About • Yakyu Cosmopolitan

Yuri with best-selling author and journalist Robert Whiting in 2025 at the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame Museum

Japanese-American Yuri Karasawa founded Yakyu Cosmopolitan in February 2021 to share his passion for Japanese baseball in English. Originally intended as a hub for translated interviews of Japanese players, the project quickly grew to cover everything related to Nippon Professional Baseball. Yakyu Cosmopolitan aims to bridge cultural and linguistic divides to promote free and accessible information about baseball in Japan.

In August 2022, Yuri joined JapanBall, where he continues to contribute as a writer and tour guide, publishing his first article on Munetaka Murakami’s historic h ome run pace. In March 2023, he was featured on the BBC World Service radio for his independent coverage of Samurai Japan at the 2023 World Baseball Classic. In June 2024, he began contributing to SportsLook and the World Baseball Network. In October 2024, he made another appearance on the BBC to discuss the impact of Japanese players in the World Series.

In November 2024, he attended the WBSC Premier12 tournament as a media member and was later featured in an official MLB video showcasing Japanese baseball. In January 2025, he appeared on an NCAA D1 podcast series about top prospect Rintaro Sasaki’s groundbreaking decision to attend Stanford. In March 2025, he attended the MLB Tokyo Series and was cited in the New York Times. In October 2025, he made multiple appearances on Al Jazeera English to discuss Japan’s reaction to the World Series.

Thanks to continued exposure on various platforms, Yakyu Cosmopolitan has now gained over 23K followers on X (Formerly Twitter). To expand its horizons, this website was launched in August 2024 by Yuri and his friend Christian Johnson to provide up-to-date NPB statistics and analysis for the 2020s.

The ultimate mission of Yakyu Cosmopolitan is not only to be a reliable source of contemporary NPB information but also to strike a balance between traditional stats, which still dominate much of Japanese discourse, and Sabermetrics. In short, a modernized approach to Japanese baseball. Thank you for visiting, and please consider joining the Patreon for as little as $1/month to support our work.