News in Easy English: MLB star Shohei Ohtani appears the most in new school books

Tokyo – The famous baseball player of the Major League, Shohei Ohtani, is in many new school books. The textbooks are suitable for students in the first year from the school year 2026.

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Textbooks sometimes use famous people to make learning easy and interesting for schoolchildren. But textbook publishers have to be careful. If a famous person has problems or scandals, companies have to change the textbooks.

Ohtani is in 12 new textbooks. It appears in textbooks for four different classes in two school subjects. In a textbook “English Communication I”, for example, students can practice English use diagram using ohtan.

Other famous athletes, such as Haruka Kitaguchi (javelin throw), Hina Hayata (table tennis) and Tokito Oda (wheelchair tennis), are also in new textbooks. Books that teach Japanese also have songs and works by music artists and television stars. Examples are Hoshino and Neru Nagahama.

A textbook by Taishukan Publishing first included Ippei Mizuhara, who helped ohtani with English in an English lesson. But Mibuhara had a gambling scandal, so Taishukan Publishing changed this part of the textbook. It now uses a story about a Japanese-Canadian baseball team from World War II. The Ministry of Education said Mibuhara's scandal had to use the lesson “difficult”.

Another textbook for the Junior High School also had to change to Mibuhara's scandal. Another textbook with a picture of entertainer Fuwa-Chan also took it out after she wrote a bad thing about a comedian on social media.

Textbook companies say that it is very difficult to choose famous people. An employee of a textbook said: “We always think of scandals when we decide people in our textbooks. We can only check online. We only hope that people have no scandals in the four years until we do textbooks again.”

(Japanese original by Sahomi Nishimoto and Buntaro Saito, Department of Tokyo City News)

vocabulary

Fameteness: A famous person (example: singer, actor or athlete)

Athlet: a person who plays sport

Scandal: A big problem in relation to the actions of someone, usually in messages or on the Internet

Gambling: Playing games for money – it can be bad or against the rules

Entertainer: a person who sings, acts or jokes to make people happy

Verlag: A company that produces books or textbooks