Yakult Swallows

The Tokyo Yakult Swallows (東京ヤクルトスワローズ) are a professional baseball team in Nippon Professional Baseball's Central League. They are based in Shinjuku, Tokyo. They have won 8 Central League championships and 6 Japan Series championships. Since 1964, they play their games at Meiji Jingu Stadium.

The Swallows are named after their corporate owners, the Yakult Corporation. From 1950 to 1965, the team was owned by the former Japanese National Railways (known as Kokutetsu (国鉄) in Japanese) and called the Kokutetsu Swallows; the team was then owned by the newspaper Sankei Shimbun from 1965 to 1968 and called the Sankei Atoms. Yakult purchased the team in 1970 and renamed it the Yakult Atoms, before renaming it again as the Yakult Swallows in 1974, and then the Tokyo Yakult Swallows in 2006.