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.
Nomo (band) Nomo (band) Nomo is a band from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The band formed at the University of Michigan, and is not to be confused with the 1980s Pop/New Wave band of the same name fronted by California singer-songwriter David Batteau, which is best known for the 1985 minor hit "Red Lipstick". Fronted by Elliot Bergman, the band has recorded for Ubiquity Records and Ypsilanti Records. The band has been recorded by His Name Is Alive frontman Warn Defever. Members of Nomo also perform on various His Name Is Alive albums, including "Detrola", "XMMER", and "Sweet Earth Flower". Members include nine