Munenori Kawasaki (川﨑 宗則, Kawasaki Munenori, born June 3, 1981) is a Japanese former professional baseball shortstop and second baseman. He has played in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) for the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, and in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the Seattle Mariners, Toronto Blue Jays, and Chicago Cubs. He played for the Japanese national team in the 2008 Beijing Olympics as well as the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics. Following the Chicago Cubs\' 2016 World Series championship, Kawasaki joined Daisuke Matsuzaka and Koji Uehara as the only Japanese players to have won championships in the World Baseball Classic, Japan Series and World Series.\n', '

Kawasaki was born in Aira, a former town in central Kagoshima Prefecture in the south of Japan. He began playing baseball after his older brother got him into the sport. Though he was a pitcher throughout his early years, Kawasaki switched to shortstop after enrolling in Kagoshima Prefectural Technical High School.\n', '

Kawasaki remained largely an unknown on the national level during his high school career, partly due to his team\'s failing to make any national tournaments in those three years. Still, he made a name for himself locally, earning the nickname Satsurō, a portmanteau derived from Satsuma (the name given to a former province of Japan in present-day western Kagoshima) and former Seattle Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki\'s first name for the similarities in their playing styles. He was drafted in the fourth round of the 1999 NPB amateur draft by the then-Fukuoka Daiei Hawks.\n', '

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