Nippon Professional Baseball merged with the Orix BlueWave and were replaced by the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. Until 1993, baseball was the only team sport played professionally in Japan. In that year, the J.League professional soccer league was founded. The new soccer league placed teams in prefectural capitals around the country—rather than clustering them in and around Tokyo—and the teams were named after their locations rather than after corporate sponsors. The wave of players moving to Major League Baseball, which began with Hideo Nomo "retiring" from the Kintetsu Buffaloes, then signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers, has also added to the financial problems.
Hideo Haga Hideo Haga Hideo Haga (芳賀 日出男 "Haga Hideo", October 10, 1921—) is known for his photography of traditional Japanese festivals and folk culture. Hideo Haga was born in 1921, Dalian, Manchuria on October 10, 1921. He took up the camera as a child, encouraged by his father, an engineer whose hobby was photography. In 1941 he enrolled in Literature at Keio University, where he also joined the camera club, often to the neglect of his studies. Lectures by the folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi (1887 - 1953), which he joined when he heard that he could get credits for attendance, were a