Shohei Ohtani and the Tragedy of Japanese Translation Part One

Shohei Ohtani may be the greatest baseball player who has ever lived. He is also, arguably, the most famous Japanese person alive. And nearly everything he says to the English-speaking world arrives secondhand-through an interpreter, filtered, diminished, and rarely capturing who he actually is.This is the story of how that happened.Part 1 traces the 180-year history that led to this moment: from the Black Ships that forced Japan open on unequal terms, through the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate, to the personal sacrifice and resilience of Shohei's parents-an athlete who walked away from his dreams and the badminton champion who gave him reason to pursue them.To understand Shohei Ohtani is to understand Japan. To understand what's being lost in translation is to see something broken in how America receives the greatness it imports.This is the beginning of that story.Part 1 of an ongoing series examining baseball, culture, and the gap between who Ohtani is and how the world is allowed to know him.