Ichiro will join Hall of Fame this weekend. But his legacy has long been cemented.

Years later, the details of his first encounter with Ichiro Suzuki are a bit fuzzy. The feeling is what remains for Justin Novak.

“I was so nervous,” Novak said. “I’m, like, screaming inside like a fanboy, but I try to be respectful and try to act cool. But it’s hard.”

As a baseball-obsessed kid growing up in the heart of Tokyo, Novak lived through the height of Ichiro-mania in Japan.

As the Mariners’ 29-year-old bullpen catcher, Novak now has a personal connection to Ichiro’s ageless influence here in Seattle.

With Ichiro set to become the first Japanese player inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., Novak has a one-of-a-kind perspective on Ichiro’s legacy from his experiences on both sides of the Pacific.

Like virtually all of his childhood friends, Novak idolized Ichiro. He would spend hours imitating Ichiro’s batting stance — the extreme crouch, the extended right arm holding the bat high, the smooth swing and the gentle bat drop — and pore through Ichiro’s highlights every day.

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Novak, whose mother is Japanese and his father is a U.S. Air Force veteran who was stationed in Tokyo, went on to have a four-year playing career at the University of Virginia and was part of the national championship team in 2015 (eventually earning him the nickname “Champ” with the Mariners).

He has forged a career in pro baseball, initially joining the Mariners organization in 2019 as the interpreter for Japanese pitcher Yusei Kikuchi. Novak moved into minor-league player development for a couple of years and then became one of the big-league team’s bullpen catchers in 2023.

Most days, Novak now shares the outfield grass with Ichiro during afternoon batting practice and serves as one of Ichiro’s long-toss partners.

“A lot of people ask me: ‘Is he real? Is he even a real person?’” Novak said. “Every time I get to play catch with him, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, imagine telling my 10-year-old self that I’m doing this right now.’ … It’s just such a privilege.”

In 2001, Ichiro arrived in Seattle as the first position player to make the jump from Japan, and he was greeted by overwhelming skepticism about how a skinny 5-foot-9 slap hitter would fare in MLB.

“There was definitely that pressure that I knew that how I performed was going to be really looked at as, ‘This is Japanese baseball,’” Ichiro said through his longtime interpreter, Allen Turner.

Ichiro, of course, thrived immediately, winning the MVP and Rookie of the Year and helping the Mariners to a record 116 victories in that magical 2001 season.

His breakthrough bridged the gap between two continents. Before there could be a Shohei Ohtani in MLB, there was Ichiro.

“He paved the way … and it was really important for people to see that,” Novak said. “Obviously, you have Ohtani now and he’s the superstar there, but Ichiro-san is the original superstar. I describe it to people as, like, Michael Jordan vs. LeBron. It’s the same thing, and Ichiro-san is the GOAT.”

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Cooperstown is bracing for a massive turnout to celebrate Ichiro’s induction.

The Hall of Fame has received RSVPs from dozens of dignitaries from Japan. The commissioner of Nippon Professional Baseball and the president of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame are scheduled to be there, along with civic leaders and some 60 media members from 20 Japanese outlets.

Local businesses have reportedly hired Japanese interpreters to guide customers throughout the induction weekend.

“It’s definitely going to be a very unique crowd,” Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch said. “There’s just a huge amount of excitement for him and what’s happening.”

In conjunction with Ichiro’s induction, the Hall opened a new exhibit this month called “Yakyu | Baseball: The Transpacific Exchange of the Game,” which celebrates the larger connections between American and Japanese baseball.

“I think that adds a whole ’nother level to it,” Rawitch said. “I think it’s the perfect culmination of everything you’re seeing in baseball right now.”

Ichiro has deep connections to Cooperstown. No player has shown a greater appreciation for baseball history than Ichiro, who quietly made seven visits to the Hall of Fame from 2001 to 2016, while he was an active player.

“It’s so rare to have a player come to Cooperstown as often as he did,” Rawitch said. “He has been incredibly generous over the years with donating artifacts, with making these visits and caring so deeply about this place. He’s a great representative for all Hall of Famers, not just the current ones, and not just his home country. He is going to be a great new member of the Hall of Fame family … and we’re excited for him to keep coming back year after year.”

Unknown to anyone at the time, Ichiro conducted his media conference call after winning the 2001 Rookie of the Year award from Cooperstown in the office of then-Hall president Jeff Idelson. It was on that trip that Ichiro got his first private tour of the museum.

