Japan and Boston Ties: Kyoto Sister City, Red Sox Stars and Business Links

Economic Warfare & Trade Policy

Boston and Japan have been linked for well over a century, through art collectors who shipped Japanese treasures to the Museum of Fine Arts, a sister-city agreement with Kyoto, a line of Japanese players at Fenway Park and a growing list of Japanese companies with offices in Massachusetts. Here is a fact-checked look at the Japan-Boston relationship as of October 2026.

Boston and Kyoto: sister cities since 1959

Kyoto became Boston’s first sister city when the two mayors signed an agreement on June 24, 1959, according to the City of Kyoto. Kyoto first proposed the partnership in 1957, when its mayor approached the U.S. ambassador to Japan and sent a letter to Boston’s mayor through a delegation attending a Japan-U.S. mayors’ conference in San Diego. The City of Boston’s sister-cities page notes that Kyoto donated a traditional “Japan House” to the Boston Children’s Museum, which the city describes as believed to be the most generous gift from a foreign sister city to an American community.

Boston is not alone. The East-West Center counts 14 sister relationships between Massachusetts communities and Japan. The Consulate-General of Japan’s list includes Massachusetts pairings such as Cambridge and Tsukuba (1984), Arlington and Nagaokakyo (1984), Salem and Ota City in Tokyo (1991) and Gloucester and Tamano (2004). Massachusetts also has a state-level partnership with Hokkaido.

Japanese players and the Red Sox

When the Red Sox signed outfielder Masataka Yoshida to a five-year contract through 2027 in December 2022, the team said in its announcement that he would become the 10th Japan-born player in club history. The earlier nine were outfielder Dave Roberts (2004) and pitchers Tomo Ohka (1999-2001), Hideo Nomo (2001), Daisuke Matsuzaka (2007-12), Hideki Okajima (2007-11), Takashi Saito (2009), Junichi Tazawa (2009, 2011-16), Koji Uehara (2013-16) and Hirokazu Sawamura (2021-22). Matsuzaka, Okajima, Uehara and Tazawa all pitched for World Series-winning Boston teams in 2007 or 2013.

Yoshida, a native of Fukui and a Tokyo 2020 Olympic gold medalist, made the 2026 Opening Day roster. MLB transaction records on his player page show he went on the injured list Aug. 16 with a left hamstring strain and was activated Oct. 1. He is the only Japan-born player on Boston’s current 40-man roster, per Baseball-Reference. For more on the club’s winter plans, see our coverage of the Red Sox offseason and spring training 2027.

Japanese business and investment in Massachusetts

The East-West Center’s Japan Matters for America profile, using 2020-2021 data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, fDi Intelligence and other sources, counts 115 Japanese majority-owned enterprises in Massachusetts employing 3,275 people. It reports $1.6 billion invested by Japanese greenfield projects between 2003 and 2021, creating 5,840 jobs, and $3.2 billion in Massachusetts exports to Japan in 2021.

The largest single presence is Takeda Pharmaceutical, which has its U.S. headquarters in Cambridge. The Boston Globe, citing the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, reported that Takeda had 6,290 workers in the state in 2023 before announcing 641 Massachusetts layoffs in 2024. Japan’s trade agency JETRO publishes an annual survey of Japanese companies in North America that tracks broader hiring and expansion plans.

Museum of Fine Arts: the largest Japanese collection outside Japan

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston says it holds about 100,000 Japanese works, the largest such collection outside Japan, including more than 50,000 woodblock prints. The MFA’s history of its Japan holdings credits Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Fenollosa and Okakura Kakuzō, and trustee William Sturgis Bigelow, who gave most of the museum’s roughly 4,000 Japanese paintings and more than 30,000 ukiyo-e prints. The museum’s Tenshin-en garden is named for Okakura, who used the name Tenshin.

MIT and Harvard links

At MIT, the MIT-Japan Program was founded in 1981 by political scientist Richard Samuels and later became part of MISTI, the institute’s international internship network, which places students with companies and labs in Japan. At Harvard, the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies began in 1973 as the Japan Institute and was renamed in 1985 for Reischauer, a Harvard scholar who served as U.S. ambassador to Japan. Japanese residents looking for practical help can start with our Japanese community guide to Boston.

Featured photo: Tenshin-en, the Japanese garden at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: Daderot / Wikimedia Commons, public domain (CC0).

Sources

• City of Kyoto, Boston sister city page
• City of Boston, Sister Cities
• Consulate-General of Japan in Boston, sister cities list
• Red Sox press release, Yoshida signing (Dec. 15, 2022)
• MLB.com, Masataka Yoshida player page
• Baseball-Reference, 2026 Red Sox 40-man roster
• East-West Center, Massachusetts and Japan
• Boston Globe, Takeda layoffs (May 30, 2024)
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Art of Japan
• MIT MISTI Japan; Harvard Reischauer Institute