I want to say many things, but because of active NDAs I have to be careful. I'm part of an internal team which selects pro sports partners in the Japanese market for a major American premium fashion brand.
MLB has been one of those partners. Local leadership recognizes it doesn't make sense to license every MLB team for the Japanese market assortment, so we use a bunch of quant/qual methods to pick the best teams each year - it gets a bit dicey because merchandise needs to be ordered a good 9 months before the season starts. For example, when Darvish got traded to the Padres in December 2020, we hadn't included San Diego in our 6-team selection for the 2021 collection. That hurt.
When Ohtani was with the Angels, the Angels never indexed in our top 6. The Dodgers, however, consistently did - along with the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cardinals.
The Dodgers are a much bigger brand than the Angels are in Japan, especially among self-identified MLB fans.
I'm not sold this translates to incremental tourism though. The JPYUSD is horrific right now (for us), the worst it's been in three decades. Q1 2024 outbound tourism to the US mainland is down 47% from Q1 2019; it's only down ~15% for places like South Korea and Taiwan over the same time frame (where the yen hasn't lost value).
A bunch of state boards of tourism (CA, NY, HI to name a few) are bombarding Japanese media with campaigns expressly because outbound to these states is down so much.
Last point: it's JTB's job to drive outbound tourism, they're on the supply side, and FOMO messaging is highly effective in this market. I found one of the original Japanese
JTB PRs mentioned in the OP article: JTB has a partnership with MLB this season.
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