The first Japanese basketball player to have played in NBA and Yuta Tabusewho played few regular season games in the 2004 Phoneix Suns. The first to be selected in a draft even if he never played in the world’s top league, he was instead Yasutaka Okayama at number one hundred and seventy-one in 1981.
The current player of the Los Angeles Lakers Rui Hachimura, who also did four years in the Washington Wizards, was instead the first Japanese to have made the playoffs and at the age of almost twenty-five he is already unanimously considered the Japanese with the greatest impact in the history of the NBA and perhaps the best player that the land of the rising sun has ever had. In fact, he became a starter in the Lakers, not just any franchise and his idol is Kobe Bryant.
In fact, Rui in Washington wore the jersey number eight in hours of Kobe and in the Lakers not being able to use that number since it was retired by club for honour, chose the twenty-eight, explaining that the eight is for Bryant and the two is for Gianna. Japan has never had a great basketball tradition, but thanks to the diffusion of the NBA in television schedules almost all over the world, basketball is now also expanding into new frontiers.
Japan is one of them. If at any time up to fifteen to twenty years ago, someone had said that a Japanese in 2023 would become starter in the NBA in the Lakers, he would have been laughed at and mocked, but basketball is now a global phenomenon in every part of the world.
Andrew Renzi
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