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 Shiraki Hideo Shiraki Hideo Shiraki (; born 1 January 1933 in Tokyo; died 31 August 1972) was a Japanese jazz drummer and bandleader, best known for his work in the 1950s and 1960s. Famed earlier on for hard bop, he later explored world music and became a pioneer of fusing traditional music forms with jazz structuring. Shiraki emerged in the new Japanese jazz scene of the 1950s that grew out of the influence of the US occupying forces. He studied percussion at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts and, during this period, played with Masashi Nagao's Blue Coats. In the late