Isao Harimoto, the Korean-Japanese slugger who holds Japan's professional baseball record for career hits, died on the 9th at the age of 86.
Japanese media including TBS reported on the 10th that Harimoto, known by his Korean name Chang Hoon, died at about 5 p.m. on the 9th at a hospital in Tokyo.
Born in Hiroshima, Harimoto played for the Toei Flyers and the Yomiuri Giants, the reports said. He won seven batting titles during his career and became the first player in Nippon Professional Baseball to reach 3,000 career hits, among a series of milestones.
Over a career spanning 1959 to 1981, he posted a .319 batting average with 3,085 hits, 504 home runs and 1,676 runs batted in. His 3,085 hits remain the most in the history of Japanese professional baseball.
He also maintained close ties to Korean baseball. Harimoto served as a special adviser to the commissioner of the Korea Baseball Organization from 1982, the league's inaugural season, until 2005, and helped Korean-Japanese players move to the Korean league in its early years.
Raised as a Korean resident of Japan, he received repeated offers to change his nationality during his playing days but held South Korean citizenship for decades. In a widely recounted episode, when a Japanese professional club offered him a contract at age 18 on the condition that he acquire Japanese citizenship, his mother refused, saying there was no need to become a baseball player by selling out his homeland. He said in an interview with the Sankei Shimbun last year that he had since obtained Japanese citizenship.
