese side \u2014 or at least the team managing publicity \u2014 was operating under.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why the urgency to settle the narrative so quickly? The answer is simple: an unspoken premise, already firmly shared, that Ohtani must be perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story of Ohtani picking up trash on the field has been reported again and again. A structurally identical story exists around soccer’s World Cup: Japanese supporters cleaning up their section of the stands after matches, an image that gets picked up every tournament by foreign media as a heartwarming anecdote, then re-imported into Japanese media as proof that “the world was amazed by Japanese civility.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s a simple but easily overlooked question: does someone who picks up trash in a stadium do the same thing on their daily commute? Does someone who joins a beach cleanup pick up litter on the street as a matter of routine? Probably not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn’t a claim about some deficiency of individual character. What I want to point out is the structure itself: this behavior isn’t a deeply ingrained daily habit, but a performance that activates only within a special, visible, ritual space. It belongs to the same category as cleaning up after a festival or lining up in orderly fashion after a shrine visit on New Year’s \u2014 a behavior running on an entirely different circuit than everyday manners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet the media and the audience alike turn this ritual behavior into evidence of a constant, essential national character. The wreckage left after Halloween in Shibuya, the litter piled outside convenience stores \u2014 these are caused by the same “Japanese people,” yet they never become material for a story about national character. Only the convenient samples get pulled out to construct the story “this is who we are.” In statistical terms, this is nothing but sampling bias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same structure shows up along another axis: cleanliness. Airport restrooms in Japan often feel cleaner than their counterparts elsewhere, yet station restrooms \u2014 especially on lines with fewer passengers \u2014 have increasingly felt neglected and unpleasant. The contrast becomes sharper against Singapore. There, as symbolized by its fine-based enforcement system, the state imposes uniform cleanliness as a matter of institutional infrastructure \u2014 a design that guarantees a baseline regardless of who is watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Japan’s approach runs in the opposite direction: visible places are polished to perfection through sheer effort, while invisible places are left to the discretion and goodwill of whoever happens to be on site \u2014 a personal, ritualistic approach rather than a systemic one. This is fundamentally a matter of budget allocation and maintenance structure, yet it gets papered over by a national-character narrative: “Japanese people are inherently tidy.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Airport restrooms, World Cup stadium seating, Ohtani’s on-field conduct as tracked by the media \u2014 these are all “visible places,” where resources and attention concentrate and get turned into heartwarming stories. Rural station restrooms, everyday littering, whatever Ohtani is actually like where no camera is pointed \u2014 these are “invisible places,” excluded from the story without ever being verified. The self-image of “the Japanese are clean and courteous” may be a narrative built entirely from visible-place samples \u2014 and what’s actually happening may be better described as a selective allocation of resources that perfects only the places on display.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This structure helps explain why perfection is demanded of Ohtani in the first place. South Korea, whether in K-pop or baseball, designs its systems around export from the start. Because the question of “how will this sell in overseas markets” is built in at the training stage, the weight of serving as “national proof” gets distributed across a whole system. If one idol or one player is caught in scandal, the system itself doesn’t shake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Japan runs the opposite way. Rather than building an exportable “system,” it elevates individuals who emerge as sudden anomalies into national narratives. Nomo, Ichiro, Matsui, now Ohtani \u2014 the cast changes, but the shape of the story stays the same. One person after another is made to carry, alone, the proposition of whether “a Japanese person can hold their own in the majors.” Under this structure, any flaw that one person reveals threatens to destabilize the proof itself. This is exactly why, the moment something like the Mizuhara scandal broke, the rush to repair the narrative outpaced any effort to actually establish the facts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Underlying all this is a structure dating back to the Meiji era: the idea that one only becomes a full-fledged member of the international community once recognized by “the West.” Self-assessment is never enough; only after passing through the abstract tribunal of the international community does something become a source of domestic pride. This isn’t a matter of Ohtani’s individual qualities \u2014 it’s that he has been made to function as a symbol: proof that a Japanese person can compete on equal footing on the West’s own turf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s a deeper question worth asking here: why do people invest themselves so heavily in the success or failure of someone else?