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25 Marq. Sports L. Rev. 491 (2014-2015)
Labor in Nippon Professional Baseball and the Future of Player Transfers to Major League Baseball

handle is hein.journals/mqslr25 and id is 521 raw text is: 








           INTERNATIONAL SPORTS LAW
                         PERSPECTIVE




        LABOR IN NIPPON PROFESSIONAL
  BASEBALL AND THE FUTURE OF PLAYER
  TRANSFERS TO MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

                      KEIJI KAWAI & MATT NICHOL*

                             I. INTRODUCTION

    Since the 1990s, the global search for talent by Major League Baseball
(MLB) teams has resulted in a prominent number of professional Japanese play-
ers transferring to major league teams. Sparking the movement of Japanese
players from Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) to MLB was the transfer of
Nomo Hideo in 1995, the first Japanese major league player since Murakami
Masanori played for the San Francisco Giants in 1964 and 1965. The phenom-
enal major league success of NPB stars like Nomo, Ichir6 Suzuki,1 and Matsui
Hideki has fuelled demand in MLB for Japanese players, leading to the high
profile recruitments of players like Matsuzaka Daisuke, Darvish Yu, and most
recently, Tanaka Masahiro. Over the years since Nomo's debut for the Los An-
geles Dodgers, the gradual erosion of legal, cultural, and normative barriers that
prevented Japanese players from embarking on a MLB career have seen numer-
ous NPB players and some amateurs move to MLB clubs,2 resulting in a major


   * Keiji Kawai, Professor, Graduate School of Policy and Management at Doshisha University. Matt
Nichol, Assistant Lecturer, Department of Business Law and Taxation, Monash University; Ph.D. can-
didate, Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide. The authors received helpful feedback on earlier
drafts and would like to thank Kent Anderson, Andrew Stewart, Stacey Steele, Christopher Arup, and
John Howe. The research conducted by Professor Kawai was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant
Number 25301006. The authors can be contacted by emailing Keiji Kawai at kkawai@mail.doshi-
sha.ac.jp.
   1. In contrast to Japanese custom and practice in professional baseball, the registered MLB (and
NPB) name of Suzuki is Ichir6, and he is commonly known as Ichir6 in Japan and the United States.
   2. The informal rule is that a Japanese amateur not selected in the draft can sign with a MLB club.
However, industrial league player Tazawa Junichi created controversy in 2008 when he was nominated
for the draft and then requested not to be drafted. He then signed a contract with the Boston Red Sox
and the NPB clubs informally agreed to prohibit such players from playing in the NPB after playing in

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