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“I was able to go into the dungeons underneath and feel the gloves and the bats of past players,” Ichiro said. “What was really interesting for me — the records and the numbers that I (broke), I was able to go to the Hall of Fame and really get close to that player. In 2001, it ended up being Shoeless Joe Jackson … and I was able to touch his stuff and I found out that he had shoes. I always thought that he didn’t wear shoes. …

“So that ended up being kind of the theme when we would go back. It was almost like having a conversation with (past players), and it was just such a special feeling you get when you go there.”

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To many of his teammates over the years, Ichiro was an enigma. His pursuit of perfection, his exactitude in even mundane routines, made him something of a mystical figure to some.

To Dee Strange-Gordon, he was an inspiration.

Growing up in Avon Park, Fla., a young Strange-Gordon saw in Ichiro someone much like him.

“Ichi was a little like me,” Strange-Gordon said in a recent interview, “and he was out there ballin’..’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah, we can ball on all these big dudes.’”

Strange-Gordon was 16 years old when he saw Ichiro up close for the first time. He remembers the scene clearly at the 2004 MLB All-Star Game in Houston. Strange-Gordon’s father, Tom Gordon, was an All-Star relief pitcher for the New York Yankees that year, and Dee got to tag along with his dad during the week’s festivities.

“You see that right there,” the father told his son, pointing to Ichiro stretching in right field, “that’s dedication right there.”

The scene stuck with Strange-Gordon, who fortuitously became Ichiro’s teammate for Ichiro’s final five seasons, first in 2015 with the Miami Marlins and then for Ichiro’s return to Seattle in 2018 and ’19.

Strange-Gordon won a batting title in Miami, and he credited the “secrets” Ichiro shared with him.

“I used to be the only guy he’d let use his bats in the game,” Strange-Gordon said.

Ichiro made Strange-Gordon a custom bat box every year they played together — “I still have ‘em,” he said — Strange-Gordon was one of the few teammates believed to receive an invitation to Ichiro’s home for dinner, a traditional Japanese five-course meal, as Strange-Gordon described it, prepared by Ichiro’s wife, Yumiko Fukushima.

“It was amazing,” he said.

At Ichiro’s final game in 2019, during the Mariners-A’s season-opening series in Tokyo, Strange-Gordon got a greater appreciation of Ichiro’s legacy. At Ichiro’s request, Strange-Gordon used his own phone to record a behind-the-scenes video just before Ichiro walked out of the dugout and stepped onto the Tokyo Dome turf to a thunderous applause from a sold-out crowd, with dozens of photographers crowding around Ichiro as he basked in the moment.

The 50-second personal video is one of the most cherished in Strange-Gordon’s phone. It’s also, apparently, the most valuable.

Strange-Gordon received what he says was a nine-figure offer from a collector for the video. He turned it down.

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Earlier this season, on the day the K-pop band Stray Kids was scheduled to play a sold-out concert at T-Mobile Park, the band’s security team was startled to look down on the field and see a shadowy figure running sprints in the outfield early in the afternoon.

The security team quickly alerted the Mariners stadium operations staff of their concerns: Who is that? There’s not supposed to be anyone out there!

Oh, came the response from Mariners security. That’s Ichiro.

Didn’t matter that a stage had been erected in the outfield or that a hard plastic surface was put down to protect the field’s pristine grass; Ichiro has his regimen and he won’t let anything disrupt it.

(Once the band’s security team figured out who the mystery figure was, they requested a picture with Ichiro.)

Six years into his retirement as a player, Ichiro maintains a steady fitness routine. He still has a locker inside the T-Mobile Park home clubhouse (next to the indoor batting cage, in small quarters he shares with Turner, his interpreter and longtime confidant, and the team’s bat boys) and he still looks like he could play a Gold Glove-worthy right field.

On Opening Day in March, Ichiro threw out the ceremonial first pitch, firing a fastball clocked at 84 mph.

Ichiro has befriended Julio Rodríguez — they’ll occasionally play catch in right field during pregame warmups — and in many ways Ichiro is still a fundamental part of the team.

“I’m 51 years old now; I’m still trying to hang in there with them,” he said. “I play catch, I run, I hit, I shag. So I hope that I can show them that even at this age, you can still play this game. … I’m not here to tell anybody what to do. I’m just here so that if there’s any way that I can be of any help to these guys, that’s why I’m here.”

