Hideo Iijima

Here's a guy who was already making noise as a sprinter and then someone apparently looked at those legs and said, "get this man on a baseball diamond too" — and he just went with it. Born in Mito, Ibaraki right at the tail end of 1944, a Capricorn who came up in postwar Japan when toughness wasn't a lifestyle choice but a baseline requirement. Waseda University, 176 cm, fast enough to build a whole career on pure speed. What gets me is the crossover — sprinting and baseball aren't exactly the same skill set, but elite foot speed is elite foot speed, and you can feel the logic of someone saying, yeah, we want whatever he's got on our team. I don't know every chapter of his story, but the outline alone — track man goes pro in a second sport — reads like something out of a sports manga, and I mean that as full praise.

Hideo Iijima is a Japanese sprinter and baseball player born on January 1, 1944, in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture. He attended Meguro Gakuin Junior and Senior High School before going on to study at Waseda University. He is known for his involvement in both short-distance track and field and baseball. He stands 176 cm tall.

Name (English)

Hideo Iijima

Name (Japanese)

飯島秀雄

Reading

いいじま ひでお

Born

January 1, 1944 (age 82)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Capricorn / Monkey (申)

Origin

Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan

Height

176cm

Occupation

Baseball player / Track and field athlete / Sprinter

High school

Meguro Gakuin Junior and Senior High School

University

Waseda University

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A3%AF%E5%B3%B6%E7%A7%80%E9%9B%84

Tags

• From Ibaraki Prefecture
• Baseball player
• Track and field athlete
• Sprinter

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.