Word: yakult
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...Unistraw's interest is spurred by a different set of numbers. "What's exciting," says managing director Tim York, "is that today it's a $7 billion market, and it's projected to be worth $20 billion by 2010." The big players include companies like Japan's Yakult and France's Danone (Dannon in the U.S.), which sell probiotic bacteria in yogurt. Dannon's Activia yogurt was launched in America in 2006 and passed $100 million in sales in its first year...
...stands at Tokyo's Meiji-Jingu Stadium, watching a baseball game, beer in hand. He was verging on 30, and nearly a decade into running a jazz café with his wife Yoko. A journeyman American batter named Dave Hilton came to the plate for the Yakult Swallows, stroked the first pitch into left field, and safely reached second base. As he watched the batter swing at the ball, "I just felt all of a sudden that I could write," Murakami says, sitting today in his Tokyo office, a light jog away from the stadium...
...Murakami tells it, his emergence as a novelist was a mystical experience-an artistic epiphany. It came in 1977, he says, as he sat in Tokyo's Jingu Stadium watching his favorite baseball team, the Yakult Swallows. When batter Dave Hilton hit a double, Murakami, then 28, says he heard a voice telling him to begin his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. "That was one of the happiest experiences of my life," he recalls. "Perhaps the happiest." A decade later came the momentous publication of Norwegian Wood. Until then, the psychomysteries that formed the bulk of Murakami's work...
...year-old Ishii, who spent 10 seasons with the Yakult Swallows before signing a four-year, $12.8 million contract with L.A. in February, is the latest in a line of foreign-born Dodgers pitchers whose talent has lost nothing in the translation. He follows in the footsteps of compatriot Hideo Nomo, the Japanese righthander who was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1995; Korean righthander Chan Ho Park, who won 75 games over the past five seasons; and Mexican lefthander Fernando Valenzuela, who as a 20-year-old in '81 won the league's rookie and Cy Young...
...meantime, the hemorrhaging will continue. Last month, Yakult Swallows' 27-year-old ace pitcher Kazuhisa Ishii became the latest star to declare his intention to go to the U.S. Even more startling was the recent decision by Giants slugger (and the Central League's most valuable player in 2000) Hideki Matsui to turn down an eight-year offer reportedly worth $50 million. Had Matsui signed, it would have been the most lucrative deal in the history of Japanese baseball. His refusal shocked team officials and fueled speculation that the superstar outfielder, who becomes eligible for free agency...