How culture shaped big announcement by Ohtani
Before Shohei Ohtani became Japan's most popular athlete, that designation belonged to figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu. Like Ohtani, Hanyu is 29. Like Ohtani, Hanyu was born and raised in the Tohoku region, the northern part of Japan's main island.
Last year, the retired Hanyu announced on social media that he was married. Three months later, he returned to the same platform with another announcement.
He was divorced.
The two-time Olympic gold medalist said his family was harassed and became the unwanted subjects of media inquiries and reports. The identity of his wife, which Hanyu had kept secret, was divulged by a weekly tabloid magazine.
“When I thought about my future,” Hanyu wrote in Japanese, “I wanted my spouse to be happy, to have limitless happiness, so I made the decision to divorce.”
Hanyu's story helps make sense of the bizarre manner in which Ohtani revealed his own nuptials last week.
Announcing a marriage on Instagram and holding a news conference on the subject but refusing to share the spouse's name might strike Americans as peculiar. However, by the standards of Japanese culture — especially Japanese celebrity culture — nothing about this was abnormal.
To begin with, a person's work and personal lives are more clearly delineated in Japan than in the United States. Romantic partners are rarely invited to work-related social functions, for example. Plusones aren't a standard feature of wedding invitations.
Athletes typically keep their relationships private until they are married, which is why news of their unions often feel as if they come out of nowhere. Ohtani's marriage was described by the Japanese media as a “shock wedding,” even though Ohtani said he got engaged last year.
Some Japanese baseball players married well-known sportscasters, including Ichiro Suzuki, Yusei Kikuchi and Kenta Maeda. Yu Darvish married a world champion Greco-Roman wrestler. Their wives already had public profiles before they were married and continued to maintain them after. But in cases in which a player married an ippanjin — or civilian — the spouses remained anonymous.
Ohtani said he wed a “normal” Japanese woman, so the expectation is that she will attempt to stay in the shadows.
The marriage was announced in a message Ohtani posted in Japanese on his Instagram account.
Ohtani said he would speak to reporters the next day and asked journalists to refrain from contacting his or his wife's families. In exchange for sharing some details about his relationship, he was asking for privacy.
Ohtani has become to Japan what Diego Maradona was to Argentina or what Julio César Chávez was to Mexico, an athlete who projects the virtues of his culture to the world.
Japanese parents want their boys to grow up to be like him. Women dreamed of marrying him.
Ohtani isn't just famous. He's famous in a country in which the spotlight on celebrities is particularly intense. Japan has fewer television stations and fewer entertainment options than the U.S. When an athlete or entertainer becomes well known, they become ubiquitous. Virtually everyone knows who they are.