The History of Baseball in Japan and Nippon Professional Baseball

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 11 min read

How baseball reached Japan in the 1870s, grew through school tournaments and the 1934 tour, became Nippon Professional Baseball, and sent Nomo, Ichiro and Ohtani to the majors, with the league structure explained.

Baseball is not a borrowed sport in Japan; it is one of its national games, with a history that stretches back to the 1870s and a professional league that has run, with a wartime pause, since the 1930s. Nippon Professional Baseball, usually shortened to NPB, is the highest level of the sport in the country and is generally ranked among the strongest professional leagues outside the majors. Its players have been crossing the Pacific for three decades, and their success in the majors has made the league familiar to American fans.

The Japanese game is not simply a copy of the American one. It has its own calendar, its own tournaments, its own ways of training and its own rules about ties, playoffs and foreign players. A fan who knows the American game will recognise almost everything, and will still be surprised by some of it.

This article follows the story in order: the arrival of the game in the nineteenth century, the school tournaments that made it a national passion, the founding of the professional league, the postwar structure that still exists, the style of play, and the players who connected the two countries. It also notes where the historical record, which covers only the major leagues, can and cannot help.

NPB at a glance

The Central League includes the Yomiuri Giants, the Hanshin Tigers, the Chunichi Dragons, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, the Yokohama DeNA BayStars and the Tokyo Yakult Swallows. The Pacific League includes the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, the Orix Buffaloes, the Chiba Lotte Marines, the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles and the Saitama Seibu Lions. Team names change with their corporate owners, which is a reminder that Japanese clubs have traditionally been run by companies, often railroads, newspapers or retailers, rather than by wealthy individuals.

Details such as the number of games, the foreign-player limit and the playoff format have been revised more than once, and they are best checked against the league's own announcements.

How the game arrived: the 1870s

The usual account is that baseball came to Japan in the early 1870s, during the Meiji era, when the government was bringing in foreign teachers and ideas as part of a drive to modernise. An American teacher, Horace Wilson, who taught at a school in Tokyo, is widely credited with introducing the game to his students around 1872. A few years later, in 1878, a railway engineer named Hiroshi Hiraoka, who had learned the game in the United States, founded one of the first organised clubs in Japan.

The game spread through the schools, which is the most important fact about its early history. It was taught and played at the elite higher schools and universities, where it acquired the seriousness and the emphasis on discipline that still marks it. It also acquired a Japanese name, yakyu, which means field ball, and a Japanese vocabulary, a mix of translated terms and words borrowed from English.

School tournaments and the Waseda-Keio rivalry

Two institutions did more than any others to turn a school pastime into a national obsession. The first was university baseball. A match between Waseda and Keio universities, first played in 1903, became a major annual event and a model for the rivalry between schools that now fills stadiums. Waseda and Keio, along with other Tokyo universities, formed a league that has run for generations.

The second was high school baseball. A national high school tournament has been held in most summers since 1915, at Koshien Stadium, between Osaka and Kobe, since the stadium opened in 1924, and a spring invitational tournament has run since the 1920s. Both are broadcast across the country, and the players who reach Koshien become well known long before they turn professional. The tournaments are single-elimination, which gives them a dramatic quality that is hard to match, and the scenes of players collecting soil from the infield after a loss have become part of the culture. The same stadium is the home of the Hanshin Tigers, whose fans are among the most devoted in the country.

This is a different path to the professional game than in the United States. In Japan, high school and university baseball are major cultural institutions with enormous audiences, and the professional draft draws heavily on them.

1934: the Ruth tour and the birth of the professional game

The pivotal moment came in 1934, when an all-star team from the major leagues, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx, toured Japan and played a series of games against Japanese teams. The tour drew huge crowds. The Americans won the games, but one stands out: a 17-year-old pitcher named Eiji Sawamura, facing the American lineup, struck out Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx in succession. He lost the game, but he became a national hero.

The newspaper publisher Matsutaro Shoriki, who had brought the Americans over, used the momentum to found a professional team in December 1934, the club that became the Yomiuri Giants. Other clubs followed, including the Osaka team that became the Hanshin Tigers, and a professional league began play in 1936. Sawamura pitched for the Giants and was later drafted into the army. He was killed in the war in 1944, and the league's annual award for the best starting pitcher, the Sawamura Award, is named for him.

The postwar league and the 1950 split

The war interrupted the professional game. The league played through the 1944 season, there was no championship in 1945, and play resumed in 1946. In 1950 the league reorganised into two leagues, the Central and the Pacific, and introduced a championship series between their winners, the Japan Series. That structure, with some changes, is the one that exists today.

The Giants dominated the first decades of the modern league and won nine consecutive Japan Series from 1965 to 1973, a streak known in Japan as V9. The stars of that era were Sadaharu Oh, who would finish with 868 home runs in NPB, the professional record, and Shigeo Nagashima, a third baseman who was perhaps the most popular player in the country. The Pacific League adopted the designated hitter in 1975, while the Central League kept pitchers batting, a difference that has set the two leagues apart for decades. The Central League voted in 2025 to adopt the designated hitter starting in 2027, so check the current status.

How the league works

NPB's calendar looks familiar: a season from late March or early April into the fall, an All-Star break, a postseason in October. The differences are in the details.

Ties. A regular-season game that is tied after a set number of innings, 12 in the regular season, is declared a tie. Standings are calculated from wins and losses, without counting ties. Ties are not replayed. For comparison, MLB plays its regular-season games to a decision, and our tiebreaker article explains how it breaks ties in the standings.

