Canada’s Largest Shohei Ohtani Fanclub. Instagram: @ohtanicanada

Via Michael Clair, MLB.com. Full article can be found here:  https://www.mlb.com/news/shohei-ohtani-has-fan-clubs-all-around-the-globe

“It’s those selfless, humble qualities that have even put Ohtani into Canadian classrooms thanks to Ohtani Canada, the official Canadian fan club.

That’s right: In a country where Ohtani neither lives nor regularly plays, there’s a fan club just for him.

It all began when the Mayor of Toronto asked educator David Pollard if he might be interested in starting a fan club to help convince the two-way star to sign with the Blue Jays before he came to the Majors in 2018. Though Pollard wasn’t much of a baseball fan, he teamed up with his friend and fellow teacher, Jonathan Yeh, to start the group. Though Ohtani eventually signed with the Angels, the die was already cast: The group had started and momentum had them off and running. Once they passed 500 followers on their instagram page, @OhtaniCanada, the Angels at some point even gave them the highly sought after title: They were the bona fide, real deal official Shohei Ohtani fan club of Canada.

Posting daily photos, videos, and commentary on the page, they now have nearly 50,000 followers. They sell special Ohtani Canada buttons, T-shirts, even candles. (Once, through a mistake in translation, it was reported by media in Japan that they were giving out free T-shirts. Soon, they had thousands of requests coming in.)

They’ve hosted fan meetups at baseball games around the world, whether in Toronto, at Spring Training, or in Tokyo. They’ve raised money for the Japan Organ Transplant Network and have grown quite accustomed to media requests from all over the globe. They just so happened to be on TV at the very moment that Ohtani’s record deal with Los Angeles became breaking news.

“We were on an interview with them live, and then we looked down, and they said, ‘[Ohtani] just signed with the Dodgers,'” Yeh remembered. “It was going to be another 15 minutes, 20 minutes until we found out for how much. We were excited. We were crossing our fingers [he would sign in Toronto], but we were never going to cancel the fan club. We’ve been fans since he was in Japan. We were fans when he was in Anaheim. We’re still fans now, when he’s with the Dodgers, and we will be going forward.”

Being teachers, they’re perhaps most excited to make Ohtani a part of classroom lessons.

“I say to student teachers,” Pollard explained, “‘I’m going to show you how to teach character education in the classroom.’ What better way to do that than through Ohtani? Because look what he stands for: He’s kind, considerate, generous, loyal, brave. He has all those wonderful characteristics that are common to Japanese people in general, but he brings that to the game, and that’s why he’s so popular.”

They’ll use photos from Ohtani’s life on and off the field to illustrate their point.

“As someone who’s watched baseball for my entire life, I don’t see a lot of players picking up garbage,” Yeh said. “What does that say about him? And what does that say about a person when they do that? It means they care about the world around them. You connect that to, well, at recess, there’s a lot of garbage on the field. Why don’t we care in the same way? Can we care for our environment the same way Shohei does?

“We get to combine two loves. We get to teach kids how to be better, how to be kind, how to be loving, how to be respectful, and we get to combine that with a bigger than life, the superhero you can call [Shohei Ohtani].””