No one knows better than Trevor Raichura that you can’t always predict just what is coming down the pike.
After all, the JapanBall News Correspondent has lived and worked in Japan as a teacher for two decades even though, in the beginning, living even two years abroad seemed like a stretch to him.
Later, a routine flight back to Japan after visiting family in Canada turned non-routine when he met the woman he eventually married.
And, long after dropping his collegiate journalism studies, he found himself back in the game as a writer, podcaster, and founder of a popular Japanese baseball website. On top of that, he was a wedding officiant for several years – a gig that even landed him a cameo in a Japanese movie.
None of which Raichura ever envisioned while growing up in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
“When I was young, I didn’t imagine myself being somewhere else in the world,” he agreed, “and I certainly hadn’t given a thought to living overseas. I didn’t have any interest in Japan, even after I first got here.”
“I just knew I hated the winters in Winnipeg,” he added with a laugh.
Raichura grew up following hockey – what kid in Canada doesn’t? – as a fan of the Winnipeg Jets, and also paid attention to other sports, including baseball. His mother, Neta Boychuk, says that at around age seven, Trevor and a friend would watch games with the sound muted and do the play-by-play and commentary themselves.
“He learned to read early on, too,” she said. “He’d grab the sports pages every morning when the newspaper came. He’d read the scores and other statistics, and that helped him learn his multiplication tables.”

Trevor went through high school with the goal of becoming a sports journalist and began college in Ottawa as a journalism major. However, he decided after a year to give that up in favor of education.
“It was a combination of things – a three-headed monster,” he said. “I was on a partial scholarship, and you had to have at least an A- average your first year to keep it. I barely missed that, so I was going to have to pay for room and board my second year.
Also, I was told that the second year of journalism school would mean 80 hours a week of work and study. I don’t know if that was really true, but it seemed like too much.”
“And, third, it seemed like journalism was a cutthroat business. I don’t like to step on someone else to get into the middle of a scrum – at least, that’s the way I felt when I was 19.”
Thus, his diversion into the world of education that eventually routed him to Japan.
Japan first entered Raichura’s life after graduating from the University of Manitoba in 1998.
Teaching jobs weren’t plentiful, so he signed on with the Japanese government’s JET program to get overseas experience. He was assigned to Okinawa as an assistant English teacher.
“There were a lot of issues – particularly the language barrier – but as I got into my first year in Japan, I started liking it. I really loved Okinawa. I got a real warmth from the people, and that went a long way toward smoothing the transition,” he said. “I knew part of the way into my first year that I wanted to come back for a second.”
He later taught in an American school in Okinawa, went back to Canada for a year, and then returned to Okinawa, where he worked until 2010. At that point, he moved to Hokkaido to work with a new church, and that’s where he began working on the side as a wedding officiant. He did that off and on until 2018.
“It was really fun,” Trevor said. “I worked with a guy who did it two days a week, and he would give me his overflow.
Most of the officiants are foreigners because many couples want Western-style weddings. If it was a 2pm wedding, you’d go in at one, go through it beforehand with the couple, and then do the actual wedding. Then you’d either move on to the next wedding or go home.
“Once, I dropped one of the rings during the ceremony, and I thought I was going to get fired . . . but no one complained,” he said with a laugh.
Since then, he’s been an English instructor at multiple levels – currently at the Osaka campus of Ritsumeikan University – but the circle back toward journalism began when he was commissioner of a fantasy baseball league and wrote newsletters and season-ending analyses.
“One of my friends said, ‘ESPN is missing out . . . They need you on staff.’”
Instead, he next staffed his blog and website devoted to the Hanshin Tigers.
“It was kind of a distraction from work, which I wasn’t enjoying then,” he said. “It wasn’t an issue with the school. I’d just done the job for a long time and was kind of bored with it. A friend who’s a career coach asked me what my passion was, and I told him about wanting to be a sports journalist, and he suggested I start a blog.
I’d gotten to be a fan of the Hanshin Tigers, so I started a blog on them.”
