Welcome to Black Tokyo!  

I wanted to outline a couple of connections between the Negro Leagues and Japanese baseball that aren’t (I think) all that well-known.

First: for decades, the standard story about the rise of professional baseball in Japan has credited a 1934 tour of Japan by major league all stars, including Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, for sparking interest in the sport and leading to the first professional league two years later.  But the Japanese baseball historian Kazuo Sayama, in the 1987 Baseball Research Journal, told a somewhat different story. 
He …

Former makuuchi division Russian wrestler, 20-year-old Toshinori Wakanoho (whose real name is Soslan Gagloev), under arrest for possessing marijuana, has told police that he first turned to drugs in his early teens, and that after he entered the sumo world he smoked dope every time he went home to Russia.
According to a statement Wakanoho made to police, he went to a nightclub in Tokyo’s Roppongi entertainment district by himself on June 20, where he was offered marijuana by a Russian man and a black man. He smoked the drug in …

The Olympic Games started on 08/08/08 and the U.S.A.’s eight-year quest for gold in international basketball has the U.S. men’s basketball team (a.k.a. the Redeem Team) beating Spain to win the 2008 Olympic gold medal. Spain fought hard but had to settle for silver and Argentina takes home the bronze medal. In women’s 2008 Olympic Basketball, the USA women’s team won gold. 
 

 

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I rarely get excited about swimming but I love competition! Well, Team USA’s 4×100 Freestyle captain, 32-year-old Jason Lezak (he’s oldest man on the U.S. swimming team), showed great competitive spirit and pulled off one of the great comebacks in Olympic history. He saved the day in the men’s 4-x-100 freestyle relay as the U.S. team beat the French (a.k.a. “We will smash the Americans”) swim team in a neck-and-neck race. His teammate Michael Phelps has a shot at breaking the all-time record for gold medals in a single Olympic Game.

The victory …