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 Kanaya Hideo Kanaya Kanaya began his Grand Prix career in 1967 and won his first Grand Prix at the 1972 250cc German Grand Prix. In 1972, Kanaya and Jarno Saarinen raced the first four-cylinder, two-stroke Yamaha TZ 500 in the 500cc world championship. After Saarinen's death in the 250cc race at the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, the TZ 500 project was put aside and Kanaya raced only in the 250cc class. Kanaya's best season was in 1975, when he finished third in the 500cc world championship behind his Yamaha team-mate, Giacomo Agostini and MV Agusta's Phil Read. He also won