Three years have passed since Katsuya Nomura passed away on February 11, 2020. As a player, Mr. Nomura has won numerous titles, including the Triple Crown, and as a manager, he has made many achievements, including being the best in Japan and developing players. He also had an impact on many people even after leaving the field, and he hoped for the development of the professional baseball world until just before his death. This time, Mr. Kazuki Kojima, who was Katsuya Nomura’s exclusive manager, looks back on the dense 15 years.
Katsuya Nomura has been extremely busy even after retiring as Rakuten manager in 2009.
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[Work in the morning is NG]
── How did you manage Katsuya Nomura’s work?
small islandFrom 2006, when he was the director of Rakuten, until his death in 2020, I served as his exclusive manager for about 15 years. My main work is newspapers, magazines, books, television, radio, lectures, etc. When the office receives interview requests from various media, I send faxes to Nomura’s house for the first seven or eight years. , Mrs. Sachiyo was choosing a job. In the latter half of the 7th and 8th years, I directly contacted the director (Katsuya Nomura/hereinafter the same) and asked him about it.
I consistently refused to work in the morning. In the second half, working in a distant place with accommodation was NG. After Mrs. Sachiyo passed away, Mrs. Katsunori Nomura helped me in many ways.
── Were there jobs that you received and jobs that you didn’t receive?
Kojima: To be honest, there were media that I could not accept. In addition, I was the director of Yakult, which is closely related to the Fuji Sankei Group, so there were times when I declined to participate in comedy-related programs on other stations. I received work for NHK at a turning point. As for the director, it seems that Ruriko Kojima, who was an assistant on the TBS sports program “S☆1”, was a favorite.
── What was your daily schedule like?
Kojima: “I can’t get rid of the habit of playing night games when I was active,” so it was a complete overnight stay. At work, 6:00 in the evening is “playball”, and I appear at a dining cafe in a hotel in Tokyo. It’s close to the office, but it’s quite a drive from the director’s home. Before I knew it, it had become a “workplace”.
