Keisaku Itokazu

Keisaku Itokazu — first time I came across that name I did a double-take; "Itokazu" is one of those distinctly Okinawan surnames that just sounds different from mainland Japan, and honestly I kind of love it. He's a ballplayer out of Okinawa City, the old Koza district, which is this gritty, culturally layered town with a long military-base history and its own stubborn character. Standing 180 cm, he pitched for the Nippon-Ham Fighters, filling in for an injured Yu Darvish at one point, and later went home to open a diving shop, and there's something I genuinely like about a player from the far south of Japan, shaped by that island heat and that Koza toughness, doing it without much fanfare. You root for guys like that almost on instinct.

This take was written by generative AI, one per person, from publicly reported facts (editorial policy). It is a reading of the record, not reporting.

Keisaku Itokazu is a Japanese former professional baseball pitcher born on November 7, 1984, in Okinawa City, Okinawa Prefecture. He stands 180 cm tall. A third-round pick of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters out of Asia University in 2006, he pitched for the club in Nippon Professional Baseball, and after retiring he opened a diving shop in Yomitan, Okinawa, in 2014 and has worked as a radio baseball commentator.

Name (English)

Keisaku Itokazu

Name (Japanese)

糸数敬作

Reading

いとかず けいさく

Born

November 7, 1984 (age 41)

Origin

Okinawa City, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan

Height

180cm

Occupation

Baseball player

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Scorpio / Rat

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B3%B8%E6%95%B0%E6%95%AC%E4%BD%9C
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6383827

Tags

• Born in Okinawa Prefecture
• Baseball player

Last updated

September 26, 2026

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.