P. Lee

Naomi Osaka's Grandfather Refused to Speak to Her Mother for Years. In 2018, He Wept Watching Naomi on Television Somewhere in Hokkaido, a 73-year-old man watched his granddaughter on television, and wept. His name is Tetsuo Osaka. And for years, he had not spoken to his own daughter. Her name is Tamaki. She grew up in Nemuro, a fishing town at the eastern tip of Hokkaido. Her mother's ancestors fished in the Kuril Islands until the Soviet Union took them over at the end of the Second World War, and the family moved to Nemuro. For high school, Tamaki went to Sapporo. There, in 1990, she met a Haitian-American college student named Leonard François. They kept the relationship secret for years. When Tamaki's father began pushing the idea of an arranged marriage, she told him about Leonard. He did not approve. He accused her of bringing shame on the family, because Leonard was not Japanese or simply he was Black. The couple moved far away from Hokkaido, to the city of Osaka. That is where Naomi was born, in October 1997. Her surname, in the end, came from her mother's side. For a long stretch, Tamaki had little to no contact with her family. Accounts differ on how long. One says about five years. Another says about a decade. A third says twelve years. Then, slowly, the silence ended. Naomi's Japanese grandfather had been against the family's plan for her tennis, and the decision to homeschool her. But he came around. Eventually, he became one of her biggest supporters. When she won the US Open in 2018, he was 73, and he cried. In January 2019, at 74, he smiled at a press conference in Nemuro, the town his daughter had left. In 2021, he told a Japanese newspaper that he would like Naomi to open a tennis school for children in Nemuro. He likened her to an alpinist, always going after higher mountains.