In the United States, sports stadiums have started changing names due to corporate sponsorship–note Candlestick Park in San Francisco, which has gone through the names 3Com Park and now Monster Park. But the names of the teams change only when a franchise moves to a new city.

In Japan, however, franchises are not awarded by location; you don’t really hear about a city getting a baseball team, rather a corporation getting one. Baseball teams take on whatever name the owners desire, which means that you’ve got names of the teams themselves morphing from one to another. I just saw a story about the Softbank Hawks, and thought, wha? They used to be the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (Daiei is a supermarket chain), though when I first came to Japan, they were the Nankai Hawks (Nankai is a railway firm).

Other teams have similar name histories. The Swallows were originally the Kokutetsu Swallows (another railroad firm, this one the now-defunct JNR, the national railway corporation), then they were briefly the Sankei (newspaper) Atoms, then they became the Yakult (beverage) Swallows. The Yokohama Baystars started out as the Taiyo (?) Whales, became the Taiyo-Shochiku (alcoholic beverage) Robins, then the Taiyo Whales again, and then the Yokohama Taiyo Whales.

Then there is the Hankyu (railway) Braves, which became the Orix (financial group) BlueWave, which merged in a businesslike manner with the Kintetsu Buffaloes (formerly the Kintetsu Buffalo before the herd increased I guess, and before that, the Kintetsu Pearls, owned by the hilariously-named Kinki Nippon Railway) and became the Orix Kintetsu Buffaloes, later to be renamed the Orix Buffaloes.

One team name I particularly enjoy is the Nippon Ham (meat-packing company) Fighters, now the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. Often the name of the team is misinterpreted as the “Ham Fighters,” which I think is much better than just “Fighters,” myself.

One note: for a sport which claims to have acquired its own unique Japanese identity, the names are all English–including even the more-Asian-flavored names, the Carp and the Dragons. The Giants are sometimes called the “Kyojin” (Japanese for “Giants”), but that’s a nickname, not an official one. I have to wonder if that’s a rule or something, because you gotta figure that “Samurai” would be the perfect name for a Japanese team. However, Japanese people would find such names odd. What might appeal to English speakers would sound strange or even comical to Japanese–take the name “Ninjas,” for example. A Japanese person would laugh at any baseball team with that name.

In the meantime, you gotta have a scorecard to keep track of the name changes.