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) core members; Elliot Bergman (saxophone, percussion, electric mbira, and electric sawblade gamelan), Erik Hall (guitar, Nu-Tone Cymbals, and drums), Quin Kirchner (congas, drums, percussion), Dan Bennett (baritone saxophone, percussion), Justin Walter (trumpet, wah-wah), Jake Vinsel (bass). In an interview, Bergman said: "NOMO is a big melting pot of ideas and influences." 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