| | | How sports can change culture. Pretty cool.
Wizards’ Rui Hachimura is the NBA rookie with the biggest following
How is the Japanese-born star handling pressure of representing his country?
theundefeated.com
excerpt:
Seeing a large Japanese media contingent following baseball players in America has been commonplace for a while. Major league baseball stars past and present, from Hideo Nomo to Ichiro Suzuki to Hideki Matsui to Yu Darvish to Shohei Ohtani, have primarily answered questions from the North American media in English through a translator and then in Japanese with their native media. That won’t be the case for Hachimura.
Hachimura learned to speak fluent English while at Gonzaga, primarily by listening to rap songs, watching Netflix, playing video games and talking to his teammates.
 Rui Hachimura was surrounded daily by Japanese media during summer league. John Locher/AP Photo
“The difference is I don’t use a translator,” Hachimura said. “But it’s good for me because I learned the language and speak English and Japanese too. It makes me smart because it strains on my brain.”
Former Phoenix Suns guard Yuta Tabuse, who played in four career NBA games, and current Memphis Grizzlies guard Yuta Watanabe have also received attention from Japanese media. Former Denver Nuggets head coach Jeff Bzdelik recalled getting grilled by Japanese media daily about Tabuse during his short stint with the team during 2003 training camp.
“They are extremely passionate about their own countrymen,” Bzdelik said. “I’d refer all questions about why he wasn’t playing to [then-Nuggets general manager] Kiki [VanDeWeghe]. They want so badly to have someone make it for them.”
Hachimura averaged a team-best 19.7 points and 6.5 rebounds for Gonzaga last season as a junior, earning the 2019 West Coast Conference Player of the Year award and a consensus first-team All-America selection. Selected with the ninth overall pick in the 2019 NBA draft, Hachimura, proudly wearing a Japan flag on his suit jacket, became the first Japanese player to be selected in the first round.
Related Story  Top NBA prospect Rui Hachimura wants to inspire biracial athletes in Japan Read now “Rui is huge right now,” Kyodo News reporter Akiko Yamawaki said. “He has television cameras following him everywhere. He’s just not on the sports news, but he is even on the news in Japan during the daytime at 2 o’clock or 3 o’clock when only housewives are watching TV. I think most of Japan knows who he is.
“When you open the newspaper in Japan, he is there all the time now. Before, only sports fans knew of him. Everybody knows Ichiro and Ohtani. Now Hachimura, everybody knows.”
What has made Hachimura a media sensation in Japan is that he has a chance to be their first NBA star. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of that is Hachimura is of mixed racial identity, something that wasn’t always embraced in Japan. His mother is Japanese and his father is from Benin in West Africa.
Yamawaki told The Undefeated that it was not long ago that Japanese natives were not welcoming to biracial athletes. That began to change in recent years, however, as Japan has had its share of biracial sports stars, such as tennis champion Naomi Osaka, Chicago Cubs pitcher Yu Darvish, sprinter Abdul Hakim Sani Brown and Olympic hammer throw gold medalist Koji Murofushi.
“Probably before, six years ago, it was different,” Yamawaki said. “Now they are accepting of everything. Japanese people are proud of them.”
Hachimura previously told The Undefeated that he hopes to inspire not only young basketball players in Japan but also kids of mixed race struggling with racism, discrimination and identity issues. Wearing an NBA uniform certainly will give him a bigger platform.
“I definitely want to help them. I don’t know how I am going to do it. But I am so excited to have a camp or something like that back home, and here too,” Hachimura said. “There are a lot of Japanese American kids here, and I think I can help them kids too.”
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