Shohei Ohtani’s Arrival Brings Hope and Nostalgia to Little Tokyo in L.A.
It’s Shohei Ohtani Season in L.A.
Even before the startling accusations made against Ohtani’s interpreter, the Dodgers star was seemingly at the center of civic life.
By Emily Witt
Los Angeles rarely unites around a collective obsession; the city is too large and diffuse for conversation to center on a single topic. But there are occasional exceptions, such as 1) if it’s raining and 2) Shohei Ohtani.
On Thursday afternoon, the day of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ home opener at Dodger Stadium, it was not raining, so Ohtani, the team’s biggest star and the world’s greatest baseball player, had the conversation to himself. Not that he participates in it: Ohtani is so private that his rare public disclosures, no matter how anodyne, generate frenzies of interest. In November, when he accepted his second M.V.P award, he revealed that he had a dog, a Nederlandse kooikerhondje named Dekopin, or Decoy, for short. The dog dominated baseball discussion for days. A few months later, in an Instagram post, Ohtani revealed he had married. Nobody had ever even seen him with a girlfriend. The announcement was accompanied by a picture of Decoy, and Ohtani later described his bride, whom he did not name, as a “normal Japanese woman.” This turned out to be an understatement: she is Mamiko Tanaka, a former professional basketball player in Japan, and videos were soon circulating of her sinking three-pointers, accompanied by jokes that the couple would produce the Kwisatz Haderach, the messiah generated by the careful mixing of bloodlines in “Dune.”
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