How Japan Took Over Baseball

The gutsy, traditional Japanese baseball culture showcased in this video is changing. The high school that won last year's Koshien Championship adopts the principle of "enjoying baseball" and allows freedom in hairstyles as well.

As an American who spent 3 years growing up in Nagoya Japan. Watching the Nagoya Dragon baseball team is something I will never forget. Made it onto the jumbo-tron 3 times in a game and the crowd was WILD yet respectful. Drums, chants, cheers. Great life experience.

I had a small skinny Japanese kid on my little league team who just moved to America. That was many years ago, but he’s one of my only teammates I remembered. He threw like a rocket, perfectly accurate throws from the outfield or from 3rd to 1st, like 70 mph when the rest of us probably only threw 40 mph

If you watched/read Ace of Diamond, you cried watching this. The amount of heart these kids have brings me to tears.

As someone who has played in the Japanese little league for a few years I can attest that these Japanese little league teams are insane. My team didn't personally practice more than a few hours a week, and it showed. Against the Japanese teams, our team was absolutely horrible and once got a game called in the 3 inning because we were losing 27 to 3, even though most of our players were at least a few years older than most of the other team. They just had an ungodly ability to make hard contact, and their pitching was leaps and bounds above anything I had seen before. Japanese little league is no joke.

As a Taiwanese I loved this video, baseball in Taiwan is basically the little brother of japan and although we have a very powerful baseball team it’s nothing compared to how powerful Japanese baseball has become in the last 5 years. We loved watching npb in Taiwan and have tried to learn more and more from Japan aswell

Full discretion, I'm a knuckle dragger that only watches UFC, but holy moly this was an amazing documentary and really gave me a whole new appreciation for Japan and baseball. Thank you so much for the hard work in this documentary and showing me a whole new world I didn't even know existed! Time to go train harder!

I'm not that into baseball, but this channel is one of the best things in sports journalism today.

An hour long BDE video? What did we do to deserve this blessing??

Kousien is every man's dream in Japan. Before the Summmer Kousien we have a competition in the every prefecture and the winning team will get the ticket to the Kosien.

Even though they lost by 82 points in the summer Koshien tournament, they cannot afford to give up. They are the players who know that this game will be their last official match in their baseball life, and their best friends.

I'm just some random British bloke who has never watched baseball in my life but this video is sensational

I played baseball on an American high school team in Japan. Our main competition was the other international schools and US military base schools in the area, but we would also play Japanese schools during the season. Mind you, none of the Japanese schools we played were Koshien caliber, but they would smoke us every time.

Because of my business, I would frequent Japan, and one occasion, I spent a month in Nagoya. The place where I worked was near a little league field. Every day I would spend my dinner sitting in the stands watching the kids practice and would sometimes watch a game during the weekends. They were so fundamentally sound with every aspect of the game.

my friend ron passed away last year and i wish he was still here to sit down and enjoy this absolutely monster of a video from you he would have loved that you made an hour long vid!

Japanese players who go to the MLB always say that one of the hardest things they have to adjust to, is the minimal amounts of practice they get before the game. Seiya Suzuki, known quite famously in Japan for practicing a lot despite his already successful career in npb, said in an interview that he had to find time to practice by himself in the MLB, since practice sessions before games are extremely short, and major league players simply don’t practice as much as normal npb players. Really shows the difference in culture between the two.

As a 23 year old Japanese guy who played baseball for 12 years in Japan, this content is so fun to watch. When in it comes to abusing, when I was in junior high school, I got kicked at my belly by a coach, but it was totally fineI got used to it and he’s too old no power When I was in high school, we were so focused on baseball to go to “Koshien”. In Japan, we have almost no rest day, personally when I was in a junior high school n high school, we had only one rest day in a week. I dumped my girlfriends cuz I wanted to practice it more and I had to study for uni we rarely had time to hang out with friends But this memory in high school is my treasure

I played very competitive little league baseball. Went to the Little League World Series twice and i can say my coach for those teams definitely took the Japanese training methods to heart. Puking as 10 year olds because of running for miles and miles. It was absuive but something amazing at the same time. I dont even know how to describe it accurately. We had many "death paractices" that were over 4 to 5 hrs long. I was so engrained in baseball that after those practices i would come home and play wall ball with myself and my glove until i went to bed. Thankfully my house had a this massive brick fireplace in my living room with vaulted ceilings. So i was able to throw the tennis balls high like a pop up and practice jumping over walls with the furniture. By age 15 i was a well oiled machine but was completely burnt out. One thing I would have loved carry over to the US is no forefeits. I would love to rock pitcher after pitcher until we were up 82-0 lol. But many of our games ended after 3 innings because we were up by twenty so I only got to bat twice if I was lucky. However whenever we played a competitive tournament I could catch 18 innings a day. You should see a picture of my knee cap lol. I'm 35 and my body is that of a 50 year old. Have had multiple concussions as well. I remember playing over 100 games during the spring and summer and then starting "fall ball" the next week. With all said, it definitely helped me become the man I am today. I deal with the trauma yes, but I also know anything is possible and I will never quit on something until I achieve it.

When you think about the size of Japan it’s pretty cool that some of the best players come from there. Makes me think of Ivory Coast in soccer

A factual error regarding Ohtani: he wanted to come to the MLB as soon as he graduated from high school, but the team who drafted him, Nippon Ham Fighters, persuaded him not to be too hasty. They drew up a "business plan" which would better prepare Ohtani as a pro, both as a hitter and pitcher, so he would be ready for MLB a few years later. They wanted him to succeed first in the NPB, and then send him off.