Meet the Shohei Ohtani fan clubs from around the world

Oshu City, part of the Iwate Prefecture, is a rural inland town in northern Japan. Famed for its Maesawa beef and historic temples and shrines, these days the city may be better known as the hometown of one Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s biggest star.

Head to its City Hall, and you’ll quickly be met with posters, signs and memorabilia for the city’s favorite son. Posters that tracked Ohtani’s race for a 50 home run, 50 stolen base season hang near the exhibition, where a city employee was tasked with checking the box scores and updating the information every morning. There’s even a replica cast of Ohtani’s hand you can shake.

This is the home base for the Shohei Ohtani Cheer Squad, led by the city’s mayor, Jun Kuranari.

The cheer squad started in 2018 when Ohtani joined the Angels, 10 groups and companies coming together to support the slugger and show off some town pride. Since then, as Ohtani’s star continued to grow, as he blitzed the MLB record books and helped lead the Dodgers to the World Series, so too has the group exploded in popularity. A remarkable 259 groups are now in the squad.

“This includes major companies. It includes things like Shohei Ohtani’s middle school and even just small mom and pop businesses across the city,” cheer squad spokesperson Tomonori Toriumi said over Zoom through MLB Japan’s Sho Kurematsu, who translated. Toriumi is a member of the Lifelong Learning and Sports Promotion Division in city hall, making him the perfect person to be the mouthpiece for the now massive group of Ohtani fanatics.

The cheer squad has created special Japanese wind chimes known as fuurin for Ohtani and have produced commemorative stickers for Ohtani’s accomplishments, including ones for his 50/50 season and his back-to-back years leading the American League and now National League in home runs.

“We created 2,000 stickers,” Toriumi said of the most recent batch, “and they were all distributed within the first three hours.”

This isn’t restricted to City Hall, either. The entire city, whether you’re a bank, a restaurant or other organization, shows up for Ohtani. A local rice paddy is designed in Ohtani’s image and on the 17th of every month, people don the his iconic No. 17 tee-shirts or jerseys.

Even the school lunches pay homage to the superstar.

“They’ll play on Ohtani’s two-way features and think of a way to do a two-way menu item for school lunches for kids in middle school and elementary school,” Toriumi said.

While Oshu may claim a special connection to the superstar, the love of Ohtani spans the globe. Pull up Twitter, Instagram, or whichever social media platform you choose and you’ll find Ohtani fanatics from every walk of life. His jersey sales top the league and game broadcasts are sure to highlight when Ohtani is due up to bat.

Baseball players aren’t immune from the Ohtani fandom, either — whether you’re the Yankees’ Aaron Judge calling him “the best player in the game,” or a member of the Czech Republic national baseball team, each of whom named Ohtani as the player they were most excited to face in last spring’s World Baseball Classic.

There’s Shotime Korea, a group of Shohei Ohtani superfans in South Korea. Founded by radio producer, broadcaster and author Jae-ik Lee, the group — now 770 members strong — regularly posts their thoughts, feelings, and memorabilia on Naver Cafe. Some 40-plus members of the group anxiously waited at Incheon International Airport, carrying banners and signs reading “Goatani” in hopes that Ohtani would smile or greet them when the Dodgers arrived for the season-opening Seoul Series.

“During the baseball season, we gather at pub or sports bar and cheer together,” Lee wrote to MLB.com in an email. “The airport welcoming was one of the biggest events of our fan club. Somebody (I can’t remember who he or she was) said, ‘What if we all go together to the airport and welcome Shohei and the Dodgers?’ and we all agreed. We held a few meetings and took each role.”

As the leader of the group, Lee likely has the rest of the members beat in the gear department. He doesn’t just have cards, jerseys and game-used equipment in the space he calls his “museum,” though: He also buys Hugo Boss suits because Ohtani is a pitchman for the brand, and he purchased a Porsche Taycan in the same color as the one that Ohtani bought for Joe Kelly after the two players swapped numbers.

“Once Ohtani came into my life, I surrendered to this feeling, sort of in the way you would a religion,” Lee told the LA Times earlier this year. “I felt at ease. I could just go on with my life, accepting that I wasn’t made for that. I could be content just rooting for Ohtani and the great things he is achieving.”

