Cal’s Star Freshman Yamato Okadome Says He Came to the NCAA Because of Japanese Swimming Slump

An Instagram post from two months ago written by Cal freshman Yamato Okadome has become interesting in the wake of his headlining first performance as a collegiate athlete last weekend. In the team’s dual meet against UCSD, Okadome swam 1:52.85 in the 200 breaststroke, which ranks him 2nd in the NCAA this season.

On August 9th, as he was preparing to start his academic and athletic career at Cal, Okadome wrote a lengthy post on his Instagram account in a photo posing with Cal associate head coach David Marsh.

While most athletes explain their college choices with canned notions of ‘family’ and a pursuit of academic and athletic excellence, Okadome dug deeper in his post, explaining his choice as a Japanese swimmer – a country that has robust domestic opportunities for elite swimmers to study and train and therefore has not historically sent many athletes to the NCAA.

In the post, he says that he made the choice in part because Japanese competitive swimming “has been in a slump.” He pointed to results at last year’s World Championships, where Japan managed only one silver medal, a performance they repeated in 2024.

He also says he wants to progress the commercial opportunities for Japanese swimmers. In 2022, Yui Ohashi officially became Japan’s first-ever professional swimmer, and their 5th ever. Professional swimmers in Japan have relaxed restrictions on commercial opportunities, but in exchange become responsible for their own expenses related to training camps and team trips.

Okadome has represented Japan internationally at the junior level on several occasions, including at the 2023 World Junior Swimming Championships.

The full post, translated:

As my time to enter college approaches, I would like to write a serious “style” of why I decided to go to UC Berkeley for various people through social media.

Some negative expressions are included, but I would appreciate it if you would take this as just one person’s opinion and way of thinking, not as criticism.

Also, this is a long article, and I’m not sure if I’ve written it to meet your expectations, but I hope you will read it with that in mind.

The reason I am going to the United States to go to UC Berkeley is to fundamentally strengthen the Japanese competitive swimming world and achieve my ultimate goal in my swimming career, which is to become the world’s best in the 400m medley relay. In order to achieve this goal, I believe that it is not enough to pursue my own results and become faster, but rather that the overall strengthening of the Japanese competitive swimming world is necessary more broadly. In recent years, the Japanese competitive swimming world has been in a slump, as symbolized by the results of only one silver medal at last year’s World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka and the Paris Olympics. I believe that the cause is not superficial, such as the timing of the selection meeting or the organizational strength of the team for the match, but a more fundamental problem.

I believe that one of the reasons for the current slump in competitive swimming is the inadequacy of university swimming programs in Japan. When the Japanese team participated in the Junior Pan Pacific two years ago, they were unable to beat the United States, but they showed enough strength to compete with Australia in terms of the number of medals won. However, when looking at the World Aquatics Championships and the Olympics, there is a big gap between overseas university students and athletes in their 20s. This is evidence that juniors are being strengthened, which means that improvements to programs at the university level are required.

So I wanted to create an opportunity to fundamentally change this situation by studying abroad at an American university. Currently, there are no Japanese competitive swimmers studying abroad at American universities, and the reasons for this include a lack of English language skills, the character of Japanese people, and financial issues, but I think the biggest reason is that there is no precedent. So I decided to go to UC Berkeley to lower the hurdle of going to a university abroad and create an environment where athletes of a younger generation than me have a wider range of new options than they have now.

In addition, I want to change the current situation in Japan, where the commercialization of swimming is not progressing and there are few athletes who work professionally after graduating from university. I want to learn about the entertainment and business models of swimming that have been successful in the United States, and acquire the creativity and ability to apply something like ISL to Japan. To that end, I have decided to go to UC Berkeley, where I can receive a high-level education in both swimming and business.

There is a limit to what one person can do, but regardless of whether my ideas are correct or not, I hope that this will be shared with many people, including athletes and coaches, and that it will be an opportunity to look at competitive swimming from a broader perspective and think about how to get out of this current situation and make it stronger. I don’t know if the training methods and environment at American universities suit Japanese people, or if they are really necessary to make Japanese people stronger. However, even if my choice is not direct, it will benefit many Japanese competitive swimmers, and although I don’t know if I will be able to participate as a member of the Japanese team at the World Aquatics Championships in a year or the Olympics in four years, I aim to compete against the world with a stronger team than I am now, and to make the competition more enjoyable for those who support me. I sincerely hope that competitive swimming will become a sport that involves more people, and that the swimming world in Japan and other countries will continue to develop.

There are many excellent coaches and athletes in Japan. If we can create an environment where they can fully demonstrate their abilities, the world of competitive swimming will take a further leap forward, so I would like to use my experience at UC Berkeley to contribute to that goal.

Thank you for reading this unnecessarily long article to the end.

PS: The above is almost an afterthought.
The real reason is simply because it seemed interesting.
I don’t know if I’ll still be very interested in swimming four years from now, but I want to experience the joy of winning a relay at the highest point in the world. It’s all for that dream.
For me, even if I achieve something individually in swimming, I feel some joy and happiness, but what’s the point of being a fast swimmer? So what? That’s my honest feeling. I don’t particularly like swimming, but the value of competitive swimming for me is achieving something as a team through relays, getting to connect with a wide range of people, and being able to connect people without having to go through language or culture that much, and that’s the reason I swim. At university, I want to learn not only swimming but also other things I want to learn at the time, so don’t expect too much and just think of it as the ramblings of a university student.

If you are even slightly interested, please send me a DM with any questions and I will answer them as best I can 😎 I am grateful for all the opportunities and will enjoy my university life 🤞🤞🤞

There have been historically very-few Japanese swimmers in the NCAA. Where there have been, they’ve usually been athletes with multiple citizenships, like the Ortiz brothers of the University of Michigan or the Litherland triplets at Georgia, though none chose to represent Japan internationally (Bruno Ortiz swam for Spain).

Among the more prominent examples are 2008 Japanese Olympian Saori Haruguchi, who swam collegiately at Oregon State. She wound up finishing 27th at the Olympics in the 400 IM.

Many of the swimmers who come from Japan to the NCAA come from the St. Mary’s International School in Tokyo. That includes swimmers like the Ortiz brothers, former Michigan swimmer Ryutaro Kamiya, former Princeton standout Josh Brown, current Virginia swimmer Alex Hotta, and a handful of others, both Japanese citizens and ex-pats.

Okadome has represented Japan at the international level in