The Climax Series. Since 2007 each league has held a playoff among its top three teams. The second- and third-place teams meet in a first stage, and the winner faces the first-place team in a final stage in which the top seed receives an advantage. The winners meet in the Japan Series. The system has been criticised because a team that finishes third can win the pennant, and it has also been defended for keeping the late-season race alive.

The draft and the farm system. Amateur players, from high school, universities and company teams, enter through an annual draft, and teams also sign development players on separate contracts. Teams maintain farm clubs in the Eastern and Western Leagues.

Foreign players. Teams may have foreign players on their rosters, but the number who can be on the active first-team roster at once is limited. Many American and Latin American players have played in NPB, some for a few seasons before moving to the majors and others for most of their careers.

Free agency. Players earn the right to free agency after a set number of years of service, and the time is longer for those who want to move to the majors without a posting fee. The details have changed over the years.

The Japanese style of play

Generalisations about style are risky, because the two countries' games have converged, but a few differences are consistently reported. NPB teams have historically bunted and used the sacrifice more than major-league teams do, and managers have favoured pitching, defence and manufactured runs. Starting pitchers in NPB typically pitch once a week, in rotations of six, with a day off on most Mondays. The result is a different pitching culture, with high pitch counts and a premium on command and a wide array of pitches.

The forkball and the split-finger fastball are common in Japan, and the pitch that Hideo Nomo used to attract attention in the United States was a forkball. Practice culture is also different. Teams hold long training camps in the winter and spring, and the work ethic that coaches demand is a matter of national comment.

None of this should be treated as fixed. Japanese players have absorbed techniques from the majors, including new approaches to hitting and pitching, and some of NPB's own influence has moved the other way, through the players who have returned to Japan.

Crossing the Pacific

The first Japanese player in the majors was Masanori Murakami, who pitched for the San Francisco Giants in 1964 and 1965. The historical record lists his debut in 1964. For three decades afterwards there was almost no movement, because the clubs and leagues had agreements that discouraged it.

That changed in 1995 with Hideo Nomo, who left Japan through a loophole in his contract and joined the Los Angeles Dodgers. He was the National League Rookie of the Year. In 1998 the two leagues signed a posting agreement, under which a Japanese club could make a player available to major-league teams for a fee, and the details of the system have been revised since.

Then came Ichiro Suzuki. Ichiro had won seven straight batting titles in the Pacific League before joining Seattle in 2001. In his first major-league season he batted .350 with 242 hits and 56 stolen bases, and he won both the American League Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards, according to the historical record. Over his major-league career he collected 3,089 hits. Widely cited arguments add his NPB hits to that total, which brings it past Pete Rose's 4,256, and what the combined number means is a matter of opinion. Ichiro was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2025, one vote short of being unanimous.

These totals cover only major-league games, because the historical record does not include NPB. Hideki Matsui came to the Yankees in 2003 after a successful career with the Giants. Shohei Ohtani, who played for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters from 2013 to 2017, moved to the Los Angeles Angels in 2018 and has won multiple Most Valuable Player awards as a two-way player, hitting and pitching. He hit 55 home runs in 2025.

The flow has not been one-directional. American players of all kinds have played in NPB, and some major-league stars have finished their careers there. The relationship between Japanese and major-league clubs is covered in our article on how international prospects sign.

International baseball

Japan is also a power in international tournaments. The national team won the first World Baseball Classic in 2006 and again in 2009, and won the 2023 tournament, with Ohtani on the roster. Japan also won the Olympic baseball tournament in 2021, when the Tokyo Games were played after a delay. The country takes part in the Premier12 as well, discussed in our tournaments article. The neighbouring leagues in Korea and Taiwan are related to the Japanese game by history and rivalry, and they are covered in our Korean Baseball Organization article and our CPBL article. The leagues of Mexico are covered in our Mexican baseball article.

What the numbers cannot tell you

The historical record covers the major leagues and the Negro leagues, not Japanese professional baseball, so it has no NPB statistics, no Japanese amateur records and no information on salaries or attendance in Japan. The figures in this article come from it only for the major-league careers in the table above. For NPB records, including Sadaharu Oh's 868 home runs, the league's own sources are the authority.

A second limit is context. A batting average or an ERA in NPB cannot be compared directly with one in the majors, because the ball, the parks, the strike zone and the level of competition differ. Analysts have worked on conversion factors for the Japanese players who come over, with mixed results, and the honest conclusion is that translation is uncertain.

Common questions

How many teams are in NPB? Twelve, six in each league.

When was the first professional league founded? A professional league began play in 1936, after the Yomiuri Giants were founded in 1934. The current two-league structure dates from 1950.

What is the Japan Series? The best-of-seven championship between the winners of the Central and Pacific Leagues.

Do games end in ties? Yes, in the regular season, after a maximum number of innings.

Who was the first Japanese player in the majors? Masanori Murakami, in 1964. Hideo Nomo in 1995 started the modern flow.

Is Ohtani the first Japanese star in the majors? No. Nomo, Ichiro and Matsui came before him, and each opened the way for the next.

Where to go next

For the broader picture of the sport outside the United States, see the international section of this site and the world baseball topic page. The articles on the Korean league and Taiwan's CPBL show how the game developed in neighbouring countries, and the players pages let you look up the Japanese players who reached the majors. If you collect Japanese cards, our card grading guide explains how grading works.