Shohei Ohtani and his team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, are making donations in support of the victims of earthquakes that struck western Japan on New Year’s Day. In an Instagram post, the Dodgers announced that the donation from the organization in conjunction with Guggenheim Baseball, the team’s ownership group, is a collaboration with Ohtani, who will be making his own personal contribution. “Our thoughts are with all of Japan in the wake of this tragedy,” the team wrote on Thursday.
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Ohtani, who is from Japan and has been competing in the U.S. since 2018, said his donation will be separate from the team’s. “I would like to thank those who have joined in the recovery effort, and my hope is that we continue to come together to support those whose lives have been upended,” Ohtani said in a statement on social media. “I hope for the rapid rescue of missing persons and the reconstruction of the disaster-stricken areas.”
A series of earthquakes hit the Ishikawa coast, the most severe of which reached a magnitude of 7.6, that killed 94 people, forced about 33,000 people to leave their homes and left over 200 people unaccounted for. Ohtani keeps up his relations with Japan. When the two-way MLB star signed a record-breaking 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers in December, his homeland honored him with a stamp and postcard collection.
Back in November, Ohtanu donated more than 60,000 baseball gloves to 20,000 elementary schools in Japan. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he donated to the Japan Mask Project, an initiative to supply masks to medical workers.
