A young basketball fan is currently bouncing his way from Tokyo to disaster-stricken Miyagi Prefecture to raise money for quake-hit regions.
A young basketball fan is currently bouncing his way from Tokyo to disaster-stricken Miyagi Prefecture to raise money for quake-hit regions.
Hiroshi Morioka, 27, will dribble a basketball some 300 kilometers on his journey, weather permitting.
“I want to dribble with a smile on my face and deliver some positive energy,” said Morioka, who is set to work for a U.S. minor-league baseball team this spring.
Morioka left Tokyo's Shibuya district at 7 a.m. on Jan. 18, sent off by about 10 friends. He left from a street dubbed, appropriately enough, “Basketball Street” located in the middle of Shibuya’s main arcade.
This is not Morioka’s first attempt at long-distance dribbling. While he was a student at Ritsumeikan University, Morioka dribbled a basketball from Kyoto to Okayama in 2006 and from Kyoto to Tokyo in 2007. While he was in college, he did it simply to boost the popularity of basketball. But now, he feels there’s a greater significance to his journey.
“I thought about what I could do (for disaster survivors) after the March 11 earthquake,” he said.
After graduating from college, Morioka worked for a temp agency, then went on to sell tickets and help at events for NBA teams in the United States. He planned his current dribbling tour after landing a job with a U.S. minor-league baseball team, which means he will have to leave Japan in February.
During his journey to Miyagi Prefecture, Morioka plans to dribble through streets during the day, and spend nights at his friends’ houses along the way. On snowy roads, he will walk with the basketball in hand. He aims to walk through Utsunomiya, Shirakawa of Fukushima Prefecture, and other cities along the way, and will finish his tour on Jan. 29 at Sendai City Gymnasium, where a bj league game between the Sendai 89ers and Chiba Jets will be taking place that day.
Under a program initiated by the bj league in Sendai, the donations collected by Morioka are scheduled to be used to provide basketballs to junior high schools in Miyagi Prefecture that were damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.