Why Ohtani picks up trash: American outlets say luck, Japanese writers point to his high school coach

Cameras catch Shohei Ohtani bending down to pick up a scrap of paper on the field often enough that the clips have their own following. In 2024 the Japanese sports site SPREAD rounded up how American outlets were explaining it. Sam Garcia of Dodgers Nation wrote that for Ohtani, other people's trash is a source of good luck, and that he believes picking it up helps keep his luck. SPREAD tied that to his high school goal-setting sheet, where luck was one of the eight elements he listed.

Japanese writers tend to tell it differently. A President Online column by the business writer Teruya Kuwabara in April 2024 framed the habit as character training. It cited a lesson attributed to Hanamaki Higashi coach Hiroshi Sasaki: the person who stands on the highest mound in the ballpark should do the job everyone else least wants to do. According to the column, Ohtani kept that rule in the dormitory, cleaning the toilets without complaint.

The column also quotes Ohtani from the Japanese book 道ひらく、海わたる, on his view that people who have worked honestly should be the ones who reach the top. Kuwabara links that line to the litter on the field: someone at the top, in this reading, is expected to set an example. The luck version and the manners version are not exclusive. Both come back to the same school and the same sheet of paper, as covered earlier in this series.

What separates them is emphasis. In the American framing, the habit is a quirky superstition from a superstar. In the Japanese framing, it is ordinary behavior that a Japanese high school team would expect of its best player, and the surprise is that he kept doing it. Neither outlet quotes Ohtani directly explaining a specific piece of trash. Readers should treat both as interpretations.