Cities across the U.S. are trying to win back international tourists they lost during the pandemic.
Los Angeles received a gift in the form of Shohei Ohtani, the hitting and pitching phenom of the Dodgers baseball team. Already a star in Japan when he came to the United States to play for the Los Angeles Angels, Ohtani cemented his status as an international star when he signed a record-breaking 10-year contract with the Dodgers last year worth $700 million a year.
Now thousands of Japanese fans are coming to watch Ohtani play for his new team, spending tourist dollars in places they normally wouldn’t go.
Near Dodger Stadium, tourists were taking photos of Ohtani’s new 15-story mural that covers the entire wall of the Miyako Hotel, where workers were selling Japanese pastries in the shape of blue Dodgers helmets and practicing their Japanese.
A mural depicting Ohtani in a Dodgers uniform, created by artist Robert Vargas, is displayed at the Miyako Hotel in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In the lobby, guest Megu Adachi was checking in at the front desk with some friends from Japan. They couldn’t wait to watch the Dodgers and Colorado Rockies game, especially Ohtani, whom Adachi affectionately calls a “baseball boy” – a boy who is crazy about baseball.
“Only baseball,” Adachi emphasized in English.
Hotel manager Akira Yuhara said when the Dodgers play at home, half the hotel’s 170-plus rooms are filled by Japanese tourists in town to watch Ohtani. Previously, they had little reason to come to his hotel in Little Tokyo, a historic neighborhood that occupies several blocks in downtown Los Angeles and is considered dangerous by some.
“Especially in this area, they don’t want to come,” Yuhara added.
Mr. Yuhara said his sister hotel in Torrance, a seaside town a 30-minute drive south of Los Angeles, is generally popular with Japanese travelers. Southern California’s Japanese American population center shifted from Little Tokyo to the South Bay after World War II.
Many Japanese companies, including Honda and All Nippon Airways, have bases in Tokyo, where many of their employees live, eat, bank and shop.
But hotel manager Yuhara said Ohtani has sparked interest in an area of Los Angeles that hasn’t been a major tourist destination for Japanese people. “Even though there’s no game today, they go to Dodger Stadium and buy everything,” Yuhara said.
At the stadium, visitors can purchase a replica of Ohtani’s uniform number 17. The concession stand sells items such as chicken cutlet sandwiches and fried octopus.
The stadium is dotted with signs in Chinese characters, and tours in Japanese are offered several times a week.
“You could call it the Ohtani effect,” said Adam Burke, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Convention Center. “I think it’s not unexpected that we’d have more than 400,000 Japanese tourists.”
This would be a dramatic increase from the 230,000 expected in 2023. Burke predicts Japan could join the top four markets globally, alongside China and the UK.
Despite the current weak yen, Japanese tourists are paying to see not just one Dodgers game but “three in a row,” said Osuke Ishiguro, Los Angeles branch manager for JTB, a major Japanese travel agency.
His agency books clients in Little Tokyo neighborhoods, including at the Miyako Hotel. Just outside the hotel on a recent day, Tadashi Ohnaka was photographing a mural of Ohtani. He had planned a trip to Arizona to visit family, but took a detour to Los Angeles to watch a Dodgers game. He was able to see Ohtani hit a single in the first inning.
Now he is in Little Tokyo, and is surprised to learn that the place has been around for 140 years. Speaking in Japanese, he describes Little Tokyo as “very small.”
And it’s nothing like Japan. In fact, what legions of Ohtani fans are now beginning to discover is something uniquely Japanese.
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