The Japan Championship Series (日本選手権シリーズ, Nippon Senshuken Shiriizu^?), or Japan Series (日本シリーズ, Nippon Shiriizu^?) is the annual championship series in Nippon Professional Baseball, the top baseball league in Japan. It is a seven-game series between the winning clubs of the league's two circuits, the Central League and the Pacific League.

The Series is the highest level of play in professional baseball in Japan. It is usually played in October or November. As in all of the best-of-seven series, the first team to win four games is the overall winner and is declared the Japan Series Champion (日本一, Nippon Ichi^?, number one in Japan) in each year. The winner of the Japan Series also goes on to be the Japanese representative team in the annual Asia Series.

The home team for games 1, 2 and eventually 6 and 7, alternates between the two leagues with the Pacific League having the advantage on the years ending with an odd number and the Central League on the years ending with an even number. Designated Hitters are used if the team from the Pacific League hosts the game.

Japan ⁱ/dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国  Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".

Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest islands are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan has the world's tenth-largest population, with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the de facto capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.

Archaeological research indicates that people lived in Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other nations followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.

Motonobu Tanishige (born December 21, 1970, in Hiroshima) is a Japanese professional baseball player for the Chunichi Dragons in Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball.

Daigo Umehara (Japanese: 梅原 大吾, Hepburn: Umehara Daigo^?, born 19 May 1981) is a Japanese arcade fighting video game player. He specializes in 2D arcade fighting games, mainly those released by Capcom. Known as "Daigo" or "The Beast" in the west and "Umehara" or "Ume" in Japan, Umehara is one of the world's most famous Street Fighter players and is often considered its greatest, as well. He currently holds a world record of "the most successful player in major tournaments of Street Fighter" in Guinness World Records.

Before properly being called a progamer from signing a sponsorship deal with MadCatz, Japanese media usually referred to Umehara as "God of 2D fighting games" (2D格闘ゲームの神 "2D Kakutou Game no Kami").

Umehara began going to an arcade game center and playing fighting games at around 10 years of age when he was an elementary school student, the same time when Street Fighter II and Fatal Fury: King of Fighters hit the game center. Because the SF2 cabinet had a very long line and also had older kids playing, his first fighting game is actually Garou Densetsu. Because there was usually a long line in his free time and he could not stay too late, Umehara first started challenging other players in Street Fighter II Dash (Champion Edition) even though he felt shy and had to ask for permission to challenge first, but that was also when he started to like playing with other players.