2001 ’02 ’03 ’04 ’05 ’06 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’10 ’11 ’12 ’13 ’14 ’15 ’16 ’17 ’18 ’19

In what was one of the most anticipated arrivals in Seattle sports history, Ichiro burst onto the major-league stage with a two-hit debut. In typical Ichiro fashion, the hits were both singles that squeaked through the infield. Safeco Field erupted when Ichiro slapped his first hit up the middle – a hit that provided the opening salvo to a 242-hit most valuable player and rookie of the year season, and a legendary MLB career.

Almost certainly the most memorable play of Ichiro’s career was the base hit that he called “the greatest moment of my baseball career.” Batting in the third inning against Rangers right-hander Ryan Drese, Ichiro had a chance to set the single-season MLB hits record, a mark he had tied in the first inning with a single to left. He worked the count full and bounced the ball up the middle, past the outstretched arms of shortstop Michael Young and into the record books.

It was his 258th hit of the year, breaking George Sisler’s record that had stood for 84 years. Ichiro would add another hit in the sixth, and three more over the final two games to finish the season with 262 hits — a mark no one else has come close to approaching since.

Ichiro wasted no time in notching his 1,000th career MLB hit when the Mariners hosted the Phillies in the middle of June 2005. Leading off the bottom of the first, he lined the second pitch he saw off the base of the right-field wall for a single, becoming the third-fastest player in major league history to reach the 1,000-hit milestone.

Ichiro, in the middle of a staggering seven-straight All-Star seasons and his seventh season leading the league in hits, did something no player had ever done before. In the fifth inning of the 2007 All-Star Game, already with two singles to his name, Ichiro stepped in and launched a hit over 400 feet to right-center. Aided by a strange bounce, Ichiro sped around the bases and didn’t even need to slide to complete the first, and only, inside-the-park home run in All-Star Game history. Ken Griffey Jr., Ichiro’s pal who was then an All-Star with the Reds, was the one left chasing the ball down in right field. Griffey deflected criticism later, blaming the signs for the weird bounce. “It ain’t my fault, coach,” Griffey joked to The New York Times.

Ichiro had power in his swing, but didn’t typically swing for the fences. Of his 3,089 career hits, just 117 of them left the yard. But his most memorable homer was likely in 2009, when Ichiro took Yankees immortal closer Mariano Rivera deep to give the Mariners a walkoff 3-2 win and snapping a run of 27 straight saves by Rivera.

“Ichiro can do a lot of things,” Rivera told The Seattle Times after the game. “But definitely if you make mistakes, he’s going to hurt you.”

After 11-and-a-half seasons, 10 All-Star appearances and just as many Gold Gloves, Ichiro’s (first) run with the Mariners came to an end July 23, 2012. In the final year of his contract and after extension talks never materialized, the 38-year-old Ichiro was traded to the Yankees for Danny Farquhar and D.J. Mitchell. His first game with the Bronx Bombers was, of course, in Seattle.

“I was shocked when I saw the TV. I think the whole clubhouse is — the whole baseball world. When you picture Ichi, you always picture him with No. 51 in a Mariner uniform.” — Mariners outfielder Michael Saunders on the trade (Seattle Times)

At age 42 with the Marlins, Ichiro tripled in Colorado to become the 30th player in MLB history to reach 3,000 career hits on Aug. 7, 2016. Even more impressive was the fact that he reached the rare milestone despite debuting at age 27 after playing nine seasons with the Orix BlueWave in Japan. Including his 1,278 hits in Japan, Ichiro had already passed Pete Rose’s all-time hits record earlier that season.

“For me, it’s been an honor to watch him play, an honor to have managed him. He honors our game the way he plays, the way he prepares. Everything he does is a tribute to the game of baseball. He shows our guys how you’re supposed to do it.” — Marlins manager Don Mattingly (ESPN)

Ichiro joined the Mariners for the first two games of the season before officially announcing his retirement at age 45. The Mariners opened the season with a two-game series in Tokyo, allowing the future Hall of Famer to exit the game in his home country. The crowd of 46,000 in the Tokyo Dome continued to cheer as Ichiro went out for an extended curtain call, ending a professional baseball career that began when he was 18 years old in 1992.

“It was awesome. This is what baseball is all about. He had a chance to play in his home country, where they’ve seen him grow up.” — Mariners legend Ken Griffey Jr., who was on hand in Tokyo (Seattle Times)