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 Ochi gave his belt -which was almost white- to a boy blackbelt from Venezuela, when he asked Master Ochi for a picture for his birthday. Now, he is wearing a new black belt. Hideo Ochi Hideo Ochi (born February 29, 1940, in Saijō, Japan) is a Japanese master of karate. He is ranked 9th "Dan", and is a former Japan Karate Association (JKA) World Champion in "kumite" (sparring) and "kata" (patterns). He was also coach (European Championship in 1971, 1972 and 1975) of the German national team and Chief Instructor for JKA Europe. In 1997, he received the Order of Merit