About this site
Japanese baseball is a community, and this website is meant as a community effort. If you want to contribute, give us a shout.
Japanese baseball is not a level, it’s a whole, independent and self-sufficient on its own. It has its own culture, its own traditions and lives in a kind of parallel universe to baseball in the U.S. major leagues. It’s also lots of fun.
“Everything I have from baseball comes from Japan"
Karl “Tuffy” Rhodes
Biography
Jim Allen studied Asian history at the University of California Santa Cruz. After graduating in 1984, he moved to Japan, where he was employed for 14 years as an English teacher.
During that time, he completed a masters in education in TESOL, and began self publishing the first sabermetric guide to Japanese baseball in 1994.
After four editions of JIM ALLEN’S GUIDE TO JAPANESE BASEBALL, he was hired to work on the sports desk of the Daily Yomiuri, currently known as the Japan News.
From 2000 to 2010, Jim wrote a weekly column on Japanese baseball called the Hot Corner and became the first English language writer to vote for NPB’s postseason awards.
In May 2012, Jim filed for free agency and has since signed a series of one-year contracts with Kyodo News, Japan’s national press agency. There, he has continued to write about Japanese baseball and other sports.
Since December 2014, he has been covering the baseball winter meetings in the United States, where he was encouraged to resume writing online.
In December 2018, Jim became the first foreign writer to cast a ballot for Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame.
Jim is married and currently living in Tokyo.
About this site:
Although started as a personal blog, this site now seeks contributions covering the span of Japan’s baseball experience. These can be in the form of written posts, translations, video and photographs.
Hopefully, this site can become an outlet for those willing to share their insight and expertise to build a bilingual site that is something far beyond what any of us are capable of on our own.
If interested, please contact me at guidedogjapan@yahoo.com
