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 Tokoro Hideo Tokoro Hideo Tokoro (born August 22, 1977) is a Japanese mixed martial artist currently competing in Bellator's Bantamweight division. A professional competitor since 2000, Tokoro has also formerly competed for Vale Tudo Japan, ZST, Shooto, RINGS and K-1 Hero's. Tokoro got his first contact with mixed martial arts in 1999, joining Kenichi Yamamoto's Power of Dream gym. He debuted in Titan Fighting Championship in 2000 and moved to multiple promotions, among them Fighting Network RINGS, Shooto, ZST and K-1, the latter of which signed him up for its HERO'S MMA promotion. Up to that point, as fighting wasn't enough