Hikaru Kawase

Hikaru Kawase, born in Oita City in 1997, plays infield for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. What draws me to players like him is that they survive on something television rarely rewards. He is not a slugger, and at 175 cm he is not physically imposing by professional standards. He is there because the ball goes where he is, and because he handles it cleanly. That is a much harder career to build than it sounds. The SoftBank Hawks are one of the deepest organizations in Nippon Professional Baseball, which means every roster spot is contested by someone younger and hungrier every single spring. Holding on in that environment, without the safety net of home run totals, requires a very specific kind of stubbornness. I find late-inning defensive substitutions quietly thrilling for exactly this reason. When a manager sends a defensive specialist onto the field, he is making a statement about how the rest of the game will be played. Kawase is the sort of player who makes that statement credible, and baseball is more interesting because such players exist.

Name (English)

Hikaru Kawase

Name (Japanese)

川瀬晃

Reading

かわせ ひかる

Born

September 15, 1997 (age 28)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Virgo / Ox

Origin

Ōita-shi, Ōita Prefecture, Japan

Height

175 cm

Occupation

baseball player

• Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/hihi____karu15/
• Xhttps://x.com/h___kh1022
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru%20Kawase
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B7%9D%E7%80%AC%E6%99%83
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q27921240

Tags

• Ōita Prefecture
• baseball player

Last updated

2026-08-07

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.