06-05-2025
News in Easy English: MLB star Shohei Ohtani appears most in new school textbooks
TOKYO -- Famous Major League Baseball player Shohei Ohtani is in many new school textbooks. The textbooks will be for first-year high school students from the 2026 school year.
Textbooks sometimes use famous people to make learning easy and interesting for students. But textbook publishers must be careful. If a famous person has problems or scandals, the companies must change the textbooks.
Ohtani is in 12 new textbooks. He appears in textbooks for four different classes in two school subjects. For example, in one "English Communication I" textbook, students can practice English using Ohtani's goal-setting chart.
Other famous athletes, like Haruka Kitaguchi (javelin throw), Hina Hayata (table tennis), and Tokito Oda (wheelchair tennis), are also in new textbooks. Books teaching Japanese language have songs and works by music artists and TV stars, too. Examples are Gen Hoshino and Neru Nagahama.
One textbook from Taishukan Publishing first included Ippei Mizuhara, who helped Ohtani with English, in an English lesson. But Mizuhara had a gambling scandal, so Taishukan Publishing changed that part of the textbook. It now uses a story about a Japanese-Canadian baseball team from before World War II. The education ministry said Mizuhara's scandal made the lesson "difficult" to use.
Another textbook for junior high school also had to change after Mizuhara's scandal. A different textbook with a picture of entertainer Fuwa-chan also took her out after she wrote a bad thing about a comedian on social media.
Textbook companies say choosing famous people is very difficult. A worker at a textbook company said, "We always think about scandals when we decide the people in our textbooks. We can only check online. We just hope that people don't have scandals in the four years until we make textbooks again."
Vocabulary
celebrity: a famous person (example: singer, actor, or athlete)
athlete: a person who plays sports
scandal: a big problem about someone's actions, usually in news or on the internet
gambling: playing games for money -- can be bad or against the rules
entertainer: a person who sings, acts, or makes jokes to make people happy
publisher: a company that makes books or textbooks
