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 Noda New York, and his parents in Japan. His wife had just returned to New York, and he was to join her shortly. In his 1952 memoir, Chambers "wondered whether, in Ulrich's words, Noda had 'been shot by them or shot by us'." A 1940 issue of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library notes under "Limited or Other Special Editions" the following entry: "Mrs. Ruth Noda Hulley — No. 120 of a limited edition of 500 copies of Album Hideo Noda, by Shinseisaku-Ha." In his 1939 obituary, the New York Times declared: Mr. Noda's art, which was one of