What drew Lee and his group to its Ohtani obsession, though, wasn’t just his performance on the field: It was the attitude with which he carries himself, his intense focus and self-discipline, the rituals he follows and respect he shows others that set him apart from other superstars in the world. (Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Ohtani’s “handsome face and Greek god-like body seems another inspiration,” for some of the fan club’s members, according to Lee.)

It’s those selfless, humble qualities that have even put Ohtani into Canadian classrooms thanks to Ohtani Canada, the official Canadian fan club.

That’s right: In a country where Ohtani neither lives nor regularly plays, there’s a fan club just for him.

It all began when the Mayor of Toronto asked educator David Pollard if he might be interested in starting a fan club to help convince the two-way star to sign with the Blue Jays before he came to the Majors in 2018. Though Pollard wasn’t much of a baseball fan, he teamed up with his friend and fellow teacher, Jonathan Yeh, to start the group. Though Ohtani eventually signed with the Angels, the die was already cast: The group had started and momentum had them off and running. Once they passed 500 followers on their instagram page, @OhtaniCanada, the Angels at some point even gave them the highly sought after title: They were the bona fide, real deal official Shohei Ohtani fan club of Canada.

Posting daily photos, videos, and commentary on the page, they now have nearly 50,000 followers. They sell special Ohtani Canada buttons, T-shirts, even candles. (Once, through a mistake in translation, it was reported by media in Japan that they were giving out free T-shirts. Soon, they had thousands of requests coming in.)

They’ve hosted fan meetups at baseball games around the world, whether in Toronto, at Spring Training, or in Tokyo. They’ve raised money for the Japan Organ Transplant Network and have grown quite accustomed to media requests from all over the globe. They just so happened to be on TV at the very moment that Ohtani’s record deal with Los Angeles became breaking news.

“We were on an interview with them live, and then we looked down, and they said, ‘[Ohtani] just signed with the Dodgers,'” Yeh remembered. “It was going to be another 15 minutes, 20 minutes until we found out for how much. We were excited. We were crossing our fingers [he would sign in Toronto], but we were never going to cancel the fan club. We’ve been fans since he was in Japan. We were fans when he was in Anaheim. We’re still fans now, when he’s with the Dodgers, and we will be going forward.”

Being teachers, they’re perhaps most excited to make Ohtani a part of classroom lessons.

“I say to student teachers,” Pollard explained, “‘I’m going to show you how to teach character education in the classroom.’ What better way to do that than through Ohtani? Because look what he stands for: He’s kind, considerate, generous, loyal, brave. He has all those wonderful characteristics that are common to Japanese people in general, but he brings that to the game, and that’s why he’s so popular.”

They’ll use photos from Ohtani’s life on and off the field to illustrate their point.

“As someone who’s watched baseball for my entire life, I don’t see a lot of players picking up garbage,” Yeh said. “What does that say about him? And what does that say about a person when they do that? It means they care about the world around them. You connect that to, well, at recess, there’s a lot of garbage on the field. Why don’t we care in the same way? Can we care for our environment the same way Shohei does?

“We get to combine two loves. We get to teach kids how to be better, how to be kind, how to be loving, how to be respectful, and we get to combine that with a bigger than life, the superhero you can call [Shohei Ohtani].”

As a civic organization, Oshu City’s cheer squad supports these traits, as well. Using Ohtani’s high school goal chart as inspiration, “we teach kids things like reading, the importance of cleaning, the importance of being mindful and respectful,” Toriumi said. “We try to instill those good values into our teachings and education to the kids who are cheering on Shohei Ohtani.”

With the World Series underway, Oshu’s city hall is ready for the big week. They’ll be hosting a watch party for Game 3 and will continue to wear their No. 17 shirts every month.

“Everyone in the cheer squad and as a city, we also understand and truly embrace Shohei’s dream of becoming a World Series champion,” Toriumi said. “It’s amazing that in his first year as a Dodger, he’s been successful in the team and successful enough to reach this point. Right now, fans across the city, fans across the squad, are just really excited. They are doing whatever they can in spirit and are cheering for him to push him forward, [so he can] meet his dreams.”

The Oshu City Hall is open to visitors during normal business hours. If you would like more information about your visit, please reach out to the city’s Commerce and Sightseeing Division or Lifelong Learning and Sports Promotion Division.