2025-26 Nagasaki Velca
110 · 2026-05-02 · easy
If you're alone in your own home and you brew a cup of tea for yourself, you're either old or British... or old and British. This is what I believed for most of my adult life. Then, somewhere around my 47th birthday, I realized that there were teabags in my condominium cupboard that weren't completely dried out, that hadn't belonged to the previous tenants. I'd actually written tea on my shopping list, in pen, and every month I was restocking. I guess I'm now an official Tea Enjoyer. Every mid-morning, I plonk two black Ceylon bags into scalding water, drop four or five edulcorante that I smuggled in from Italy, top things off with two-percent milk, and cradle my warm mug as I contemplate death. "Your tea is mid as fuck," says the inventor of Shirtdoku. She's the kind of ocha snob who uses a strainer and a kyusu, who orders decorative tins of hojicha and yuzu and sakura sencha from one of those Japanese mail services that ship stuff that Japanese retailers refuse to send overseas. Somewhere around my 48th birthday, I realized I was drinking a beverage I'd imperceptibly discovered when I was living in Actual Japan. The way that ロイヤルミルクティー is rendered and pronounced self-signifies that Royal Milk Tea – like sando and basuke – is locally loved, nationally cherished, but make absolutely no mistake: all of these things were brought in by pale-skinned outsiders. Anyway, baseball. The NPB season is now a month old, and, as always, it's clear who the target television audience is. Major League broadcast breaks are full of dick pills and medications for diseases with made-up acronyms; during a typical nine-inning game (or 12-inning tie) on J Sports or TBS-2, you'll see at least 18 two-minute infomercials for products like royal jelly and glucosamine supplements. You'll see wise doctors in labcoats, retired salarymen swinging golf clubs, empty-nest grandmothers walking briskly in tracksuits. They might all be in their 50s and 60s, but they've all turned back the clock to active ballplayer age with green juice. Oiiiiissshiiii. Anyway, basketball. During the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, Nagasaki Prefecture formed its first-ever professional hoop club, and petitioned to join the third level of the Japanese B.League. When lower-division basketball started up again in 2021, the team smashed all previous records with 42 wins against three losses, clinching promotion to B2 with two months to go in the season. “Our plan was to move up," said head coach and GM Takuma Ito, "just get up out of B3 as soon as possible.” With a 43-17 record, it took the Velca only one season to get promoted again, and then they moved into a state-of-the-art facility called HAPPINESS ARENA (sic). After two seasons of footing-finding in the top-flight B.League, Nagasaki just ended the 2025-26 regular season at 47-12 and are the top overall seed in the playoffs. The team is powered by import swing-forward Stanley Johnson (22.8 ppg, 6.3 rpg), a former consensus five-star recruit and the No. 8 overall pick in the 2015 NBA Draft. So what's the Velca's secret? How did they get so good so quickly? Both the club and ARENA are owned and operated by Japanet Holdings, cherished pet projects of CEO Akito Takata. In addition to basukettobōru, Japanet recently expanded into luxury Pacific Ocean sea cruises and AI venture capital. But it's their core business that's made all of this possible: selling $1 billion USD of health and wellness products to retired Japanese baseball fans over the teevee.