Japanese citizens recognize that baseball players betting on baseball — even if the wagers aren’t made on a bettor’s team — is taboo. Most support bans on nearly any sort of sports gambling. A cultural aversion to gambling exists, even though placing bets illegally has a long and lively history on the island nation.
So the sports gambling scandal involving national hero Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, has shaken the Japanese people. According to reporters whose assignment for years has been to cover all aspects of Ohtani, their readership demands daily detailed updates of the two-way star’s on-field activities, while also anxiously awaiting (and often dreading) the next development in the perplexing gambling saga that so far has produced more questions than answers.