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both hooligan-style fanaticism and excessive investment in the Ohtani myth make more sense if understood not as affection for the object itself, but as an act of confirming “who we are” through that object. Whereas fan devotion (oshi-katsu<\/em>) is a self-contained act that completes itself in love for its object, this kind of investment treats its object as interchangeable. It doesn’t have to be Ohtani \u2014 it could be whoever comes next. In fact, the cast has already changed hands multiple times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why entrust one’s sense of worth to someone else’s success rather than one’s own achievements? One answer lies in the differing cost of expressing pride. Pride rooted in something you personally care about \u2014 professional accomplishment, a hobby you’ve honed, an intellectual position \u2014 carries risk the moment you expose it to others: it can be criticized, dismissed. And the more personal the investment, the more directly any rejection lands on you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Collective pride \u2014 “our national team won,” “a Japanese athlete succeeded on the world stage” \u2014 is, by contrast, already pre-approved by the crowd, and low-risk. Riding along with it means any criticism falls on the athlete or the team, not on you. If the athlete fails, you walk away unscathed. Free-riding on collective pride is a low-cost way to enjoy pride without exposing your own vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be clear, this isn’t a claim that such people have nothing of their own to be proud of. Everyone has something \u2014 large or small \u2014 that matters deeply to them. But most people would rather avoid the risk of exposing that to public scrutiny. The stronger the pressure toward conformity in a society, the higher the perceived risk of voicing a private source of pride and getting attacked for it \u2014 and the more people end up leaning on already-sanctioned, safe, collective narratives instead. This isn’t unique to Japan; it’s a form of psychological economizing present, to varying degrees, in every culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Extend this structure one step further and the same function appears in people drawn to extreme political movements or cults. Many of them, too, aren’t operating from ideas they built themselves, but simply riding a pre-packaged “cause” that someone else has already assembled. Someone who rides the “already-sanctioned vessel of pride” that is Ohtani, and someone who rides the “already-prepared story of justice and enemy” that is an extreme cause, differ entirely in the nature of their object \u2014 legal or illegal, violent or peaceful \u2014 but share the same underlying mechanism: filling a void that one cannot support alone with a ready-made narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What matters here is that this is not a matter of individual personality. Even someone with a strong, personal sense of pride can, the moment that pride is rejected by the world or they find themselves isolated, suddenly find themselves drawn toward a ready-made cause. The difference isn’t a fixed trait separating “people prone to joining in” from “people who aren’t” \u2014 it’s circumstance: whether one is isolated, whether one’s existing sources of pride are still functioning. Given the right conditions, anyone can end up relying on a pre-made story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Religious faith touches on part of this same structure. The pattern of a person carrying isolation or emptiness having that void filled by a completed doctrine and community is a familiar one in cult recruitment. But religion also contains something this framework alone can’t explain: a response to questions of death and suffering that no worldly success or personal pride can dissolve, and rituals and ethics carried across generations on a timescale entirely different from momentary fervor. Fundamentalist faith \u2014 absolute submission to doctrine, ambiguity refused \u2014 and faith whose core is the act of continuing to hold an unanswerable question, may be two genuinely different phenomena bundled together under the single word “religion.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given everything above, I want to say this plainly: Shohei Ohtani is an excellent baseball player. That is enough. He doesn’t need to serve as proof of human perfection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Being an excellent player” and “having to be proof of a perfect human being” are, fundamentally, two entirely different things. The former rests on a verifiable, healthy axis of evaluation \u2014 results, skill, accumulated effort. The latter is a symbolic role imposed by society, entirely beyond the individual’s control. The sense of “it doesn’t add up” that spread during the Mizuhara scandal arose precisely because events had brushed, even slightly, against the pressure this myth carries \u2014 the demand for perfection. Had the premise from the start simply been “an excellent player who is also one human being,” having money stolen by one’s interpreter would have amounted to nothing more than an unfortunate misfortune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Small good deeds don’t need to be consumed, one by one, as proof of Japanese virtue, and society doesn’t need to feel that “the proof has been shaken” over something that isn’t even the man’s own fault. Effort and results \u2014 that alone is more than enough to make for an admirable athlete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it is not Ohtani who has constructed this myth. It is the media and society \u2014 the audience \u2014 who receive him. To actually arrive at “just stop it,” the recipients themselves need to let go of the circuit itself: the equation of “a Japanese person succeeding abroad” with “proof of the nation,” a circuit dating back to the Meiji era. Absent that, the same myth, in the same shape, will simply be reproduced onto the next star.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If something feels off, it’s fine to say so. That isn’t an insult to Ohtani, an excellent player in his own right \u2014 it’s a legitimate objection to the society that keeps using him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Foreword: This Is Not a Critique of Shohei Ohtani Let me be clear from the outset. This is not about the truth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":660,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions\/660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.junkatanuma.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Picking Up Trash: Virtue as Ritual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Perfection Only Where It’s Visible: A Pattern of Resource Allocation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why Demand Perfection? The Weight of Being Proof<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Outsourcing Pride: Why Do People Get So Invested?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Same Structure Runs Through Cults and Extreme Causes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conclusion: Just Treat Him as an Excellent Player<\/h2>\n\n\n\n