NPB Player Blog Round-up
Blogging is immensely popular in Japan — as of April 2007 Japanese was the #1 most “blogged in” language according to Technorati. I haven’t found any newer data, but then again I haven’t looked too hard either. Moving along to the point, several NPB players maintain blogs and I would like to make a selected few a little more accessible to English-speaking fans.
- Yu Darvish celebrated a birthday, and received 3000 well-wishing comments on his blog.
- Chiba Lotte submariner Shunsuke Watanabe last updated his blog on August 13, noting that it felt good to work up a sweat in the outdoor Chiba Marine Stadium as opposed to Osaka Dome, while lamenting the struggles of Japan’s Olympic team and his Marines.
- Speedy Hiroshima Carp centerfielder Masato Akamatsu hit his first home run in a while and was nervous in the Hero Interview that followed, the first of his career. He also included a picture of him with a weird looking stuffed animal in this post.
- “Hama no Bancho” Daisuke Miura poses for a picture with Osaka Castle and admits to being a “castle maniac”.
- Kazumi Saito is rehabbing a shoulder injury in Arizona, and fortunately for us has plenty of time to write in his blog. Saito’s blog definitely offers the best insight into what his life is like. A recent post describes his rehab schedule, which is pretty interesting — he has an alternating workout schedule, which requires him to get up no later than 6:15 AM. He has a methodical attitude about it: “For every result, there is a process. I think results without a process cannot be maintained.” Saito seems to be enjoying his time in Arizona. I’ll have to write an entry on his blog alone sometime.
Some of the foreign NPB players maintain blogs as well. I think that topic is worthy of it’s own post so look out for it soon.
18/08/2008 at 9:20 am Permalink
I never thought about blogging language shares, but when I first read here that Japanese was #1, I thought it meant per capita, as the number of Japanese bloggers must be something like 1/10th of English bloggers. But then, I guess if you count the moblogs, then Japan jumps way ahead with all those twitter-like keitai “blog” entries. Still, fascinating. And I also expected the totally wired Korean to be up there, but I guess their population is just too small.
18/08/2008 at 9:46 am Permalink
Yeah, I found that surprising too when my wife told me a few months ago. I guess it was reported in the Japanese media/blogosphere, but I haven’t found any source other than Technorati. I guess they measure content produced rather than individual bloggers — I think another interesting metric would be consumers/readers, but I haven’t looked into that.
18/08/2008 at 7:58 pm Permalink
Yeah, I’ve been a big slacker this year. I keep a page with a list of NPB player blog links but haven’t updated it since mid-2007 since I don’t really have time to read many of them anymore (I probly check Takuro Ishii’s most often since he writes daily. I miss Kazuo Fukumori’s since it was some of the funniest stuff ever). I used to translate Kazumi Saitoh’s blog on a semi-regular basis earlier last year, but this year I’m actually kind of put off by his “having a great time in Arizona, wish you were here… err… wish I was there?” stuff.
18/08/2008 at 11:33 pm Permalink
I thought about compiling a list, but Gary Garland’s is pretty exhaustive so I don’t have much motivation for it. A surprising number of those sites are active.
I know what you mean about Saito, but I think some of his stuff is actually really good.