A baseball childhood in northern Japan

Iwate Prefecture is one of Japan’s snowiest regions — Oshu averages about 8 feet of annual snowfall. Ohtani grew up training in indoor batting cages and in his family’s converted garage. His father Toru worked at a Mitsubishi auto plant during the day and ran youth baseball clinics in the evenings; his mother Kayoko ran the household. Ohtani’s older brother Ryuta also played baseball and worked as the family’s first catcher for Shohei’s pitching practice as a child.

Ohtani attended Hanamaki Higashi High School — the same school Yusei Kikuchi (later Mariners/Blue Jays/Astros pitcher) attended four years earlier. He played both ways from his sophomore year onward: starting pitcher and starting outfielder. He hit a home run that traveled 525 feet in a high school exhibition game at age 18, and he threw a 100 mph fastball at the 2012 National High School Baseball Tournament — the first Japanese high schooler to ever hit triple digits.

From Oshu to MLB scouts at 18

MLB teams scouted Ohtani heavily during his senior year of high school in 2012. He was widely projected as a top-10 MLB Draft pick if he chose to skip Japanese pro baseball and sign as an international free agent. At a press conference at Hanamaki Higashi High School in October 2012, Ohtani publicly announced he would sign with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball — partly because the Fighters’ general manager Hiroshi Yoshimura had personally promised in the meeting room that he could play both pitcher AND hitter, something no MLB team had publicly committed to.

Ohtani signed with the Fighters in November 2012. He played five seasons in NPB (2013-17), winning the 2016 Pacific League MVP. He came to MLB in December 2017 via the international posting system, signed with the Angels for a $2.3 million bonus (capped by international rules — about 1/30th of what he could have gotten through normal free agency three years later).

Oshu after Ohtani

The city of Oshu officially named Ohtani an honorary citizen in November 2018, after his AL Rookie of the Year season. The Mizusawa Little Senior baseball field where he played as a child was renamed the Shohei Ohtani Memorial Field in 2024. The local Mitsubishi auto plant where his father worked offered free factory tours to baseball-tourism groups visiting Oshu starting in 2023.

Hanamaki Higashi High School expanded its baseball program after Ohtani’s success — partly funded by an Ohtani-family endowment. The school now produces 4-6 NPB or college-level prospects per year, up from 1-2 in the pre-Ohtani era. Ohtani returns to Oshu most off-seasons; he held his September 2024 wedding announcement press conference there rather than in Los Angeles or Tokyo.

Background facts cross-referenced with the Wikipedia article on Shohei Ohtani and Pro-Football-Reference / Basketball-Reference public records.