Baseball Legend Oh, 7 Others to Receive Order of Culture

Tokyo, Oct. 18 (Jiji Press)–The Japanese government decided Friday to award the Order of Culture for fiscal 2025 to eight people, including baseball legend Sadaharu Oh, 85, currently chairman of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks professional baseball team, and Susumu Kitagawa, 74, special professor at Kyoto University and recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The other six are Kataoka Nizaemon, 81, a kabuki actor whose real name is Takao Kataoka, Yasunaru Kawashima, 95, a heart surgeon, folklorist Kazuhiko Komatsu, 78, Junko Koshino, 86, a fashion designer whose real name is Junko Suzuki, art critic Nobuo Tsuji, 93, and Hisashi Yamamoto, 82, a researcher in organic synthetic chemistry. The government also selected 21 Persons of Cultural Merit. They include Masako Nozawa, 88, a voice actor known for her role as Son Goku in the “Dragon Ball” anime series, Keiko Takemiya, 75, a manga artist, and Shigeru Ban, 68, an architect. Nozawa, whose real name is Masako Tsukada, is the first voice actor to be chosen as a Person of Cultural Merit. Six of the nominees are women, equal to the record number last year. Kitagawa was also chosen as a Person of Cultural Merit. An awards ceremony for the Order of Culture will take place at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo on Nov. 3, while a ceremony for the Persons of Cultural Merit will be held at a hotel in the Japanese capital on Nov. 4. It is customary for Nobel Prize laureates to be selected as recipients of the Order of Culture and Persons of Cultural Merit. University of Osaka professor Shimon Sakaguchi, 74, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was chosen as a Person of Cultural Merit in 2017 and received the Order of Culture in 2019. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]