Ryota Funakoshi

I'll be honest — when I first saw the name Ryota Funakoshi, my brain immediately went "wait, is he related to that famous Japanese actor?" but nope, totally different guy, different world entirely. This Funakoshi is a baseball player out of Nagareyama, Chiba, born in 1993, and he came up through Kashiwa City's Kashiwa High School, which has a solid baseball tradition in the Chiba scene. Nagareyama itself is one of those quiet suburban cities east of Tokyo that quietly produces serious, grounded people, and I get that vibe from the path he took. He converted from shortstop to catcher at Oji, helped them to the national industrial-league semifinals, and got a hit in his very first at-bat for the Carp in 2016 — sometimes the players who keep their heads down and just grind are the ones worth remembering.

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.

Ryota Funakoshi is a Japanese former professional baseball catcher born on November 26, 1993, in Nagareyama, Chiba Prefecture. He played shortstop at Kashiwa Municipal Kashiwa High School, converted to catcher with the industrial-league team Oji, and played for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp from 2016 to 2019. He stands 178 cm tall.

Name (English)

Ryota Funakoshi

Name (Japanese)

船越涼太

Reading

ふなこし りょうた

Born

November 26, 1993 (age 32)

Origin

Nagareyama, Chiba Prefecture, Japan

Height

178 cm

Occupation

Baseball Player

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Sagittarius / Rooster

High school

Kashiwa Municipal Kashiwa High School

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%88%B9%E8%B6%8A%E6%B6%BC%E5%A4%AA
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q26044117

Tags

• From Chiba Prefecture
• Baseball Player

Last updated

October 18, 2026

Only publicly available facts are listed; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Base data was compiled from Wikidata from June 2026 onward; ages are recalculated daily and deaths are checked against Wikidata on an ongoing basis. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.